Open Office vs. Libre Office - a comparison
We compare Open Office and Libre Office and explain the differences.
At first there was only open office
Read a short story about the creation of the two almost identical office packages here.
- Open Office is the open source variant of Star Office. Sun had bought it and made it available to the developer community.
- Sun was bought by Oracle, which was more commercial and got into a dispute with the free developers. They left and founded their own foundation.
- They continued the project under Libre Office because the naming rights were still with Oracle.
- Oracle was not happy with OpenOffice and gave the project and name to the Apache Software Foundation. They renamed the project back to Apache Open Office.
Open Office and Libre Office can do that
Basically, the two office packages consist of the same building blocks. These are:
- WRITER, the word processor
- CALC, the spreadsheet
- IMPRESS for multimedia presentations
- DRAW, a 3D drawing program
- BASE, the database module
Differences between the Office packages
Are there any differences? The separation was not that long ago, which is why the vast majority are still identical programs. But there are already differences. Libre Office has already received significantly more updates, which mostly contain bug fixes, but also new functions. So now in LibreOffice (and only in LibreOffice):
- Table cells are marked in color in Calc
- The LibreOffice Writer has a word count in the status bar
- With PDF export, the generated PDFs can be watermarked
- Numerous import and export formats improved
Libre Office belongs to the future
Given the marginal differences so far, it is up to you which office suite you use. These, if any, are only noticeable to those who are dependent on one of the new special features. Libre Office is already ahead of Open Office in terms of development technology, and that will certainly remain the case.
Do you need help with other programs? Then take a look at our software practical tips.