

Eventually, the company added other office suite programs and with support for DOS, OS/2, and Windows, the suite became known as StarOffice. By 1986, he created a company, Star Division, porting the word processor to platforms like CP/M and MSDOS. It all started when German Marco Börries wrote StarWriter in 1985 for the Zilog Z80. But it did get us thinking about how things got here. We could argue that case either way, but we won’t. LibreOffice, on the other hand, is a very active project. Their logic is that OpenOffice has huge name recognition, but hasn’t had a new major release in several years. However, the LibreOffice team recently penned an open letter to the Apache project - the current keepers of OpenOffice - asking them to redirect new users to the LibreOffice project. That isn’t surprising since they both started with exactly the same code base. If you're looking to get some work done on a budget, the versatile Lenovo Flex 5 14 with the AMD Ryzen 5 5500U is available on Amazon.When it comes to open source office suites, most people choose OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and they both look suspiciously similar. If you're not afraid of spending some time setting up the software to your liking and getting used to some quirks, you should give LibreOffice a chance. LibreOffice offers support for just about every document format under the sun, including PDF and Microsoft's proprietary formats. User-created extensions expand the functionality of LibreOffice even further, while Collabora Office offers a paid, enterprise-ready, cloud-based collaboration solution based on LibreOffice. Objectively speaking, the UI is unoptimised and somewhat messy - with options buried in sub-menus in odd places - which gives the software a bit of a steep learning curve.

Subjectively, the somewhat retro look and feel may appeal to some. LibreOffice does offer theming and custom layouts, but the default UI looks like something pulled straight out of Windows XP. It has everything you realistically need - word processing, presentation creation, spreadsheet wrangling.you name it, LibreOffice has it - but the user interface is definitely a throwback to Windows XP days. LibreOffice is the go-to open-source office powerhouse.
