libreoffice or openoffice for microsoft office replacement

The question is whether that will be enough to reel in MS Office users of long standing. He added that developers have cleaned up the code base from the first four releases of the product and that only 130 of the 10,000 documents used in compatability testing of the latest incarnation of the product with MS Office broke. 'Our compatibility with legacy Microsoft Office documents and actually Microsoft Office docs is now extremely good,' Vignoli said. For instance, the French government has already deployed LibreOffice on about a half million computers while Spain's Valencia region has installed the program on 120,000 desktops. Vignoli is hoping that will help the organization build on earlier successes winning over other European governments. The thrust of the UK announcement will be to let users choose open-source office suites, should they wish. Government officials say the move to standardize around open formats will reduce costs associated with the Office suite and break what they describe as the 'oligopoly' of IT suppliers. Italo Vignoli, one of the founders of The Document Foundation, also expressed hope that a decision governing the use of open source software by the UK government will prove to be a harbinger of more rapid adoption.Įarlier this week, the United Kingdom finally put in practice a directive that all official office suites must support an open format for documents called ODF. The OpenOffice project has since been taken up by the Apache Foundation while LibreOffice wound up under the auspices of The Document Foundation.Įxecutives from The Document Foundation expressed confidence about getting 200 million active users worldwide before the end of the decade. However, developers who became unhappy with Oracle's stewardship of the project, subsequently forked the code to create a new office suite called LibreOffice. In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, which was then responsible for an open-source software suite called OpenOffice. LibreOffice came about as part of a grass roots response to tech industry consolidation. In contrast, only 10 million users had downloaded the software by Sept.

The latest update comes as the organization behind LibreOffice says that its products are now being used by some 80 million users around the world. LibreOffice looks to make more headway against MS OfficeĪfter a headline lull, LibreOffice on Wednesday renewed its drive to replace Microsoft Office with the newest version of its open source suite of applications.

Libreoffice or openoffice for microsoft office replacement