free excel?

esuhl

DCFC79 wrote: »

because ive used open office and not used libre office, i have used another free 1 but cant think of the name,

think it was made by sun but not sure

OpenOffice was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, but they were bought by Oracle last year. Since Oracle have upset a lot of OO developers and have (from what I've read) some strange not-quite-so-open ideas about how OO should be developed from now on, a lot of the developers were upset and decided to continue the OO project as before without Oracle's help. The gave the project a new name (as Oracle own the trademark for OO) - LibreOffice.

So... LibreOffice is the continuation of the OpenOffice project with (most of) the same developers. What is now OpenOffice is just the old name with new not-very-popular direction from Oracle. At the moment, LO and OO are almost identical, but I have a feeling that OO will die off as LO replaces it. I suspect that a lot of Linux distos will quickly replace OO with LO in their repositories for idealistic reasons.

Sun also developed StarOffice (after buying out Star Division). I think they shared a lot of code between StarOffice and OpenOffice, but kept the two as separate products...

paddyrg

esuhl wrote: »

Why choose OpenOffice over LibreOffice?

I understand that most of the develeopers of OO have moved to LO, but is there a particular reason to prefer OO?

Because Libre Office is still only a Release Candidate, not RTM yet.

I'm still using OO, but will be going over to LO once it has gone Gold/RTM - but it isn't yet :-) Not long away though, and in fairness it's unlikely they'll go to RC4, but until RTM, may as well hold on!

Mr_Oink

I always find it a source of amusement when I see people rattling on because a FOS/OS project has forked or had some kind of internal political spat resulting in fragmentation.

In particular I get a good belly laugh from the 'Why are you still using XXX it has now become YYY because ZZZ has bought the company'. This usually comes from people that any such change will make zero difference to, who will continue to enjoy the hard work of others for free and are unlikely to contribute anything to the project other than 'religious' views on it and the state of FoS in forums and newsgroups. It's a cracker :-)

OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Whateva Office. To the majority of the world it's the "Free Office productivity suite". Mkay......

free4440273

I'd recommend LibreOffice too / easy install/ light-weight and bloat free //

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

Sublime_2

Download and try one of the free office suites mentioned. Its the only way to see if you like it or not. Open Office is good though.

lucylucky

buglawton wrote: »

MS Works seems to be bundled on some new Win7 Netbooks / Laptops. Do you have MS Works on your machine? It has a reasonable Ad-supported Spreadsheet and Document editor that is free to use and no expiry (apparently).

MSWorks was(is) free with most Windows OS.

And it is rubbish.

DCFC79

esuhl wrote: »

OpenOffice was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, but they were bought by Oracle last year. Since Oracle have upset a lot of OO developers and have (from what I've read) some strange not-quite-so-open ideas about how OO should be developed from now on, a lot of the developers were upset and decided to continue the OO project as before without Oracle's help. The gave the project a new name (as Oracle own the trademark for OO) - LibreOffice.

So... LibreOffice is the continuation of the OpenOffice project with (most of) the same developers. What is now OpenOffice is just the old name with new not-very-popular direction from Oracle. At the moment, LO and OO are almost identical, but I have a feeling that OO will die off as LO replaces it. I suspect that a lot of Linux distos will quickly replace OO with LO in their repositories for idealistic reasons.

Sun also developed StarOffice (after buying out Star Division). I think they shared a lot of code between StarOffice and OpenOffice, but kept the two as separate products...

there is or was another free office like package free to download and use

Viper_7

DCFC79 wrote: »

there is or was another free office like package free to download and use

Yes there is... but lets keep people guessing...

Mr_Oink

DCFC79 wrote: »

there is or was another free office like package free to download and use

Do you mean this:

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/products

IIRC it used to be free. I seem to recall it used to use 'abiword' for wp not sure what the SS was like.

IBM® Lotus® Symphony™ is a richly-featured set of productivity tools that are intuitive and easy to use and provided at no charge. There are three applications that make up Lotus Symphony: Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, Lotus Symphony Presentations.

aarrgghh

Libre as yet does not support all MS Office formats. Open Office does, despite its pitiful slow start up and instability. But free is free and you get what you pay, or don't pay for. I use MS Office because the others don't have enough lines and columns in spreadsheet. No way could I get a million plus entries on OO Calc.