The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #142281   Message #3279293
Posted By: Dorrington Lad
24-Dec-11 - 07:06 AM
Thread Name: Tech: OpenOffice
Subject: RE: Tech: OpenOffice
I switched to Open Office a couple or three years ago and went to Libre Office when I transferred to Linux. I have not use a version of Word newer than Office '97. Libre Office and Open office will both produce doc files fully compatible with Microsoft Office and will read doc and docx files. I have used both programs to clean up flaky Office documents. The spreadsheets are nowhere near as comprehensive as excel but the differences only show at the limits of the features.

As I understand it, Sun never 'owned' Open Office. It was more that they were custodians, allowing Open Source programmers an opportunity to write some decent software. Sun would sell an 'enterprise version' to industry which was identical software but with tech support. This still the model for MySQL and is a similar setup to Fedora/RedHat. Sun owned the name open office and that went to Oracle but when Oracle wouldn't play the game, they were left with the name and software which was falling behind the curve. I wonder whether Apache will get together with the LibreOffice crowd?