#REVIEW OPENOFFICE VS LIBREOFFICE WINDOWS#

That’s important, because it’s always bugged me that Impress could never handle slide imports cleaner. PowerPoint presentations opened easily, and the font and images transfer, while not perfect, were handled far better than OpenOffice Impress did with the same files. LibreOffice Impress, fortunately, was a better experience. I can forgive a lot of shortcomings, but complete application crash is not really one of them. I don’t know if it was the pivot table that croaked the application, but that was the only file I had trouble with, and the pivot table was the unique factor about that particular file. I might be a bit more forgiving about Calc, too, if I hadn’t tried to open a spreadsheet with a pivot table inside only to have Calc and every other LibreOffice window completely crash. But I would be interested to hear what, if any, progress was being done on adding more functions, because for me functions are the core of what makes a spreadsheet app work. So I completely get why some functions can’t just be pulled into LibreOffice. I often have to explain to my students why DATEDIF is in Excel, but is completely undocumented - the result of a lawsuit between Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft where Microsoft got to keep DATEDIF, but can’t document it. It may be a bit harsh to hold LibreOffice (and before it) Calc developers to the fire for this kind of thing. These are not, I believe, all that rare, and the lack of these functions and others like them are a notable detriment. Seriously, what good is it to have SUMIF and COUNTIF but not their multi-range/criteria counterparts SUMIFS and COUNTIFS? And don’t look for AVERAGEIF and AVERAGEIFS - not there. Fonts and basic were converted perfectly, but there are a lot of not-really-that-obscure Excel functions that didn’t come across at all. I know, it’s a little odd to get excited about a dialog box, but I always have found the Print dialog box rather clunky, so it’s LibreOffice counterpart is a breath of fresh air.Ĭalc was another story. I liked the page numbering tool, and I really appreciated the new Print dialog box (which is present in all of the LibreOffice tools).

The remainder of LibreOffice Writer’s new features were also useful.

#REVIEW OPENOFFICE VS LIBREOFFICE WINDOWS#

This was good news, since I would much rather use LibreOffice on Linux than fire up a Windows VM when I’m writing for publishers insistent on clean. LibreOffice Writer didn’t even blink: all revisions, comments, and fonts came across perfectly. Opening some heavily-revised and commented chapter files from my last book in usually leads to mis-rendered comments and loads of font issues.

In LibreOffice, that’s no longer the case. has long-touted its capability to open and save Office files, but in reality most users know that any file with any kind of complexity was going to have to have problems coming across. The feature I found most helpful in LibreOffice 3.3 was a much better improvement in file importing from Microsoft Office. But it still bears noting, because a lot of the problems users may have with the suite could still be present.Ī lot, but not all, so let’s give credit where credit is due. Expecting a drastic change is folly in that timeframe. This is to be expected, of course, since the fork of LibreOffice from the Oracle-controlled (formerly Sun-controlled) project only occurred four months ago. And while there are a few new features of note, this is still pretty much, with all the attendant advantages and foibles. The Document Foundation released the first new version of its LibreOffice suite on January 25th, and it was far too tempting not to grab a copy and run it through its paces.

Review openoffice vs libreoffice