Comments on: OpenOffice May Close The Door

By: Christopher Winter

Christopher Winter — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 01:16:48 +0000

Thanks for this article. I’ve been using Apache OpenOffice for a while — three versions, I think — on WinXP. I’m now on version 4.1.2. It sometimes fails to load, so that I have to reboot the machine. But that’s rare, and I haven’t had any other problems with it.

The article linked below compares it (briefly) with LibreOffice, and the comments give some good notes on the history of the two efforts. Apparently LibreOffice can use code from OpenOffice, but not vice-versa.

http://www.howtogeek.com/187663/openoffice-vs.-libreoffice-whats-the-difference-and-which-should-you-use/

By: Edgar Carpenter

Edgar Carpenter — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 15:31:27 +0000

Open Office was great – it could even open old documents created by Microsoft Office that newer versions of Microsoft Office couldn’t. I was saddened when it went through the troubles, and I moved on to Libre Office once that was up and running, but I’ll always remember Open Office with respect and affection.

By: Julian Frost

Julian Frost — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 10:41:10 +0000

I’ve used both OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
All I can say about OO is “good riddance”. LibreOffice is better.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 03:08:23 +0000

Dean, your advisor must be some kind of monster!

Gary, yeah, I figured Wordpad would be RTF. So by using RTF in Word everything should work together nicely.

RTF covers pretty much most or all of one’s needs.

I personally like markdown.

By: dean

dean — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 01:32:21 +0000

“emacs is the best editor.”

My advisor would say the same thing about vim.

Texstudio is nothing special – command completion, integrated viewer – but it works.

By: Gary S

Gary S — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 23:29:51 +0000

@ Greg, #6. Thanks. I should have said I’m editing .RTF files with Wordpad. Their advantage is compatibility with many editors, and it’s free on MS systems (at least so far). Here’s a hack: if you really can’t read the contents of a .DOCX file, just change the type to .ZIP and then find and copy the text content.

By: skeptictmac57

skeptictmac57 — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 22:03:05 +0000

Thanks Greg! this was interesting. I have used OO for years now, but only rarely as needed. I was always very appreciative of the fact that they provided these tools for free vs the predatory pricing of MS. I would have been glad to buy MS Office for a reasonable price, but (I don’t know what it is now) I recall seeing it at nearly $300 retail at times.
I had no idea about any of this backstory though.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 18:41:27 +0000

emacs is the best editor. RStudio is great.

I don’t use windows so I’m not familiar with Textstudio.

BBE editor is great on a mac. If you fully loaded your .emacs file and put everything on a set of menus, it would be BBEdit.

I think TextWrangler is the toned down free version of it. BBEdit is a great example of good proprietary software, but I do wish there was an OO and Linux version of something like it.

By: dean

dean — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 17:52:01 +0000

And, the comments about the issues between Microsoft Office and Open Office were spot on – what I tried to get at. Those issues were a perfect illustration of the difference between philosophies and designs of open source software and commercial software.

By: dean

dean — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 17:50:06 +0000

Yes, you caught me in the error of seeming to say LaTeX is an editor.
I use emacs or Rstudio on my Mac at home (the latter allows me to include R code, output, graphics, and markdown or LaTeX formatting in a single file) , Texstudio and Rstudio on my Windows computer at school. Everything moves back and forth seamlessly between operating systems. Isn’t that what we want to have happen?