The two program suites OpenOffice and LibreOffice are popular free alternatives to Microsoft Office. But where exactly is the difference between the two? We have put together a comparison of the most important properties for you.
Why are OpenOffice and LibreOffice so similar?
OpenOffice and LibreOffice have a common past: It all started with StarOffice. This program is an office suite.
Sun, the company behind StarOffice, finally decided to release the source code. This means that the program was open source from that point on. Since then, every user can adapt the program to his or her wishes or simply use lines for his own program. The StarOffice project has now been renamed OpenOffice.
The company Sun was eventually bought by Oracle, which ultimately made OpenOffice Apache OpenOffice.org. The small group of the open source community that had previously worked on OpenOffice continued to work. Since Oracle had also bought the naming rights to OpenOffice, the former developers of OpenOffice founded the community "The Document Foundation". Work on the office suite has continued since then, albeit under the name LibreOffice..
Are there any differences?
At first glance, the two programs appear very similar. Basically they are, because of their shared past. Both include a full office suite with the main components Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (presentations) and Draw (drawings). In addition, both program suites use Open Document files (.odt) as a basic storage unit. The two programs are available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. The basic functions in the respective components are basically the same, but some marginal differences can also be seen: The
disadvantage for OpenOffice is the missing 64-bit version . This is annoying because 64-bit versions of operating systems such as Windows work faster.
Documents in .docx format (i.e. documents that have been created with a newer version of Microsoft Word) can be used by both programs . This means that both programs can open files in this format and save documents in this format again. However, if Word has included complicated formatting , both programs sometimes have problems adopting the format. OpenOffice has a harder time with this than LibreOffice .
One advantage of LibreOffice is that it is essential more developers are working on this program. As a result, bugs are fixed more quickly and everyone can concentrate better on their specialty. There are also many more updates for LibreOffice . This means more security - regular updates at short intervals can quickly become irritating or even annoying.
Ultimately, everyone has to know for themselves which program is better suited for their own purposes. There are hardly any functional differences . However, at the moment there are more technical advantages of LibreOffice over OpenOffice .
