Feature Comparison: LibreOffice - Microsoft Office

[simonlang]

i just happend to come across this and did not read every feature but the quick overview looks like that libre office does exactly what ms office can not and the other way arround.

wouldn't it be more profiting for users if both organizations worked together include all features and bring out the "perfect" office suite?

 

what are your opinions on this?

[chrisj1968]

I also noticed that LibreOffice also can save documents in the Office 2013 formats DOCX as well. Libre Office is really coming into its own.

[Sikh]

Holy feature comparison. Definitely glad you shared this.

[Knife Party]

This topic has been rehashed to death for YEARS now on Neowin. MS office in an industry standard for a reason, and OO is a duplication of that standard via features and format support if you can observe the development route. The big features right now are cloud integration via the app, device unity aka open a word doc from desktop to ipad mini and SAAS via Office365. OO doesn't do any of those, and if it does it will most likely be a patch-job since the developers and community isn't as fast with development, hence the ugly OO interface now for the last 6 years.... and neither do they have the resources/man power akin to MS.

 

My point? There is no point in your post. Why would MS and OO collaborate on one industry standard? Their vested interests are complete opposites, for MS its about market dominance and keeping Office as a industry standard (and making money), while OO has a focus on duplicating the most important features from MS office they perceive and not profiting from it other than exposure... 

 

To conclude, you should rethink this debate OP. I too am a mega fan of many linux distros, but not once should you think OO is on par or better than MS Office overall relatively. 

[Guest]

:laugh:

 

Seriously? Liked the OP because it made me laugh so much.

[simonlang]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:14, Don said:

I too am a mega fan of many linux distros

 

sure... and that's why you use win7. :rofl:

[Max Norris]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:20, Jack Unterweger said:

sure... and that's why you use win7. :rofl:

Why does it have to be exclusive?  Been using Unix and Linux for decades, does that mean I'm not allowed to use something else?

 

Also some inaccuracies in that comparison chart.  

[Knife Party]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:20, Jack Unterweger said:

sure... and that's why you use win7. :rofl:

Applied Logic and truth are simple concepts. Care for me to link you?  And yes well observed, I put down Windows 7 for my main machine since well that's it.... and dual booting with Ubuntu 14.04.1.  :laugh:

[LaP]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:14, Don said:

but not once should you think OO is on par or better than MS Office overall relatively. 

 

Few people really think it is.

 

Yes MS Office is an industry standard. But the keyword here is industry. What the industry use and what normal people need at home is 2 vastly different things.

 

It doesn't apply to MS Office only but it is true for Adobe products and others. The matter of the fact is 99% of the users at home don't need those professional products and can go along open source or 50$ softwares just fine.

[simonlang]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:32, LaP said:

Few people really think it is.

 

Yes MS Office is an industry standard. But the keyword here is industry. What the industry use and what normal people need at home is 2 vastly different things.

 

It doesn't apply to MS Office only but it is true for Adobe products and others. The matter of the fact is 99% of the users at home don't need those professional products and can go along open source or 50$ softwares just fine.

 

indeed. and instead of supporting an open format like open doc, ms office throws in their own format where it has proven that the code looks faulty and horribly therefore leading to incompatibility with libre office. it was the same thing with ms front page editor many years back those websites could be only seen fine when using IE but not with netscape or opera because the code was so faulty and bad, but monopolistic companies like ms don't care about this. they want your money, nothing else.

[simplezz]

Libre Office and OpenDocument fulfil all my needs on the desktop. Why would someone actually pay money for Microsoft Office these days? Even in the enterprise, it's a complete waste of money when the FOSS solution does exactly the same thing.

[BajiRav]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:32, LaP said:

Few people really think it is.

 

Yes MS Office is an industry standard. But the keyword here is industry. What the industry use and what normal people need at home is 2 vastly different things.

 

It doesn't apply to MS Office only but it is true for Adobe products and others. The matter of the fact is 99% of the users at home don't need those professional products and can go along open source or 50$ softwares just fine.

Those 99% people are better off using the free MS Office version in most cases.

[Draconian Guppy]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:40, BajiRav said:

Those 99% people are better off using the free MS Office version in most cases.

