[leke]

Even being a Linux fan boy, I still hate OpenOffice/Libre because it's so clunky and doesn't play as nice as MS Office when you need to do some complicated things for the workplace. I actually even prefer Google docs now over OpenOffice and find the gmail/Drive integration so handy. As for the Greece thing, MS has a good product (Office), but a bad OS (for the money they charge). They need to approach this differently, like porting Office to Linux.

[slurry]

Open/LibreOffice has never been that great and if I were considering a big install of it the fact that it's under Apache stewardship would give me pause. Apache does very good work but their specialty is server-side, highly-configurable, large systems that take a fair amount of skill to get up and running.

If I had to guess what direction OO development is headed in, I'd say things are headed in a more service-oriented architecture direction. It'll be great if you want a customed-out integrated groupware, collaboration, data analysis and document management solution, and you've got a large, skilled IT staff (and/or Oracle or IBM service contract) to set it up. I doubt it's going to be any good for standalone plain vanilla desktop apps.

Could be I'm wrong about this; but it's open to question where this is headed.

[pktoss]

LibreOffice is not Apache Licensed or driven by Apache. It is a fork lead by "The Document Foundation". You can read http://www.documentfoundation.org/.

[IvarTJ]

I personally prefer AbiWord because of the startup time, but it failed to display Word document vector graphics at all. Open/LibreOffice did not display them correctly at first, but displayed them better in later versions. Later I managed to get some Windows systems to convert the docs to PDF so that I could read them on Linux.

I am very grateful for the work that has been put into open-source office software, and know that they face an uphill battle with the peculiarities of Microsoft's formats.

[pippy]

Microsoft Office is a superior experience to its OpenSource competitors, and definitely worth the cost.

However OpenOffice & LibreOffice (and possibly Google Docs) are functionality equivalent, and use open source standards. This raises the biggest question with OpenSource products: is the poor experience worth no vendor lock in?

Given Greek austerity mesures, compatibility assurance, the educational use of the product, and it will force MS to compete it's best Greece uses OpenSource.

[stephen_g]

MS Office file type import is one area where LibreOffice has been making major strides recently. The latest version, and 4.0 which is coming soon has greatly improved support.

It's nice to actually see it quickly improving now they've forked, given how stagnant Open Office development was when Sun (and then Oracle) was in charge.