Yup. This is hosted by Discourse, see this page linked from FAQ, Migration from AskBot
Also there are other types of help, see
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That is the latest Fresh version today. “If you’re a technology enthusiast, early adopter or power user, this version is for you!”
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It is better to use the latest Still version for the daily works.
" This version is slightly older and does not have the latest features, but it has been tested for longer. For business deployments, we strongly recommend support from certified partners which also offer long-term support versions of LibreOffice."
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See it on the official download page:
There are many useful informations on the common AOO+LO forum:
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/index.php
Thank you EarnestAl. Appreciate the help. I’m typically used to seeing help forums with a User-Interface much like Apache Open Office - link below:
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/
Therefore if I need help on any of the office products I simply ask here verses looking for a specific forum that is geared towards that product?
The search function can be used to find key words of a subject, the Advanced filter can help too. The common tags are: writer, calc, impress, draw, math, base, or common with meta being for this site
Personally, I tend to use a search engine with a targeted query, if I were looking for “main & forum” I would enter something like main forum site:ask.libreoffice.org into the search. I tend to this method especially to find reported bugs on bugzilla, http://bugs.documentfoundation.org
Thank you Zizi64. Do you mean I can also ask LO help questions on Apache’s Open Office forum as well? Aren’t LibreOffice and Apache Open Office two separate and different applications? I understand LibreOffice was forked from Apache OpenOffice but thought they were now and have-been totally separate. Just trying to figure this out. I did much research on deciding what Office product had the best support and decided to go with LibreOffice. Still wrapping my mind around all this and new to actually using a MS Office alternative. Thanks for your help and patience.
Please don’t cross-post though, posting the same question on the two forums tends to upset people.
EarnestAl, thank you. Is this the correct forum to ask my initial question?
Yes, you can ask LO related questions on the common AOO+LO forum.
(There are more similarity than differency are in the two applications.)
There are some specific differences between the two suites although there is huge commonality. If you are using LibreOffice, I would ask here.
You can search on AOO forum for answers too
Thank you Zizi64. To kindly clarify, I already installed ver. 7.4.4. Not sure what they mean by “If you’re a technology enthusiast …” however I have buit and repaired my own computers over the years, dabbled in programming and created a website from scratch using HTML. I am not a power-user but have used MS Office for years. What issues would I encounter by simply using ver. 7.4.4 (for daily use). Yes, I understand version 7.4.4 is a beta but are you saying that I could run into an issue that may be beyond my ability to fix? If so, do you suggest I delete ver. 7.4.4 and install ver. 7.3.7 ? Thanks again.
Not. The 7.4.4 is NOT a Beta version. That is the 7.5.0 version today: see it on the download page. The 7.4.4 is the Fresh version. The Fresh version may contain more bugs (related to the newe features) than the Still version has after many published bug fixing versions.
See the release plan:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan
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In other words: In the Free and Open Source world the Users are the final inspectors, and software testers.
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My company and me, personally are using the LO 6.4.7 since January 4 of this year. We had used the 6.1.6 before.
Forget your “muscle memory” from MS Office. Take time to read the user guides. LO is not MSO and is not a direct replacement for it. Their purpose is similar but they are different products. You can open your existing documents with LO (there is some form of compatibility but don’t expect 100%). For any new document, save in native format .odt, .ods, .odp, not .docx, .xlsx or .pptx. And even with old documents, try to convert to native; this will spare you many headaches.
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Ok Zizi64, I understand. thank you for helping me.
Glad you offered advice. I watched this how-to video today on making LO compatible with MS Office (see link below). The video looked interesting but read other forums that said, “compatibility is not always the case”. Read almost all the posts in that thread and concluded that saying, “LO is compatible with MS Office” may be a tall order. However, that’s not my intention anyway. I’ll use LO for what it’s intended for (its own office suite) and will rely on the LO programmers (and my help when possible) to improve areas where needed. Thank you for the kind perspective.
Moving from MS Office to LibreOffice.
Welcome to this site.
Here is some more help:
My Transition from MS-Office to LibreOffice
As @Zizi64 explained, this is an utterly incorrect statement.
We have a proper pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate stages before officially releasing an X.Y.0, which is finally definitely not a beta at all. However, unlike many commercial products, we do not rush to force it to users, like when some new version of another office suite comes out, and all older versions disappear instantly from the offering. We realize that all the testing that the developers, QA, and enthusiastic users applied to the pre-releases is not a guarantee (everyone knows that even commercial software, spending millions on its QA, gives headaches to its early adopters soon after release every now and then); and we keep an older branch in parallel, as a recommended version. At the same time, without many users downloading and using the newly released X.Y.0, .1, etc., this newly released version would never improve anymore, and it would still create problems later. That is why we are very thankful to all the early adopters who use the fresh version - and we insist that it is not a beta at this stage.
Behaving responsibly and honestly may play bad joke to you. With everything else unchanged, discontinue version 7.3 the day you publish 7.4, and people will not be surprised. Provide choice keeping 7.3 in parallel, explain the difference - and people would have an opportunity to accuse you of abusing them as beta-testers.
I can only echo what @Zizi64 said:
Not beta-testers. We do everything we can to create good releases. But user testing is absolutely essential in the process, and we urge you to choose your branch wisely according to your needs.
Note that X.Y.4 is already not .0, .1, .2 - it is ready to become the next “still”, because it’s time when we discontinue 7.3, and release 7.5.0 (this February), the new fresh, at which stage, current 7.4 release becomes still.
Hi Mike,
Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. I learned a lot from your post. The error was brought to my attention (two days ago) by Zizi64’s correction. When I initially went to downloaded LibreOffice the definition under version 7.4.4 read:
" If you’re a technology enthusiast, early adopter or power user, this version is for you! "
I mistakenly thought this was a beta version as compared to the time tested version 7.3.X
Just a mistake on my part as the words "Still’ and ‘Fresh’ were unknown to me. Always looking to help out the LibreOffice team whenever the need arises and have major respect for the arduous task that programmers encounter daily. Thanks again Mike.
(Exclusively concerning the question)
Some people stress now and the the fact that this is not a forum, but a Question-and-Answer (Q&A) site.
And indeed, even if there may not be a mandatory definition, there are differences.
Well, this is the most official site of the kind, and actually driven by the document foundation (owner of the label LibreOffice, the organization behind the ongoing development).
Anyway you will have to decide yourself if this is the best site to find community help, and even if you come to think so, you will also visit others.
I would recommend to also look at an actual forum site (classical structure) originally created for OO.o and AOO respectively, but nowadays used by many (even a majority meanwhile probably) actually working with LibreOffice.
Try it: https://forum.openoffice.org
You will find that many contributors are active in both “environments”.
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Thank you Lupp. Great info. now I understand better.