In a similar way to what happens with antiviruses or multimedia players, an office suite is present in practically the majority of computers. Here we have several options to choose from, where LibreOffice is one of the best known proposals.
By now it is considered by many to be Microsoft‘s main Office competition. One of the main and most obvious differences between the two is that the first is a free open source project, and Redmond offers us a paid suite . With everything and with it, the programs that are part of Office are considered some of the most used in the world. Keep in mind that here we are referring to applications of the importance of Word , Excel or PowerPoint , among others.
But the participants in the LibreOffice project work so that as many users as possible use their alternative. This is something that little by little they are achieving thanks to the growth that the suite experiences over time. Much of the blame for all this lies with the constant updates with improvements that the firm sends us. It is true that these usually include some interesting new functions to improve the user experience. But something that we must take into consideration is that one of the objectives of the LibreOffice developers is to improve compatibility with the Microsoft suite.
This means that we should have no problem opening and working with native Office file formats in LibreOffice . In this way, the migration from one proposal to another should be as simple and comfortable as possible.
What would LibreOffice be without Office compatibility?
With everything and with it, surely on some occasions we have wondered what would happen to this popular open source office suite if it were not so compatible with Office . This means that, when opening Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents, we couldn’t do it with LibreOffice. Keep in mind that here we also find a text editor, a spreadsheet program, and another to design multimedia presentations. It is true that these have their own native formats, but they can also work with those of Office.
The first thing we must bear in mind is that Microsoft programs, despite being paid for, are widespread and have enormous market penetration. Therefore, if the free proposal could not open the native Office files , it is expected that its use would drop significantly. Those who use LibreOffice with their own file formats and open source lovers would surely be delighted .
But on the contrary, many end users and especially companies that are starting or have thought about migrating, would surely back down . This is a movement that those responsible for LibreOffice could make to further establish their own brand. However, at the moment it would be quite risky and could be a serious setback in terms of the use of the open source suite. That is precisely why they focus on improving and increasing compatibility with formats such as DOCX or XLSX , among others.