LibreOffice vs. Microsoft Office: It's a format war An interesting background on how LibreOffice was born and evolved as a free competitor to Microsoft Office. LibreOffice is increasing its focus on its community and users with many companies and governments standing behind it and even contributing to it. But it is very true that much of it comes down to the document format you use. Whilst both MS Office and LibreOffice support each other's formats (LIbreOffice's being the international ODF format and not really their own), they perform best using their own formats. Conversion (even between one MS Office format and another) does present issues. So the bottom line for LibreOffice adopters is to really use the ODF format to edit and save in and rather don't try save everything in OOXML format. Microsoft has always been keenly aware of this hence the tiny tweaks to their format to ensure that only they can truly fully support it. The good news is that it is really possible to work fine in ODF as long as you are not constantly surrounded by other business units wanting everything in OOXML. It does still rather boggle the mind why people would choose to pay so much money for software that essentially aims specifically to lock you into their format.... Think seriously about what you use the software for. I have yet to find something I could not do in the course of my normal document and spreadsheet creation in ODF format. Free plus Freedom vs US$376 per user here in South Africa.... See http://ift.tt/2kqQBkR
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