Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Travis Cardwell <travis.cardwell@example.com>]

On 2014年05月15日 12:11, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Let me clarify: I'm not interested in that.  I'm pretty sure that there
> are few people on this list who use an office suite by preference.[1]
> If you do like office suites, feel free to say so, though.
> 
> The question is what do you use if you *must* use an office suite?
> 
> I'm especially interested in comments like Benjamin's about Microsoft
> compatibility vs. becoming a contender in its own right.

I had a chance to ask my wife about it.  She has been using OpenOffice
(just Writer and Calc) at home for ~five years.  All of her documents are
Japanese.  Note that she uses OpenOffice and not LibreOffice just because
it is what is on her distro; she plans on getting a new laptop before
moving, on which I will install Debian Wheezy, and she will switch to
LibreOffice.

When I asked her about it, she said that she had no problems at all using
OpenOffice to create new documents.  When one does not have to worry about
Microsoft compatibility, perhaps by exporting to PDF for sharing, the
software does indeed seem to be a contender in its own right.

Problems arise when Microsoft compatibility is required, however.  She
used Microsoft Office at her work, and trying to edit Word documents at
home caused a significant amount of frustration.  The general frustration
is that documents are rendered differently in the different applications:
spacing and positioning of content is different.  For concrete examples,
she has had issues with fonts (as would be expected...) and floating
frames.  When Microsoft formats are required, OpenOffice has not been
sufficient.

Cheers,

Travis