It reads in all of the spreadsheets I constructed in MS Office previously without incident and in some cases has even offered a welcome feature bonus not available in Office. Having moved over to Ubuntu (linux) after the end of life statement regarding XP (cant stand MS 7 or later derivatives) I started to use LibreOffice which is distributed free with Ubuntu. I still feel that the technical barriers to entry to contributing to the documentation project are too high, although the FAQ and manuals tend to be fairly well written, albeit a few versions behind the actual current release.Īs for the built-in help, it uses a specific engine to render rather obscure XML files, and editing these is by no means something for the neophyte, as it requires knowledge of XML syntax, and use of the source code repository versioning tool, git (or logerrit via the web). Obviously, this is a difficult situation to redress, and currently our only way to make things any better is to try and engage people to contribute their own knowledge (whether by discovery or experience) to improving the documentation. This leaves the documentation project, which is "under-subscribed" when it comes to members actually writing stuff in the dark about the existence of the function and how best to provide documentation for it - the people who write the documentation are generally users of the product and not the developers. formulae for Calc, and do not always explain how those new functions are to be used, nor add help entries to the built-in help. One of the problems the project has, like many open source projects, is that developers develop new functions, e.g. if yes, which modules (or apps, if you prefer) ? if yes, what for - professional / personal use ? do you use LibreOffice / Apache OpenOffice / NeoOffice ? Well, enough of the brief history of time, and back to the question(s) : Prior to Sun's acquisition, the product was a closed source, proprietary offering from the German company StarDivision GmbH. It is entirely free, both financially and in terms of use (or re-use) of code, copying of the binaries, installation, subject to the terms of two open source licences (LGPL / MPL).Ī similar sister project exists, called Apache OpenOffice with similar goals, although a different licensing scheme for code submissions - I won't get into the embroglio of the philosophical principles behind the differing choice of licences between the two, but suffice it to say, they are still very close in terms of actual shared lines of computer code, although the two are diverging.īoth of these products stem from Oracle's OpenOffice, which Oracle acquired from Sun, the first company to open up the source code and create a community of contributors. It runs on Windows (from XP to 8), Mac OSX (10.4 to 10.10), and various Linux distributions and other Unixes (I believe FreeBSD and Solaris versions are available, but not officially supported as yet). As a member of the QA volunteer group for the LibreOffice project that deals mainly with bug triaging, I would be interested to know whether or not you use LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice, NeoOffice or something related to any of these for your daily document productivity needs.įor those that might not know, LibreOffice is an office document productivity suite.
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