Thinking of switching to LibreOffice - couple of questions

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KFCJ
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Thinking of switching to LibreOffice - couple of questions

Post by KFCJ »

For years I have been using Microsoft office 2010 now I am finally decide to move to something free, open source and something that will respect my privacy (I am mild privacy freak, just don't like Office telemetry). Question are:

I have more than 300 documents in default office word/excel/powerpoint format. Will their structure be affected when I switch to LibreOffice? I am mostly afraid that font, spaces and all other text formatting will be a big mess after switching.

Similar question as above, let say I switch to LibreOffice, I edit all my documents and after some time (let say couple of years) I want to return to Microsoft Office. Will that be a problem, text structure and formatting will remain the same?

In word, excel and powerpoint I am using mostly 99% bacic functions, writing, font change, bold letters, insert table, basic mathematics operation in excel, edit/delete slide in powerpoint and so on. That all I have also in LibreOffice?

Seasrching I found that there is a also OpenOffice. As far as I read that is weaker version than LibreOffice?
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Villeroy
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Re: Thinking of switching to LibreOffice - couple of questio

Post by Villeroy »

Macros are the crucial point of incompatibility. Code needs to be rewritten for documents which depend on heavy macro coding.

After installing LibreOffice, call File>WIzards>Document Converter. It creates copies of all text, spreadsheet and presentation documents in a given directory and saves them in the Open Document Format (ODF), .odt for text, .ods for spreadsheet, .odp for presentations. The original doc/xls/ppt documents won't be touched. This way you will see any problems in document copies. Feel free to ask concrete questions on concrete conversion issues.

In 2011 the OpenOffice.org project was about to be destroyed by a Oracle which bought the top code contributor Sun Microsystems. A team of developers took the open source code and forked another project known as LibreOffice. OpenOffice survived under the roof of the Apache foundation but now is almost dead due to lack of resources, poor maintainance, no significant new features since 2015, poorer compatibility with Microsoft documents.
Last edited by Villeroy on Wed Sep 01, 2021 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Please, edit this topic's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line if your problem has been solved.
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John_Ha
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Re: Thinking of switching to LibreOffice - couple of questio

Post by John_Ha »

LO 6.4.4.2, Windows 10 Home 64 bit

See the Writer Guide, the Writer FAQ, the Writer Tutorials and Writer for students.

Remember: Always save your Writer files as .odt files. - see here for the many reasons why.
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Thinking of switching to LibreOffice - couple of questio

Post by Hagar Delest »

KFCJ wrote:In word, excel and powerpoint I am using mostly 99% bacic functions, writing, font change, bold letters, insert table, basic mathematics operation in excel, edit/delete slide in powerpoint and so on. That all I have also in LibreOffice?
Yes.
KFCJ wrote:I have more than 300 documents in default office word/excel/powerpoint format. Will their structure be affected when I switch to LibreOffice? I am mostly afraid that font, spaces and all other text formatting will be a big mess after switching.
Not that much I think. LibreOffice seems to manage the conversion pretty well. However, MS Office is not that good at handling ODF files. If you switch from .docx to .odt and then back to .docx, it may lead to significant rework. Do a test to check. That's why keeping the original files is a good bet. However, it means that all the changes done in LibreOffice may have to be redone also if you switch back to MS Office, starting back from the original files. Do some tests with LibreOffice and then see if this worst case scenario is probable or very unlikely.

Please add [Solved] at the beginning of the title in your first post (top of the topic) with the *EDIT button if your issue has been fixed.
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bavumybel
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Re: Thinking of switching to LibreOffice - couple of questio

Post by bavumybel »

I've tried to start using Libre several years ago. I don't remember all the process in detail, but I remember that something in structure changed. Let me wonder what makes you think about leaving open office?
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Thinking of switching to LibreOffice - couple of questio

Post by Hagar Delest »

Look at the AOO dev mailing list and the release notes for example. Not much has happened to AOO since the fork. Whereas LO strives with new features and improvements (is not plagued by the very old AOO issue that ruins files into hashes sometimes).
To switch, I only had to adjust some macros, that's all. User interface is the same (just don't use their alternate UI if you don't like it).
I never thought I would switch to LO but I've to admit it's just better now.
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Re: Thinking of switching to LibreOffice - couple of questio

Post by esperantisto »

KFCJ wrote:Seasrching I found that there is a also OpenOffice. As far as I read that is weaker version than LibreOffice?
In my experience, Apache OpenOffice is superior to LibreOffice in terms of stability, especially when processing really big files. However, since your main concern seems to be compatibly with Microsoft Office, LibreOffice is a better option.

However, if you need 100% compatibility, stick to MSO (especially for presentations that have more compatibility issues as compared to text documents and spreadsheets).
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Villeroy
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Re: Thinking of switching to LibreOffice - couple of questio

Post by Villeroy »

KFCJ wrote: I have more than 300 documents in default office word/excel/powerpoint format. Will their structure be affected when I switch to LibreOffice?
You should definitively switch to MS Office. It makes absolutely no sense to work with application A and save all your work in the proprietary file format of application B. Likewise, it would be stupid to save everything in ODF while working with MS Office or any other application that supports some foreign file format for import and export but not for creative work.
ALWAYS work with the native file format of the application you are using and export an additional copy in foreign file format when absolutely needed. This is the only way how you keep all your work intact when something gets lost during the conversion.
When you receive some file in a foreign file format for editing, the first thing you should do is saving a copy in the native file format of your application and work with that. Every time you open an MSO file in Libre/OpenOffice, the file is converted to ODF anyway. What your office keeps in the working memory is always an ODF version of the loaded file. And when you write it to disk, it is converted back into the foreign MSO format.
Please, edit this topic's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line if your problem has been solved.
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