There's a free  MS office version? :wacko:

[Skiver Veteran]

What OS people use has nothing to do with the topic, please drop it or the thread will be closed

[HawkMan]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:38, simplezz said:

Libre Office and OpenDocument fulfil all my needs on the desktop. Why would someone actually pay money for Microsoft Office these days? Even in the enterprise, it's a complete waste of money when the FOSS solution does exactly the same thing.

 

 

Because usability is far more important than feature vs feature, and that's where MS blows them out of the water. Not even counting that the comparison is incomplete and inaccurate.

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:46, Draconian Guppy said:

There's a free  MS office version? :wacko:

 

One Drive/Web office.

 

Also where in that feature chart is touch friendlyness and touch version..

[briangw]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:32, LaP said:

Few people really think it is.

 

Yes MS Office is an industry standard. But the keyword here is industry. What the industry use and what normal people need at home is 2 vastly different things.

 

It doesn't apply to MS Office only but it is true for Adobe products and others. The matter of the fact is 99% of the users at home don't need those professional products and can go along open source or 50$ softwares just fine.

 

Except we don't know what home people have been spoon-fed from all sources. When I taught IT classes for a college in Minneapolis for 5 years, I'd say about 99% of students (both young and old) had no clue that OpenOffice (when it was named that) was free. They had grown up around Office either at work, home, school, and even from recommendations from others. Imagine their astonishment that they could have a full-fledged version for free and it did almost everything that MS Office did for free. However, now they needed to go back and modify what they were used to in order to take advantage of this open source version. That proved to be trickier as many of them complained that what they were used to in Excel didn't necessarily work the same way in OO. 

[Nick H. Supervisor]

<Thread cleaned>

I don't know how Mitt Romney or operating systems got in to this discussion...

This is not a political discussion, nor a discussion about operating systems. Stick to the topic which is comparing Microsoft Office and Libre Office.

For my part, Libre Office does the trick at home but it still has compatibility issues (working with the idea that Microsoft Office has the greater marketshare, not the idea of who controls the standards each software uses.)

As for both parties coming together to create a single standard...well, it would be nice to live in such a utopia, but I can't see it happening.

[seeprime]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:14, Don said:

Don't Feed the Wolfie, on 14 Oct 2014 - 11:14, said:

This topic has been rehashed to death for YEARS now on Neowin. MS office in an industry standard for a reason, and OO is a duplication of that standard via features and format support if you can observe the development route. The big features right now are cloud integration via the app, device unity aka open a word doc from desktop to ipad mini and SAAS via Office365. OO doesn't do any of those, and if it does it will most likely be a patch-job since the developers and community isn't as fast with development, hence the ugly OO interface now for the last 6 years.... and neither do they have the resources/man power akin to MS.

 

My point? There is no point in your post. Why would MS and OO collaborate on one industry standard? Their vested interests are complete opposites, for MS its about market dominance and keeping Office as a industry standard (and making money), while OO has a focus on duplicating the most important features from MS office they perceive and not profiting from it other than exposure... 

 

To conclude, you should rethink this debate OP. I too am a mega fan of many linux distros, but not once should you think OO is on par or better than MS Office overall relatively. 

The next version of MS Office will change Excel pivot table functionality, negating the progress that LibreOffice has made duplicating Excel's functions. Word and Writer, unless macros are used or videos are inserted, are almost interchangeable. With such open source progress, it's time for MS to change how Word saves information also. To "improve" MS Office and lock-out the freebies, as happened when 2007-2013 formats were introduced. .doc and .xls were almost trivial to duplicate in OpenOffice at the time.

[Praetor]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:52, Nick H. said:

<Thread cleaned>

I don't know how Mitt Romney or operating systems got in to this discussion...

 

You can thank Obama for that! :D

 

While LO is feature packed, it's really not know for innovation but for implementing features that exist first on MS Office. It's good for the average joe, but for any power user LO just doesn't cut.

  On 14/10/2014 at 17:03, seeprime said:

The next version of MS Office will change Excel pivot table functionality, negating the progress that LibreOffice has made duplicating Excel's functions. Word and Writer, unless macros are used or videos are inserted, are almost interchangeable. With such open source progress, it's time for MS to change how Word saves information also. To "improve" MS Office and lock-out the freebies, as happened when 2007-2013 formats were introduced. .doc and .xls were almost trivial to duplicate in OpenOffice at the time.

