Microsoft Office is being used by hundreds of thousands and even millions of people per day. However, not everybody can afford it and i’ve always wondered if there was another type of software, maybe a little less expensive or even free.
Well there is and it is called OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org is a free and open source cross-platform office suite, which can read and write MS Office .doc, .xls, and .ppt files. It actually has more to it than that, there is a drawing program, a database, a math equation editor and more. OpenOffice has been in development since 1999 when Sun Microsystems bought the code from a company called Star Division. (StarOffice.) This application was designed as an alternative to MS Office and can do practically everything the same for FREE.
But, then came along LibreOffice after Oracle bought Sun. After Oracle shut down the OpenSolaris project, people got worried that OpenOffice.org was going to be discontinued in the same fashion. Therefore, an organization called “Document Foundation” forked the code from the 3.3 release of OpenOffice and named it LibreOffice. (Ah, the beauty of open source software.) Many of the large Linux distributors are going to include LibreOffice, and even some as the default office application. A few friends of mine have been using LibreOffice and seem to want to stick with it.
So, which one do you prefer and what opinions do you have on it?? Let us know and comment!
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Oliveryty