OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

OpenOffice is barely maintained these days, because almost all the developers have moved to LibreOffice (as in, it took OpenOffice months to fix a critical security bug a while back). Go with LibreOffice.

As for formatting carrying over correctly to Word, the answer seems to be "usually". Simple formatting of the type you would find in a novel manuscript should be fine. I haven't needed to transfer anything complicated back and forth in a while, though, so there may be specific things that are prone to breaking.

I myself use LibreOffice and strongly prefer it to any word processing program I've tried.

If you don't put in too much fancy formatting, you won't have any problems. It is important however, to make sure you're using the most current version.

Best of luck with it.

> But which is better for my needs?

What are your needs?

-cb

Libre Office is still being maintained.

But no one but you can tell what is better for you.

Download it and use it for a month.

Libre Office is the actively developed version of that software, as others have said, which probably means that any updates to MS Word compatibility are more likely to be found in LO.

On the other hand, you still cannot create 100% compatible .doc files. LO also doesn't support Word macros. It really depends on how complex your documents are and how many Word-specific functions you (or your correspondents) want to use. It's a little like fitting a square peg into a round hole, even if the square peg is generally quite good at looking like a round one.

I don't think 100% Microsoft compatibility is even on the agenda anymore for open source products. LO seems to focus more on delivering a really nice free office suite instead of tracking down every new idiosyncratic feature of MS Word. You can export and open .doc files, but only up to a point.

In my experience, LO doesn't have a large number of problems, but you may find it does for you.

To elaborate, Libre Office is a direct descendant of Open Office. The company that maintained nominal control of Open Office was bought a few years ago by Oracle, a company that has historically been unfriendly with open source projects. To be sure the project would continue, the voulenteers who worked on it "forked" the code (took a copy of the then recent version, something open source lets you do) as a new project, presumably with any elements that could get them in legal hot water (name branding at least) stripped. Since then pretty much everyone who cares (including those responsible for developing it) has followed the jump to Libre Office. Same developers (mostly), same project (plus updates), different name and different legal entity controlling it.

Ooh! Ooh! Robin wants to throw in his $.02.

I use the free version of WPS Office. I still have MS Office, but it had a weird bug that caused me to migrate to WPS. The bug?

Using MS Office, I couldn't for the life of me, format my novels good enough for Smashwords. Believe me, I tried. I erased all formatting, meaning also all hidden codes, but Smashwords kept spitting it back out. Frustrated, I migrated over to WPS, tweaked the books here and there, and they went through Smashwords like diarrhea. (Okay. Nasty simile, but you know what I mean).

BTW, the difference between the free version of WPS Office and the paid one is you get a five second ad/nag screen. Functionality, though, is 100%. Sweet, huh? Plus, the letter strip resembles MS Office. I think their header system is more intuitive, too. I use MS Office 2013, BTW.

LibraOffice > OpenOffice, definitely, though I tend to stick with Word out of pure familiarity at this point.

Cliff Face said:

One other function, though, is for self-publishing e-books on Amazon. I've only done that once before, and can't quite recall the process, but I do know that I had to format my Word document in a very specific way to get compatibility with Kindle. I'd assume LO can handle that, too, but it's definitely worth asking.

Thanks all.

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Scrivener is reportedly quite good at this, and has the most out-of-the-box functions for creating clean epubs. Vellum is very highly recommended by Mac users, too, though I haven't tried it.

Cliff Face said:

Thanks, both.

I'll stick with LibreOffice for the time being, though I'll admit I am curious about Scrivener. Just, y'know, not enough to pay for it right at this point.

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Try Scrivener for thirty days. Complete NaNoWriMo and get it for half price.