 

There is also the more tighter integration with Cloud features (Onedrive for business, for example) that provides more value for MS Office users; it's not just Office anymore, but OneNote, integration with Office 365, Onedrive, Azure, Sharepoint, etc.

[simplezz]

  On 14/10/2014 at 17:03, seeprime said:

With such open source progress, it's time for MS to change how Word saves information also. To "improve" MS Office and lock-out the freebies, as happened when 2007-2013 formats were introduced. .doc and .xls were almost trivial to duplicate in OpenOffice at the time.

MS' vendor specific proprietary formats are irrelevant today. OpenDocument is the new standard. It has momentum and has seen adoption worldwide, especially by governments. Just take a look at the comments from the the UK's open consultation; the overwhelming response to which was to ditch Microsoft products and formats in favour of FOSS and vendor independent standards like OpenDocument.

There's a tipping point where we'll reach avalanche. Once that happens, Microsoft and its industry standard status will be meaningless. It's only a matter of time.

[simplezz]

  On 14/10/2014 at 16:52, HawkMan said:

Because usability is far more important than feature vs feature, and that's where MS blows them out of the water. Not even counting that the comparison is incomplete and inaccurate.

If by usability you're talking about the ribbon, I'd argue the opposite. It sticks out like a sore thumb compared to other applications. The standard paradigm is a menu system and a simple toolbar, not some over complicated bloated mess which the ribbon comprises. It's absolutely horrible.

You couldn't pay me to use MS office.

[Max Norris]

  On 14/10/2014 at 19:24, simplezz said:

MS' vendor specific proprietary formats are irrelevant today. OpenDocument is the new standard.

A standard, not "the" standard. And considering which has the overwhelming majority of the office market share.. irrelevant doesn't exactly fit here.

  On 14/10/2014 at 19:31, simplezz said:

If by usability you're talking about the ribbon, I'd argue the opposite. It sticks out like a sore thumb compared to other applications.

Your opinion. Even some other non-Microsoft applications are using it, so *shrug* apparently not everyone agrees.

[HawkMan]

  On 14/10/2014 at 19:31, simplezz said:

If by usability you're talking about the ribbon, I'd argue the opposite. It sticks out like a sore thumb compared to other applications. The standard paradigm is a menu system and a simple toolbar, not some over complicated bloated mess which the ribbon comprises. It's absolutely horrible.

You couldn't pay me to use MS office.

 

The standard WAS menus, most productivity suites and creation apps now use the ribbon in some form nice its far more efficient than menus in use and also gives much more instant feedback, you you don't have 4 layer of cascading menus  search through for the right tool d covering your work. Instead everything you need is right there and shows the result as you hover.

[Ice_Blue]

Office Online is free. The best note taking program that ever existed - One Note - is free.

 

Tell me again:

Why would I use a business software package that ninety nine percent of my clients have never heard of, and one whose only goal is playing catch-up to Microsoft Office?

[articuno1au]

The change to .docx was to enable smaller more portable (code wise as well as size wise) documents. Make a complex document with images and layouts in .docx. Then resave it as .doc and watch the file size balloon out.

 

The format change had nothing to do with OO/Libre office being able to use .doc. To that end Microsoft included the open document standard to help out the OO guys.

 

The document format uses XML. Whoever said that the code was "messy and broken" has literally 0 understanding of the format.

 

In all honestly, Office is a long way ahead of OO in terms of usability and functionality support.

 

There is a further reason people use Office: It just works. Attach rates of Office in my home country (before the introduction of 365 which massively pollutes these numbers) was about 60%. That's enormous.

 

I'm all in favour of open source, but OS != inherently better or as good.

[sc302 Veteran]

A few other simple reasons are support and standardization across many businesses.

Support, you can call ms if you are in a jam and get support. If you don't know how to do something you can also call support. While most isn't free support there are some options that they offer businesses to have a unlimited support line, not cheap. But it is there is you want it. I am quite unfamiliar with the support offerings from OO, but I can only guess that their support consists of forums and youtube only.

Standardization, you can leave one company today and go to another company tomorrow and know where things are. You will also be able to format and edit documents quickly with little to no learning curve. Until a lot of businesses adopt OO, it will always take a back seat as far as standardization goes.