“LibreOffice has quickly become the de facto standard for migrations to free office suites, thanks to the growing feature set and the improved interoperability with proprietary software. Instrumental for the overall progress is the growing developer base, which has just reached the number of 550 since the launch of the project, making LibreOffice one of the fastest growing free software projects of the decade.
After the City of Munich and the French Government, which are migrating from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice, it is now the turn of several provinces in Italy, including the largest one in term of inhabitants. In addition, there are many private companies switching to LO, like the largest furniture manufacturer and retailer in Romania, with 1,000 Windows and GNU/Linux desktops.”
see The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6.3 – The Document Foundation Blog.
Wow! 550 developers! Anything is possible. OpenOffice.org used to struggle on with a few dozen…
17444
12763
206
3
2
23886 
11847 
11699 
4637 
4257 
1641 
198 
14 
2 
0 
0 
0 
In two years time, M$ Office will be a yearly subscription based software and everyone will switch to using LibreOffice on Linux and Android.
A win-win for the free market.
It won’t be long before Libre Office will be the defacto office suite of the World. It will have all of the features that 98% of users need. Soon, other applications will follow. It just makes better sense for the World to make its own software than to rely on a single company with its own agenda.
To the next generation of users, it would be inconceivable that the World once relied upon a single company to supply it with an office suite.
One company I know spends $300 per copy of M$ Office, I asked him what do they use it for, “Email, Spreadsheets and Documents” was the reply. For 50-users, that is $15K which is ridiculous and needs some fat trimming. I have never met anyone that utilizes the full capacity of any of M$ office products, only for very simple things.
One thing I tell businesses, here try Libreoffice and see if you like it. The only thing I hear is how M$ Office does not like to play with ISO standard files, but not is not LibreOffices fault. Just get the other users to use LibreOffice as well, and problem solved!
Android tablets and smartphones are the most popular devices and by 2016 M$ Windows will become irrelevant. Its cheaper paying employees a small stipend each month, versus having to deploy Blackberry phone and separate server.
$250 Chromebooks, and a $5 app allows you to log onto almost any terminal server. No more need of $1400 laptops from Dell, HP or Panasonic.
Times are changing! Now who moved my Cheese?
Part of it now is I send ODF’s by default when no specific electronic format is requested. When folks specifically ping back they can’t read ODF, I do send them a PDF file and a link to the LibreOffice site and explain I use a stable format for archival that will be good for retrieval of archives 20 years down the road. If they really need it that other office suite I’ll send them it on the 2′nd request. In the weeds education can turn a lot of light bulbs on.
Europeans at the other end rarely ask for another format, neither do folks in the technical community either though sometimes they want LaTEX. The most interesting case was a lawyer, apparently the legal community still heavily uses WordPerfect.
Just installed it. Only took 2 mins to download, 2 mins to remove and reinstall the updated version.
Why does M$ Office take like 45 min to uninstall, than an hour to reinstall? BLOAT
Why does M$ Office seem to fail mid-way, then you have to wait for it to uninstall its failure. Over-priced junk
No wonder M$ pre-installs Office, people have better things to do then wait for its bloat to install, which fails half the time. perhaps this is why they are moving to the cloud and pushing Office with an annual subscription model? Makes ones wonder..
http://mrpogson.com/2012/10/24/feature-comparison-libreoffice-microsoft/
German city says OpenOffice shortcomings are forcing it back to Microsoft
But open source developers say the council should still consider a quick upgrade to OpenOffice or LibreOffice
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/442330/german_city_says_openoffice_shortcomings_forcing_it_back_microsoft/
“Freiburg has been using OpenOffice and Microsoft Office 2000 side-by-side since 2007 and has been very restrictive issuing licenses of new Microsoft Office suites. Since then, the city noticed that it has been far from ideal to use only OpenOffice for digital correspondence. Microsoft Office for instance is the standard for external communication, the council wrote.
Employees had trouble with documents that were formatted in a seemingly complete random way when opened in another office suite. There were also conversion problems between the presentation programs Power Point and Impress. And spreadsheet program Calc and Impress were seen as significantly underperforming compared to the Microsoft alternative, the council wrote.”
i.e. They attribute the problem that M$ does not use open standards to OpenOffice.org, which is not logical. Neither SUN, Oracle, nor the Document Foundation has any control over M$’s choices. Certainly, sending more money to M$ does not solve the real problem. TFA is also in error suggesting only Munich uses LibreOffice: “Besides Munich, there is no big community that decided to do the same as Freiburg, it said, adding that there are no signs that the use of open source software will prevail in the market.”
Have they not noticed that */Linux was shipped more often than that other OS last year? Have they not noticed that many millions of users including those in large organizations use FLOSS office-suites?
Clearly, ignorance prevails in Freiburg. Clearly, IT pushed back enough to agitate for legislating lock-in.