![]() But aside the zero price, LibreOffice plays an important political role that affects companies all over the world: Microsoft Office is the undisputed market leader in native Document software, which effectively keeps people and organizations from switching to free operating systems, since it's dependent on either a Microsoft operating system, or an even more expensive macOS. Well, obviously the main argument to use LibreOffice is that it's released under a free license and therefore free to use, in general. If your documents contain personal or company-internal information - they almost definitely do - think twice if you might want to bite one of the other sour apples: Spending time on learning a more specialized tool, getting used to LibreOffice's okay but suboptimal usability, building specialized web-based applications for your use-case, or automating those people who spend their whole day in Excel-Sheets. they might spy on your documents, which is potentially problematic. While these people could use Google Docs or Microsoft Office as well - and I even recommend them from a usability perspective - these come with a significant hidden cost, given the dependencies on Microsoft Windows in the one case and the unclear situation around "telemetry" in both cases, aka. ![]() I think LibreOffice fills the gap for those who just need a general-purpose Document processor from time to time or use it's web-based version by Collabora to collaborate. All of these require more or less experience and reading documentation. For notes, simple text-based collaboration and even website publishing I recommend markdown. Technically also for presentations, but I didn't bother so far. For scientific publishing and documents there is LaTeX. It's not easy to specify LibreOffice's niche, and it depends a lot on the technical abilities of the users. Here’s a quick primer on office software history.Not for everyone, but great that it's there Once all of the office formats were binary. They were strictly closed so that Microsoft could maintain a monopoly. Luckily, the Jedi knights from open source community created an alternative – new XML-based formats called ODF. The abbreviation stands for Open Document formats, and the word ‘open’ here reveals their open source nature and that they could be used without restrictions. Even Microsoft tech guys saw that and took the idea. In 2007 Microsoft launched a new version of their Office that by default saved documents in the newly created OOXML (Office Open XML) formats – docx, xlsx, pptx. Note that the word ‘open’ here did not mean being open source because the formats were protected by Microsoft patents. But putting aside the moral aspects of their monopolistic approach, we have to say they were brilliant and also put much time and effort in their document editors.Įven with such alternatives as OpenOffice (back then) and LibreOffice (now), Microsoft Office stays the most popular office suite in the world and the majority of office docs ever created was saved in Microsoft formats. The old files still exist in binary formats, but OOXML is catching up quickly. No scientific survey was conveyed to proved that OOXML is more widely used than ODF. Moreover, the majority of organizations has closed document circulation, so we’ll never know anything about their documentation. Google Trends service, for instance, shows us that docx is being googled way more often than odt. He filetype search experiment also proves the point.ġ filetype:docx = 14 400 000 documents found.ġ filetype:odt = 388 000 documents found. ![]() ![]() Text filetype:docx = 1 020 000 documents found. Text filetype:odt = 28 100 documents found.ĭoes it mean that OOXML is better than ODF? Not necessarily. ![]() It is just the distribution model.Īre we trying to talk you into using OOXML? No way! We are just saying that it is more widely spread which may have nothing to do with your personal preferences. ![]()
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