Since its inception as an open source project. Additionally over , people--unaffiliated individuals, business and government employees, and students from nearly every curve of the globe--have joined the project with the aim of creating the best possible office suite that all can use.
Their work as a community is both invaluable and practical: people use what the community does. This is the essence of an open source community. StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mids.
It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of and StarOffice 5. Subsequent versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6. Sun continued to sponsor development on OpenOffice.
With its acquisition of Sun in , Oracle was the principal contributor of code to OpenOffice. On June 1, , OpenOffice. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite elements as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications.
This web site, www. These range from something as easy as donating to the Apache Software Foundation, or participating in mailing lists, to actually contributing code for the product. To contribute to volunteer with the Openoffice project user or developer web sites or product , please subscribe to the Apache Openoffice developer mailing list to get started. Much of the excitement of an Open Source site takes place in the mailing lists.
Users simply have an account that gives them online access to their Office apps and the files created on those apps. Qualified nonprofits and libraries can get Office for free or at discount , depending on which plan they choose. It's no secret that Microsoft wants to move more people to its software as a service SaaS model, where upgrades and new features are automatic and customers are locked into an annual payment to use their product.
Critics of Microsoft don't like the feeling of being "locked" into regular payments and worry that they will lose control of their data. Of course, there are benefits to a Internet-based Office as well, namely the increased ability to share documents and access them on multiple devices. However you feel about Office , this article focuses on the desktop version of Office because it's a more apples-to-apples comparison with the open-source options. As a result, many of the new features in the online version of Office will not be covered here.
First, a little about the two open-source tools: OpenOffice and LibreOffice are very similar products. In fact, they were both built upon the same source code.
When Sun Microsystems acquired OpenOffice, and was subsequently taken over by Oracle, the community split and LibreOffice was created in parallel. The OpenOffice project has since been handed over to the Apache Foundation. For practical purposes, users won't see much of a difference between the two tools, although it's generally believed that LibreOffice is quicker to update and offer new features.
Many past innovations in the Microsoft Office user interface were met with scorn and frustration — most notably the introduction of the "ribbon" toolbar in Office Office is similar in look and feel to the previous version, which means the ribbon is still there. Hopefully you're used to it by now. There's a new gray theme that improves visibility for some users and more charts in Excel, but for the most part Microsoft has decided that its desktop offering is sticking to the basics.
However, a few new usability features stand out. If you've ever been working on a document and suddenly wanted to find more information, you can now get what you need without switching screens. You just select the text and choose Smart Lookup from the Home menu. Office also offers more targeted help. Its new Tell Me feature lets you type in a description of the feature you need and spits out links that will take you directly there.
Outlook also makes it just a little easier to send a document in an email by using its Recent Documents feature. OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on the other hand, lack the ribbon toolbar and instead offer a more traditional interface — which makes them intriguing options for Office 's steadfast supporters. Anyone who has used Word or Excel will feel comfortable using their open-source competitors, Write and Calc, while those familiar with newer versions of Office will find them somewhat retro.
This is not to say that the open-source applications aren't also improving usability. LibreOffice has worked to simplify its menus while providing finer controls for charts and images across all of its applications.
OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and Microsoft Office will all work fine on most computers, but if your office machines are significantly older, slower, or less powerful than the average modern machine, you'll find OpenOffice and LibreOffice better suited than Office However, both open-source options need Java installed to take advantage of certain features, most notably Base. Office requires at least Windows 7 Service Pack 1, but notes that Windows 10 offers the "best experience.
In addition, both open-source suites will run on most Mac computers running OS X In order to run the new Microsoft Office on a Mac, you no longer need to subscribe to Office , as was required with Office It's especially true for older computers that require additional applications such as those that as you might find in a public computer lab setting. If your IT team is small — or nonexistent — you can expect to need occasional support from other sources.
Thanks to Microsoft's vastness, there's more support for Office than anyone could possibly take advantage of. It includes official support from Microsoft, authorized support from licensed vendors and consultants, and professional call centers.
Plus there are dozens of books and countless websites offering tips and guides for modifying, configuring, and using Office software. However, some users report difficulty getting support for Office ; Microsoft appears to be encouraging consumers to switch to the subscription-based Office Some free resources specifically for nonprofits exist, but expect such tailored support to cost more.
Support for OpenOffice and LibreOffice is community-driven and generally free, and includes documentation projects and volunteer-led discussion forums. With these open-source projects, common issues and bugs are often addressed through updates.
In general, LibreOffice's development community tends to address these issues more quickly and release updates more frequently than the OpenOffice community. Users more familiar with Microsoft's ecosystem may find this support model unfamiliar, and may feel more comfortable with training and support for Microsoft Office.
In general, files created by all three suites can be read by the others, although there are caveats. In the case of Office , Microsoft has established de facto file standards such as. If you need to share files with anyone running Office or older, you may need to convert them to older formats. Microsoft offers a free utility to do this. Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on the other hand, use open standards for their native files, but can read and write files using Microsoft's format.
In fact, users can choose to automatically save files in. The open-source community has invested a lot of effort in ensuring that Writer, Calc, and Impress users can share documents with Microsoft users, and has succeeded in all but a few specific cases.
If you've created Word documents that make extensive use of columns, header formats, or embedded images, the file is likely to show up in Writer with minor formatting issues. These formatting problems will have to be adjusted manually. These adjustments aren't likely to be prohibitive for a document or two, but could be time-consuming for a whole library of templates and collateral. However, both OpenOffice and LibreOffice have begun to implement better support for Microsoft file formats — for example, LibreOffice has improved its utility to import.
Office and its open-source competitors are also incompatible when it comes to macros or spreadsheet pivot tables. All three suites do support both features in OpenOffice and LibreOffice, pivot tables are created with a feature called Data Pilot.
However, you will not be able to use macros or pivot tables created in Office with the open-source tools, or vice versa. You may also have minor issues translating charts between the suites' spreadsheet programs.
These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, and one should be cautious when comparing numbers across projects. Contributor numbers are especially sensitive to development methodology and tooling, e. Projects also differ in what project resources they include in version control Open Hub looks at files under version control , and which version controlled files they associate with their Open Hub account.
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