Should I still use apache openoffice?

tomscharbach

stalebrim Another thing to take into consideration when opening Linux-made Open-/LibreOffice documents in Microsoft Office is that fonts get substituted to different ones if they're not found on the system. Different fonts have different properties so that may affect the formatting.

Font substitution is just one of a number of persistent issues involved in converting documents back and forth between word processing formats, particularly when the documents have complex formatting. I don't think that there is such a thing as "lossless" conversion back and forth, and I'm not sure that things have improved much since the days when Microsoft Word and Word Perfect were dominant and competing standards.

While I disagree with OpenOffice's decisions regarding docx (and 64-bit), the blog quoted by @brent got one thing right: "If you want to produce Microsoft documents, install MS Office."

If my use case required document collaboration with Office 365 users on a regular basis, I would use Office 365,

stalebrim

tomscharbach Indeed. It's just one thing, hence I said "another thing to take into consideration". I think the apps won't look for metric compatible fonts on ODF either, but I'm not sure.

tomscharbach

stalebrim Indeed. It's just one thing, hence I said "another thing to take into consideration".

Might be looking down the wrong end of the telescope, but Microsoft has a support document ("Differences between the OpenDocument Text (.odt) format and the Word (.docx) format") that outlines what is, and what is not, supported in odt/docx conversion. Not definitive, but is suggestive of the problem areas.

stalebrim I think the apps won't look for metric compatible fonts on ODF either, but I'm not sure.

Not sure, either.

stalebrim

tomscharbach One should try out an experiment similarly to repeatedly re-encoding an MP3 file, but saving a document back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office and see how much it eventually gets malformed in the process.

tomscharbach

stalebrim One should try out an experiment similarly to repeatedly re-encoding an MP3 file, but saving a document back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office and see how much it eventually gets malformed in the process.

In my case, no need. I've been involved with document format conversion (in the context of legal technology) since the mid-1980's. The results are predictable, regardless of the formats being converted.

A simple document (text with simple formatting (e.g. bold, italics, standard fonts), but no footnotes, endnotes, TOC/TOA, captions, watermarks, embedded graphics, embedded links, comments, redlining and so on) will convert back and forth many times without problems. A more complex document usually will not convert back and forth flawlessly over time; at each conversion formatting details are lost in the conversion process and the document eventually breaks on one side of the conversion or the other. A highly complex document (e.g. an SEC filing, which requires very precise formatting) will not convert successfully at all.

Document conversion is primarily useful for occasional read, edit, save and return document exchange. Document conversion is not appropriate for serious document collaboration. For serious document collaboration, the best course is to have all parties using the same word processor (e.g. Microsoft Office 365 or Google Docs) at all times.

stalebrim

tomscharbach Thanks for the insight!

Barbiefan1475

tomscharbach very interesting. i thought open format and open source was the same . so im also confused that means there is no gpl mit apache licence to these formats ? .

tomscharbach

Barbiefan1475 Here are the Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice licenses.

LarryNG

Barbiefan1475 In my opinion, I say to use what a person is most comfortable with. I choose Word 2003 for my XP pc, Word 2010 for all other Windows pcs (2010 has the 'find column' that I need for large documents), and on Solus I prefer LibreOffice. A couple days ago I looked into testing OpenOffice in Solus, but at the moment I am too lazy to do the installation. 😉

As a background, my first word processor was on a Commodore 64 (around 1985), then WordPerfect 5 in DOS, then to Word in Windows 3.1, then Star Office, then OpenOffice, and on up through all other versions of Word to 2013 (including testing all known brands and versions of word processors). I myself will never use Office 2013 nor anything newer from Microsoft (the whites are excessively uncomfortable). LibreOffice and OpenOffice will likely never be as good as early Word versions, but still I choose LibreOffice in Solus because it is comfortable to use. 'Comfort' is the key word, and is what I told all of my customers; to use what they liked best.

