libre office anyone ?

[mrstrong]

Has anyone tried libre office or open office as an alternative to Micro$oft ?

 

Can't find any threads discussing pros / cons

[Michael]

Many moons ago I have deployed Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. It's great if your whole site use it, however most people just prefer Microsoft Office simply because it's what they use at home or it came bundled with their PC.

 

I've never come across a PC which has Open Office installed by an OEM, simply because these companies pay OEMs to be part of the image. A good example is the likes of Chrome, Firefox, Adobe Reader etc...

[tmcd35]

Tried to get OpenOffice adopted here 4-5 years back (should be some old threads on the subject). Gave up when we bought SIMS which needed Word and Excel. Then EES pricing pretty much put paid to using non-Microsoft for the foreseeable future.

[zag]

We have it as an option here, but nobody uses it.

 

I miss the ribbon bar at the top. The open/libre office icons look very oldschool like something from 10 years ago.

 

 

The features work pretty well though, it can work with Office Documents fine.

 

Its missing basic things like text up size and down.

 

On the advantages it is very processor light and the install takes a few seconds Its only about 400MB for the full suite which is amazing!

Edited February 27, 2014 by zag

[AJWhite1970]

We use Office 2010 as the site standard but we also have full installs of OpenOffice and LibreOffice on every PC in the school and fully support the file formats so that students who don't have M$ office at home aren't inconvenienced.

[unixman_again]

I use Open Office exclusively, although the rest of the site uses Office 2007, and we are upgrading to 2013. I've never had any problems with it. Unlike Zag above, I hate the ribbon in M$ Office. M$ Office 2007 is installed on my PC and I have UBitMenu which makes it useable (IMHO). We have a few students who use LibreOffice at home and they don't have any problems with files they have created at home.

 

When I worked for a mobile phone e-tailer, we used OO exclusively, but we were a Linux site. The boss did not have any M$ o/ses on site. The company is still going; I wonder if they sell Windows phones?

[MatthewL]

If I have to do a deployment of office I would use OO/LibreOffice now and just change the save format to office as from a consumer point of view its cheaper, I know we pay several hundred pounds for a copy of office. The only thing in office I use and would miss is Outlook and Access but for the majority of users OWA does these days.

[mrstrong]

Thanks all for the useful info.

 

I hate the ribbon too but maybe I will get to like it.

 

Most PCs here still on Office 2003 but that's getting retired by MS in April.

Shame as 2003 seems to do everything I need, maybe it's a case of

"you never miss what you haven't had".

[clareq]

We too install both MS Office 2010 and Open Office, though now with Student Advantage and the Work at Home options offered to staff, there is no longer any reason people wouldn't have Office at home.

[rich_tech]

I run 2013 on my work machine and have libreoffice installed to open up .od* files if their not playing ball with MS Office and I use google docs at the moment at home, though I do have Libreoffice installed as well here, because it opens the files without hassle if I ever need to open a word/excel document