# Office suite recommendations



## balanga (Mar 3, 2016)

I could do with a Microsoft Office type suite, and am not sure what to install.

I think my choices are between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

Which would anyone recommend? And will they both work under xfce?


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## forquare (Mar 3, 2016)

I use LibreOffice on FreeBSD/Xfce without any problems.  I don't know how different it is from OpenOffice these days, but I suspect OpenOffice would also run fine.

Not a suite, but you might find the components of the GnomeOffice project fit more nativly with the Xfce look & feel.  I haven't used many of the applications before (none under FreeBSD), but quickly installing AbiWord looks like it installs and runs.  Take a gander here.


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## PacketMan (Mar 3, 2016)

I have both running at home, and I don't see a big difference between the two, but I prefer OpenOffice in the end.


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## Oko (Mar 3, 2016)

Microsoft Office hands down if you need such kind of application. We have two Windows 7 laptops for business people in our Lab just for such purposes. Everything else is UNIX or UNIX-like. We tried even Microsoft Office for OS X and it was just not in par with Windows version.


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 3, 2016)

OpenOffice is under control of Oracle. LibreOffice is the fork of that and community driven. Use LibreOffice. Otherwise, use Google Docs.


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## forquare (Mar 3, 2016)

drhowarddrfine said:


> OpenOffice is under control of Oracle.



I thought Oracle relinquished it to Apache?


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## tobik@ (Mar 3, 2016)

forquare said:


> I thought Oracle relinquished it to Apache?


Yes, they did: http://www.marketwired.com/press-re...ontribution-to-apache-nasdaq-orcl-1521400.htm


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 3, 2016)

Yeah, I forgot about that.


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## shepper (Mar 3, 2016)

balanga said:


> I could do with a Microsoft Office type suite, and am not sure what to install.


This is a complex question and ultimately would depend on the OPs' needs.

Do you need all 5 (data base, word processor, spreadsheet, drawing, math) aspects of the full suite?  Will you be sharing documents with Microsoft users?  The latest libreoffice release has some improvements in MS compatibility.


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## wblock@ (Mar 3, 2016)

LibreOffice is big and takes a long time to build, but works pretty well.  math/gnumeric is a nice spreadsheet that is similar to pre-ribbon Excel, although it does not create graphs.  editors/abiword is a decent word processor.


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## ronaldlees (Mar 3, 2016)

wblock@ said:


> LibreOffice is big and takes a long time to build, but works pretty well.  math/gnumeric is a nice spreadsheet that is similar to pre-ribbon Excel, although it does not create graphs.  editors/abiword is a decent word processor.



Agreed about the "long time" - especially on a 1.7GHz ARM device with an SD disk.  Who would do such a thing? :-(

Anyway, one thing to add about OO and LO is the availability of plugins.  There is a substantial ecosystem for plugins, and I have some fairly off-path uses for LO that depend on very specific purpose plugins.  You should compare the environments (i.e. -  LO versus MS Office) with plugins included in the comparison.   Is your need for a general office setup, or for something specific?


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## Oko (Mar 3, 2016)

wblock@ said:


> LibreOffice is big and takes a long time to build, but works pretty well.  math/gnumeric is a nice spreadsheet that is similar to pre-ribbon Excel, although it does not create graphs.  editors/abiword is a decent word processor.


I second wblock@ about math/gnumeric. I use it at home. I was for a long time AWK+http://siag.nu/ proponent but it got to the point that math/gnumeric makes some simple things just faster to do. For complex spreadsheets I am still using AWK.


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## sidetone (Mar 6, 2016)

I wonder if a bought license of WordPerfect would run emulated, and how well it would run on FreeBSD. Would it be able to print too?

There is also editors/calligra, which is a full office suite. It avoids gtk, but it is dependency heavy. If you can ignore the complex dependency problem, it is pretty professional looking.

There is also a lot of free standing programs. print/scribus is a professional publishing application, and graphs/dia is great for making diagrams. There may be more hidden gems for specific purposes in the ports tree.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Mar 15, 2016)

sidetone said:


> I wonder if a bought license of WordPerfect would run emulated, and how well it would run on FreeBSD. Would it be able to print too?



I suspect you'd need a Centronics port and a WP specific driver. I've got WP on one machine here and it prints beautifully to any of my dot matrix printers. In fact there is a 24 pin Raven which is always on. People give me sideways looks when I sometimes show up at a meeting with my notes on perforated computer paper. However, I seriously doubt if anybody else would <strike>have the guts to do that</strike> be interested. The most recent WP information that I've found is from this site: WordPerfect for DOS Updated. I have no experience with running it in an emulator though.


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## sidetone (Mar 16, 2016)

On the plus side of Word Perfect, the last time I checked, 1 bought product allows about 5 licenses, or use on up to 5 computers. If someone uses Windows, they might as well try it on FreeBSD too.

For emulation, I would just install wine, and make a very basic shell script to run the full command, to my favorite Windows program, then make that file accessible from my desktop menu. I install it specifically onto a UFS file system.

I may try it one day. The only problem I'd be concerned about is printing, but then I'd just put it on a Flashdrive to print from another computer.

I haven't heard of WordPerfect for DOS in most recent times, until you posted that. That is interesting for the emulators/dosbox emulator.


