UPDATE 06/27/2020: Am reclaiming Media Library space by deleting old pics.

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Don’t know much about any of the ‘Office’ products – have used MSOffice for a long time, but mainly the Word (basic functions) and Excel for Fantasy Football (not even basic functions). Word makes it easy to write on blogs, prepare emails and mainly just personal stuff – certainly not proficient with it. Excel spreadsheets are sent out by one of my Fantasy Football leagues, loaded with stats, teams, players, rookies, Free Agents, etc for the league. I can read it and add a player to my team but that’s about it. I probably have a little over a gigabyte of saved Word docs and about 250 megabytes of Excel – probably more on some old HDD that I never thinned down.

Looks like a lot more when I’m trying to convert MSOffice formats to LibreOffice formats. I could be wrong (*UPDATE* – looks like I was wrong!?!), but it looks like LibreOffice can only open the .docx and .xlsx formats, but it can’t actually edit/write the MS docs and still save those changes in those same MS formats. Anyway, that’s where I was stuck – wondering how and when I would ever convert all those .docx and .xlsx MS docs to LibreOffice’s formats .odt and whatever their spreadsheet format is – when I saw this article: Manjaro Linux Team Responds To LibreOffice Versus FreeOffice:

The Linux community was in a bit of an uproar this week when Manjaro Linux announced that it would be swapping out the open source office suite LibreOffice in version 18.1 and replacing it with the proprietary FreeOffice.

snip … To hear the reasoning behind this decision directly from Manjaro lead Philip Müller, you can listen to Linux Unplugged beginning at 13:42. The main takeaway is that the team believes FreeOffice delivers the best overall compatibility with Microsoft Office, and Müller emphasized that no money had been exchanged (yet) as a result of the partnership.

Well, “FreeOffice delivers the best overall compatibility with Microsoft Office” caught my eye, and “compatibility” instead of converting sounded like a better choice for me.

 

OK – Day 2, and I know why I never became expert at any Office products…they are just not my cup of tea. Looks like LibreOffice does offer a way to edit/write a doc, but FreeOffice seemed easier and to the point, I think!? By easier, I mean like this:

 

I did some changing and editing to the test doc, then clicked “save as” and a popup asked if I wanted to save it as MS Office format are FreeOffice format…yes! Actually, I had hit “save” first, but that ended up saving another file in .bak. I don’t want to double the files in a folder by saving anything. I simply want to be able to use my MS Office docs in Linux and any Windows OS that doesn’t have MS Office. This was the first time I ever tried FreeOffice, and it was the first Office product (MS Office excluded) that made the compatibility issue seem much easier.

OK…I have LibreOffice on Ubuntu, so switched WIN10 Pro SSD to the Ubuntu SSD and rebooted. Was giving LibreOffice a second chance before replacing it with FreeOffice. That’s when I found it did offer other formats to save in, but it took a little time (after years of using it already!) to figure it out. Finally got this:

 

Why was that so difficult to find before I tried FreeOffice? Well, LibreOffice lost me and I’m installing FreeOffice. I read where FreeOffice is “proprietary” but it’s doing what I want, easily and informatively, and ain’t asking for money or to upgrade. That might just be baloney from the ‘Fanatical Linux‘ users – basically another obnoxious mob-mentality group trying to force their way onto everyone else.

Both also allowed me to edit/write to Excel, and save as .xlsx, but FreeOffice immediately let me know I could save in MS Office formats…LibreOffice may have been hiding that simple fact from me for whatever reasons – I don’t know for sure, but I’m done with LibreOffice from now on.

*UPDATE* – Just went back to FreeOffice on ‘Rose’ computer and wrote a new test doc when I then saved in MS Office format. Took that saved doc over to main computer and checked to see if MS Office could see and/or open it…checked properties first:

 

The test doc opened:

 

No wonder the opensource mob was howling so loud! FreeOffice can create new MS Office documents…geez! I don’t know if LibreOffice can create a new MS Office doc – and really don’t care now, since FreeOffice just replaced it for me. Great! Just what I was looking for!

OK…back again, and LibreOffice can also create a new doc that works for MS Office; however, they should’ve made it easier for me to know years ago. Interesting, but LibreOffice is too late now. BTW, FreeOffice is also suppose to work on USB…that might be interesting.

 

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