Open Source vs. Proprietary: Desktop Productivity

LibreOffice (LO) is the fork of OpenOffice.org (OOo) that came after the acquisition of Sun (the old holder/maintainer of OOo) by Oracle. For the purposes of this blog entry, at this moment in time (early 2011,) LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org are the same. (funnily enough, for both packages, the executable is still called 'soffice' - for 'Star Office.')I've been using this tool since it actually was StarOffice, more than 10 years ago, when it was first open sourced by Sun in 2000. For most of that time, except when I was doing heavy collaborative editing with colleagues who are using MS Office, it is my Office Suite of choice. There have been many times, over the course of the years, where there are things I've thrown at OpenOffice.org that it couln't handle, but those things have diminished year by year, and over the past couple of years, I've had absolutely nothing to complain about (nor have I submitted any bugs, which I did a fair bit of in the early 2000's.)I would take a bet that 90% of people who use MS Office don't need to pay for it, but can do fine with OOo/LO. 70% of people could pick up OOo/LO and use it with no training or help, even if they are used to MS Office. It is the only fully cross-platform office suite with pretty much the same functionality and interface independent of platform. It reads and writes all MS Office formats (except for Access files.) It does have a drawing program, an XML editor, as well as a math equation editor, in addition to the standard word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and database. Oh, and did I mention it's free as in beer, too, instead of adding a couple of hundred bucks or more to the price of a new PC?So what are it's weaknesses?

• The spreadsheet doesn't yet have all of the functionality of Excel. It's pretty darned close, but even I have to admit that Excel is darned hard to beat.
• It doesn't have The Ribbon I think most people would say this is a strength. :-)
• The presentation package isn't quite as polished as PowerPoint, although you can do most of what you can do with PP.
• It doesn't have Publisher
• The database has not come anywhere near the functionality of Access.

The days when many a nonprofit were run by Access databases is coming to a close as things move more and more to the cloud. Google docs will take a good long time to make it to the point where the functionality begins to match either MS Office or OOo/LO, so OOo/LO is a very good alternative to MS Office if you don't need MS Access, and have folks able and willing to make a small adjustment to use this tool. I know that the fact that nonprofits canﾠget MS Office for $30 or so makes a change unlikely, and I've carped about that one for years. But at least, for now, it seems that MS is still willing to be generous.