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Hello Everyone,

I want to share this little but very informative knowlegde with all regarding the Open-Source Office Suite.

Recently I had a requirement in one of my client side, where they wanted to use the open source office suite for a specific group of users. Actually they want to save the license cost of MS office for the users(esp. the field users) who doesn’t have much varied use of Office products. So, they wanted to ensure that the product which they use must be compatible with MS-Office as in when they exchange the files with their managers.

From Wiki I came to know all about their history here. From my further searching from Wiki & different other blogs I figured out that presently two different open source office suits are popular:-

1>  Apache OpenOffice

  •     Their latest version got released last month (29/April/2014) which can be downloaded from here.

More info about this latest release of this product can be found here.

It says :- “you can open and edit all Microsoft Office documents with OpenOffice. There are no compatibility problems. In fact, the only problem you might encounter is a missing font from Microsoft. It’s one for which OpenOffice will provide a simple replacement. But apart from that, documents open and are edited smoothly.”

There is also an article published which even favors in the usage of Apache OpenOffice instead of MS-Office for couple of reasons more. Take a look here.

2> LibreOffice

  •    Their Stable version(4.1.6) can be downloaded from here.

They are in process to release their latest version(4.3.0), which is currently under testing phase. RC version has been released.

For the latest news, we can tune in for their official blog here.

There is a very interesting document in wiki which compares the features between the LibreOffice & MS-Office here.

No doubt that the coming release of LibreOffice is going to be the best ever but for the time being I’ve tested the Apache OpenOffice on my Server and works perfectly fine.

Hope that was informative. Would like to hear more from you guys on your experiences with the Open-Source Office Suite, so that it can be beneficial for the community in coming days.

Regards