Lodahl's blog: MacOS
Showing posts with label MacOS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MacOS. Show all posts

16 July 2013

LibreOffice is becoming the Swiss army knife in the office

What started as a simple text editor and later became am office suite is actually becoming a very comprehensive set of tools for the daily office work.

LibreOffice is most likely the only application that can open almost any office file format in the world. Legacy and modern - it doesn't matter LibreOffice can handle them. Even some legacy file formats from older versions of Microsoft Office that can't be recognized by supported versions of Microsoft Office can be opened and converted with LibreOffice. Its a well known fact that some corrupted files from legacy Microsoft Office versions can only be opened with LibreOffice. I'm just mentioning a few file formats here: Lotus Word Pro, MS Works, WordPerfect and Cores Draw. Also older versions of office files from outdated Mac computers like Microsoft Word for Mac, Write Now, MacWrite Pro and AppleWorks is now accessible.


Besides that LibreOffice is constantly improving the Microsoft OOXML Import and Export filters as well as for the Microsoft Office binary file formats and the RTF format.

With LibreOffice you can store PDF-files and even embed the original text document or spreadsheet within the PDF. This makes it possible to do later edits of the file directly by loading it into LibreOffice. But there is more that. With the drawing application you can open any PDF-file that is stored without encryption. You can even edit the content and you can merge and split the document as you like. Hereby LibreOffice can replace some of the separate tools that is often used to do these tasks.

With the spreadsheet application Calc you can import CSV files and even arbitrary XML files into a spreadsheet.

LibreOffice runs on almost any thinkable platform ans operating system and its free. Free as in free beer and as in free speech. you can download it from here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/ .


What more do you want of interoperability?

24 September 2007

Summary from OOoCon2007 in Barcelona (II)

OpenOffice.org in the future
Louis Suárez-Potts opened the conference with a speak about the future development tasks. In overall terms:

  1. Support of web2.0 technologies as Wiki, blogs, collaboration tools etc. http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/thursday_80.pdf
  2. Closer integration with products from Mozilla, the so called PIM tools like contacts and calendar http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/thursday_70.pdf
  3. Interoperability with other office suites http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/thursday_94.pdf
  4. Tools for developing extensions as well as continue to enhance extension possibilities http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/thursday_48.pdf and
    http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/thursday_149.pdf
  5. PDF support by making it possible to open and edit pdf files and create hybrid documents (both ODF and PDF at the same time) http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/completing_pdf_support_in_ooo1
  6. Support pivot tables from Excel and a new solver function http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/friday_114.pdf
  7. Notes- and comments http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Notes2
  8. New porting: MacOS http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/wednesday_769.pdf and
    http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/wednesday_158.pdf
These and many other features can be expected in version 3, planned to be released spring or summer 2008. But of cause: plans can always be changed.

Chinese influence
Some time ago, Sun Microsystems made an agreement with Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co. http://www.ch2000.com.cn/english/index.htm. This company is contributing with development of OpenOffice.org and is at the same time developing a special Chinese version that respects the special Cinese culture. As it was explained to us at the conference: "Microsoft will always try to learn us to use computers the way its done in the west. Only by developing our own office suite, we can have a suite that satisfies us and respects our culture and identity".
Just a few days before the conference opened, IBM published the news, that they will contribute to OpenOffice.org development in the future. This contribution will be from China too, because all office development, e.g. Lotus Symphony is done in China. http://www.openoffice.org/press/ibm_press_release.html