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## wblock@ (Mar 16, 2016)

I would expect WordPerfect to be able to produce PostScript output.  From there, anything can be converted.


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## sidetone (Mar 16, 2016)

wblock@ said:


> I would expect WordPerfect to be able to produce PostScript output.  From there, anything can be converted.



It should, because it outputs PDF, which is only one step away from postscript. So if it can't, PDF can convert into postscript.


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## tingo (Mar 17, 2016)

balanga said:


> I think my choices are between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
> 
> And will they both work under Xfce4?


Both will work, and work well, under Xfce4. I guess they will work under other DE's as well, but I haven't tested it.


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## ronaldlees (Mar 18, 2016)

sidetone said:


> ...
> There is also a lot of free standing programs. print/scribus is a professional publishing application, and graphs/dia is great for making diagrams. There may be more hidden gems for specific purposes in the ports tree.



+1

Scribus /print/scribus has been developed for over ten years, but I only just recently tried it.  I normally use LO like everyone else, but Scribus is something I've taken a liking to ... 

It allows an extremely free-form style of publishing.  Where LO or OO might get in your way a little bit, when transposing objects like graphics and tables - Scribus has all those things but let's you do whatever you want, wherever you want, even if it's ugly.  You might give it a try ...


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## sidetone (Mar 18, 2016)

Scribus can do anything, but it's difficult to learn, then use. For instance, keeping up the same template, or adding pages with the correct page numbers, it takes a lot of planning, is easy to mess up, and doesn't always fix pages automatically when text is added. The text boxes aren't convenient as well, when the mouse points away from it, it automatically scrolls to the top, and this is difficult for inputing long documents into it. Other than it's difficulty of use, and learning curve, it makes professional publications.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Mar 18, 2016)

Hmm, ronaldlees and sidetone you've got me going. I really must give print/scribus a try. Other than that, I'm still a fan of plain text formatted with proper carriage returns.


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## trilok (Mar 30, 2016)

According to me Apache OpenOffice is better to use LibreOffice.


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## diizzy (Mar 31, 2016)

Office 365, Zoho Writer, Google Docs ?


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## rufwoof (Aug 6, 2017)

I've tended to use LibreOffice, however as a recent newbie to FreeBSD I found that the 11.1-RELEASE pkg based LibreOffice had the odd quirk, whereas OpenOffice didn't ... so I've switched over. For my purposes they look very much the same.

(Specifically LO menu fonts didn't fit well (near overlapping), there was no Scale option (Tools, Options, View) and no systray quick launcher.)

OpenOffice Calc did have a quirk in that the sheet name font was tiny, but that is theme specific i.e. is tied in with the width of the scrollbar. I adjusted that by adding the following to my ~/.gtkrc-2.0


```
style "scroll"
{
    GtkScrollbar::slider-width        = 20
}

class "*" style "scroll"
```


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## vermaden (Aug 7, 2017)

balanga said:


> I could do with a Microsoft Office type suite, and am not sure what to install.
> 
> I think my choices are between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
> 
> Which would anyone recommend? And will they both work under xfce?


Use LibreOffice or Microsoft Office 2010 using PlayOnBSD.


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## abishai (Aug 7, 2017)

math/gnumeric pulls bash as a run-dep


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## Sensucht94 (Sep 16, 2017)

sidetone said:
			
		

> I wonder if a bought license of WordPerfect would run emulated, and how well it would run on FreeBSD. Would it be able to print too?





			
				OJ said:
			
		

> The most recent WP information that I've found is from this site: WordPerfect for DOS Updated. I have no experience with running it in an emulator though.



I've been using Corel Word Perfect 6.2 for DOS for about 15 years so far and never got tired of it. Runs very well on dropbox even in graphical mode (dosbox switches autonomously CPU emulation to a 386 processor). I usually take notes on WP putting dosbox at fullscreen. Just make a dedicated configuration file to be run with `dosbox -conf ~/path_to_file/` (thus to avoid also mounting the folder and manually launching the program every time) and give it cycles=max and memsize=32. It's better to keep in mind that dosbox emulates a S3 trio video card, since WP will ask for a proper video driver to install during setup.

A couple of shots:
 - https://i.imgur.com/wvBOLJ2.png
- https://i.imgur.com/sbhsqZD.png

Files can be printed on FreeBSD with lpr, but to avoid strange characters to be added and printed from time to time (MS-DOS format vs UTF-8), use converters/unix2dos or open and print it with another office suite.


> I really must give print/scribus a try. Other than that, I'm still a fan of plain text formatted with proper carriage returns


Scribus is awesome, if you have never give a look at it, it's worth a try.I really prefer it over anything else, except for WP, and Pages (yes, pages, please don't hurt me for that).

Abiword on the contrary is something really buggy from my point of view. Never succeeded to get it work correctly on any bsd/linux system, despite all dependency correctly in place.

Anyway, a plain text lover should love editors/wordgrinder better, as well as math/sc for spreadsheets, and misc/tpp for presentations


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## rufwoof (Sep 16, 2017)

math/sc-im is better, supports loading/saving in xls format IIRC. gumeric is good as a quick spreadsheet.

I've experienced similar buggy issues with abiword and I prefer libreoffice or apache-openoffice ... which provide a vast suite (presentations, drawing, formula, word processing, spreadsheet).


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