Both my wife and I have used Open Office for several years and knew nothing about the changes and Libre Office. We would like to make the switch to Libre Office and delete Open Office to save room on the hard drives. But we don’t want to loose access to all those Open Office files. Is there a step by step instruction guide somewhere for dummies?
What OS are you running?
Read these guidelines and ask a good question. In particular, there is no such thing as “Open Office”. Which exactly office suite do you use? Which version?
One of us is on an iMac High Sierra 10.13.6; the other on a PC laptop on Windows 10.
Don’t know what’s going on with gabix. My application says OpenOffice and I don’t know how to determine which version for myself or spouse’s installation. I will check those guidelines.
My application says OpenOffice
OK. It’s not a non-existent “Open Office”, it’s probably Apache OpenOffice. Anyway, choose Help → About from the menu and give us more details. And read these guidelines and ask a good question. I think, I have already advised that, but you can’t seem to be capable to understand it from the first time.
Well - I don’t know of a resource with a step-by-step instructions for this case. But here are some considerations:
- All of OpenOffice.org, Apache OpenOffice, and LibreOffice are free software, that don’t require any commitment from you: you are free to uninstall them at any time, and then install them back wherever you want. So, just in case you’s not be satisfied with your experience with LibreOffice, you can always remove it and return back to OOo/AOO.
- Neither of those suites store your documents inside themselves. The documents are kept on your filesystem (like, in Documents directory). So, no removal of the program might affect your data files.
- All of these suites are based upon the same ODF standard (ODT, ODS, ODG, ODP files). So, installing any of them gives access to all these types of files. All of them also supports many other file types; LibreOffice supports the greatest number of such external file types. So - I suppose that simply installing LibreOffice in no way can disable your access to your data.
So, my advise would be: just uninstall the old application using your OS standard application management tools; then install LibreOffice. Try it. Make your decision, and stay with it, or if required, go back to previous suite. No special procedure should be required.
Thanks, Mike. I think this is sufficient coaching for me to proceed. I really like the idea that LibreOffice will integrate with docx. OpenOffice/Apache will open docx but won’t save as docx. If I get stuck, I’ll be back.