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Revisiting an old friend: OpenOffice

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dasein
Posts: 7680
Joined: 2011-03-04 01:06
Location: Terra Incantationum

Revisiting an old friend: OpenOffice

#1 Post by dasein »

Most folks know the "back story" behind the fork of Open Office (OO) into Libre Office (LO). And when LO was forked, it was a perfectly sensible thing, based on Oracle corp's obvious lack of interest in the project.

Speaking for myself, I found things to actively dislike in both OO and LO in the years that followed. For instance, OO was dog slow to open a file dialog, while LO showed some obvious rough spots when reading/writing files from the "other" Office suite.

Of course, Oracle ultimately ditched OO completely, and development has since moved to the Apache Software Foundation. Just on a lark, I decided to install the most recent version (3.4.1) of Apache Open Office (AOO).

All I can say is: Wow. AOO combines the best of both OO and LO, while simultaneously eliminating most of the pain points present in both products. By comparison to either product, AOO is a joy to use.

YMMV, of course. But if you're among those who find OO or LO a bit cumbersome to work with, it might be worth your while to check out AOO.

Download here: http://www.openoffice.org/download/

vbrummond
Posts: 4432
Joined: 2010-03-02 01:42

Re: Revisiting an old friend: OpenOffice

#2 Post by vbrummond »

Sounds reasonable. :) I have been using Calligra Words, though if LO or OO etc is better for the average folk it would help for me to test it so I know what to recommend.
Always on Debian Testing

confuseling
Posts: 2121
Joined: 2009-10-21 01:03

Re: Revisiting an old friend: OpenOffice

#3 Post by confuseling »

LO is far too buggy, and they seem more interested at the moment in the proverbial Shiny New Stuff...

It has pedigree. It took them ten years to fix this. https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=2197 , despite years of people pointing out how stupid it was: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=20878

I jumped ship and started using Latex, never looked back.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that AOO is more reliable. Wondering how long before it gets packaged...?
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