Office Program

[Giggsie]

Anyone tell me best free download of this libra office?

[Buenchico]

The ONLY place you should download Libre Office from is here:
https://www.libreoffice.org/

Libre Office is very good but OpenOffice is probably more popular with ABers:
https://www.openoffice.org/

[Giggsie]

Thank you buenchico always get help here when needed.

[davegosling]

This will help you decide which one is right for you though, to be honest, up to a certain level they're essentially identical - they just look a little different.

Unless you have any particularly niche functionality requirement, either will be more than sufficient.

If you regularly, sometimes or even just occasionally share documents with Microsoft Office users, make sure you set the various default file formats to their Microsoft equivalents. It will save you a lot of heartache.

[davegosling]

Forgot the link!
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/whats-the-difference-between-libreoffice-and-openoffice/

[Giggsie]

Thankyou davegosling very interesting. I am not very techie minded being a silver surfer not sure what you mean to set various default file formats. very occasionally I will be sharing documents if any. Or if somebody sends me a document will I be able to open to read it.

[davegosling]

All modern application suites which have "rivals", as it were, can open each other's documents. However, each of these are of different "formats", which means the way the data they contain is arranged and categorised. So, e.g. Microsoft Word's default file format is .docx, but it can save its documents in a couple of dozen other formats so that they can be shared with other people who don't use Microsoft Word.

Similarly, LibreOffice and OpenOffice have their own default file formats in which documents will be saved unless you specify a different one. As Microsoft Office remains by far the most common suite of apps, it can make sense to configure LibreOffice / OpenOffice to use the Microsoft document formats by default. They, you pretty much don't have to worry about it.

[Giggsie]

Thank you I understand now.

[davegosling]

Welcome.

[Buenchico]

As Dave says, simply clicking on 'Save' in either Libre Office or OpenOffice (in their 'out of the box' states) will save your documents in non-Microsoft formats. So if, say, you wanted to send a wedding present list to recipients who'd only got Microsoft Word, they wouldn't be able to open it.

You can get around that easily enough by choosing 'Save As' (instead of 'Save') and selecting a Microsoft format. However it's probably better to change how the 'Save' option works, so that your chosen program automatically uses Microsoft formats.

Instructions to do that in OpenOffice can be found here:
https://helpdeskgeek.com/office-tips/set-openof%EF%AC%81ce-org-to-save-in-microsoft-of%EF%AC%81ce-format-by-default/

For Libre Office, see here:
https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Using_Microsoft_Office_and

[davegosling]

"they wouldn't be able to open it."

Yes it would, unless it was an extremely old version of Word. Same with Excel / Calc, etc.

[Buenchico]

^^^ I agree that, from Office 2007 onwards, Microsoft Office programs can open .odt files (and other non-Microsoft file types) but the formatting might be lost. It's always safest to use Microsoft formats (even though that's annoying because it's actually Microsoft which is out-of-step with everyone else, rather than the other way round).