Barbiefan1475

LarryNG thats interesting . How was star office back in the day . Is star office project is active and open source ? . Tbh I dont kinda like Microsoft 365 office but I have to use in my high school for most of my classes . I just use a unofficial appimage for openoffice since apache only gives a Deb and rpm format for their open office product in their website

stalebrim

I still don't get what's so different in LibreOffice that it can't be used. If the ribbon-like interface is the issue, one can revert to the one resembling Office 2000 and vice versa.

infinitymdm

stalebrim Personally, my only issue with Libreoffice is that it's annoying to theme it correctly. Other than that I have no real gripes - it's great software.

stalebrim

infinitymdm Hmm. True. I think I haven't ran into theming issues with Breeze Dark on Fedora, though, but definitely remember having to switch the LO theme and icon sets with some other distro.

minrvovrfc

My first use of OpenOffice was on a box of six CD's or so, this was while Sun Microsystems still had reins over the product, ie. there was no ODT format for the word processor, it was instead SXW suffix. I used it a lot and liked it, wondered, gee whiz how did they get away with allowing free an office productivity program darned close to M$'s suite...

My very first Linux distro was an early version of Ubuntu (expected Ubuntu Studio) out of the cover CD of Computer Music Magazine. It included OpenOffice-dot-org v2, and introduced me to the ODF formats. I didn't know what to make of it, pretty much the same suite, typed into the Writer for a short time.

Then moved on to Oracle v3 and Apache v4, which increased the mess. Really liked the "AutoCorrect" but was CPU and memory greedy, and it gave me bad habits such that I was begging for the same functionality on ordinary text editors. Once I considered Abiword "not good enough for my purposes". 😮 Besides the fact it was buggy: LOL it had the "neverending last-page scroll" bug on Windows.

I noticed such a thing as Libreoffice on Debian "Wheezy". I was irritated that certain bugs with the Draw program were never fixed. No way to set a default color for polygon. When creating more than three layers, the ones it terminally insists on, and after saving ODG file, then recalling it much later, it could "eat" one of the layers. IE. it put certain picture elements into the wrong layer and didn't include at least one of the layers those elements were supposed to be on. Thank goodness for Inkscape! Although that one still bugs with many nodes and undo and whatever...

The Writer's maintainers don't care if the user has enough vertical space working on a document. It still has an annoying bug with removing its status bar. When the user saves the document, it reappears uselessly. Then it goes hiding it how it feels like.

The Help on OpenOffice-dot-org v3 (was most experienced with this one) was very good but sometimes required online access if the user needed to know even more about concepts beyond the scope of the application. Things were carried even further to the point I just don't want to know about Libre/OpenOffice anymore. Like on Debian "Bullseye" multiple languages for help are installed that are never needed and taking up valuable disk space. Then uninstalling all of it is a PITA, too much "sudo apt purge"-ing required. It's because I have OnlyOffice Desktops in AppImage. I could just put it in and scratch it off if I need 450MB of disk space. It's good enough although I'm not used to it.

One mainstay is the "Calc" program; since I thought Lotus123 was awesome for its time, really wish I could have made better use of it. I was able to use it to create "random" presets for a certain famous Japanese VST instrument LOL. An Italian guy wrote an XLS file to do it but had to stay there punching a button and saving to text file. I felt I had to do it better by creating a whole bank of 128 presets, with Purebasic. 😉

minrvovrfc

tomscharbach We live in a world in which Windows is the dominant player (as evidenced by the OpenOffice blog post "More than 333 Million Downloads of Apache OpenOffice" (August 20, 2022)) celebrating 333 million downloads. The stats suggest that 89% of OpenOffice downloads are by Windows users while only 1.4% are by Linux users:

Windows is losing market share too slowly. Sadly when I proposed OpenOffice-dot-org to somebody they much preferred a "dirty" copy of M$ Office which wasn't even the current. I died a little inside wanting to help people in real life.

kaktuspalme

minrvovrfc
Well, I'm kind of impressed it's 1.4%. Who on earth downloads OpenOffice on Linux from their website and not from the package manager?

tomscharbach

kaktuspalme Well, I'm kind of impressed it's 1.4%. Who on earth downloads OpenOffice on Linux from their website and not from the package manager?

Probably more people than you or I would expect. Linux seems to have moved on from OpenOffice in favor of LibreOffice. OpenOffice is not included in the Ubuntu repositories, for example, and Ubuntu accounts for the lion's share of the Linux desktop market, as I understand it. OpenOffice isn't in Flathub either, so a Flatpak is out as an installation option. I don't know about Snap or Appimage availability.

stalebrim

kaktuspalme Who on earth downloads OpenOffice on Linux from their website and not from the package manager?

People who insist on doing things under Linux like they did in Windows XP over ten years ago.

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