Category: Google Drive

Open formats give LibreOffice advantages over Microsoft Office

Posted on by timcdana in File formats, Google Drive, legacy documents, LibreOffice, Microsoft formats, Microsoft Office, OpenDocument Formats

During the 1980s, software companies were started, developing application types that are popular today. During this time there were several popular operating systems and computer manufacturers. When Microsoft started to dominate the market in the 1990s and early 2000s, many of the companies went out of business, or they were bought out.

For example, when the first Macintosh was released in 1984, its word processor MacWrite was one of the most popular on the market. However, in the 1990s, like many word processors it took a backseat to Microsoft Word.

Many applications were discontinued due to Microsoft Office’s market share, and many people and organizations did not migrate their old documents to active applications and formats.

As technology evolved, and they acquired new technology, many old documents could no longer be opened. This is one aspect of data rot, when data can no longer be accessed. A YouTube video gives more details.

Now there is much less concern over data rot.

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StartCenter makes LibreOffice great tool for multiple documents

Posted on by timcdana in File formats, Google Drive, LibreOffice, Microsoft Office

LibreOffice has an element and feature that Microsoft Office doesn’t have. The feature is document centralization.

Users can open any recently created and opened documents from any of the applications. A spreadsheet that you created last week can be opened from Writer. You can open the Draw document that you worked on yesterday from Impress.

These documents are listed when you click the arrow next to the Open icon in the Standard toolbar and the Recent Documents sub-menu in the File menu of any of the six applications.

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LibreOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel bury insert rows and columns feature

Posted on by timcdana in Apple iWork, Google Drive, LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, spreadsheets

Spreadsheet applications are not used as much as word processors, but they are used for just as diverse purposes. Grocery shoppers can use them to create lists. Financial managers use them to create charts from data showing forecasts for organizations. There are many other users and uses.

Though people from diverse walks of life use spreadsheets differently, they all typically perform some of the same functions. These include adding and deleting columns and rows.

This article compares how these are done in LibreOffice Calc to how they are done in Microsoft Excel 2016 for Windows.

While these to spreadsheet applications are considered to be the most powerful and feature-rich applications. However, they are not as user-friendly as some other popular spreadsheets, when it comes to adding or deleting rows and columns.

First the article will explain how these are performed. Continue reading “LibreOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel bury insert rows and columns feature” →

LibreOffice can compete with Microsoft Office’s new collaborative features

Posted on by timcdana in Google Drive, LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, Office for Mac

People have been working together on documents generated by office suite applications for decades now. One person would create the document and write his part before sending it to his colleagues, so she could create her part and make comments on his.

In the past 10 years, this collaboration has happened in real-time. Google’s office suite made it popular and easy for students, colleagues, and others to log in to their Google accounts to work on a document. A group of people work on a document, and they can see each other’s changes almost as soon as they are made. This is known as real-time collaboration.

LibreOffice and Microsoft Office have made strides to catch up to the new kid on the block. Both have taken slightly different directions. They allow for multiple people to collaborate on a document.

However, with its past two versions of its office suite, Microsoft has given users the ability to collaborate in real-time, like Google Drive users can do, through its desktop applications. With the 2013 and 2016 versions, users could work with others at the same time from the applications installed on their computers.

The latest versions of LibreOffice still don’t allow for real-time collaboration through its desktop applications, but they now have applications that can be installed on a server. These allow for real-time collaboration.

This article will mainly compare the collaborative features of LibreOffice and three of the applications from Office 2016: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Comparisons will be made with Google Drive as well since it is the office suite that is best known for real-time collaboration, and like the other two, is used by millions of people.

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LibreOffice, Google Drive partner through Web browsers

Posted on by timcdana in Google Drive, LibreOffice, Web browser

In the last blog entry, I talked extensively about connecting to your Google Drive account directly through LibreOffice and using the Google Drive application that can be installed on Mac or Windows.

There is another way to share and update documents created in LibreOffice using your Google Drive account, however. Simply launch your favorite Web browser go to your Drive account and upload the desired documents and folders.

A Web browser has several advantages over using the Google Drive application or a third-party application. One of the key reasons is that you don’t need to have all the documents from your Drive account downloaded to your computer.

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LibreOffice, Google Drive: two great companions for collaborating on documents

Posted on by timcdana in Google Drive, Microsoft formats, OpenDocument Formats, word processors

Office suites are almost as old as the personal computer, and like the personal computer, they have evolved over the decades. Modern office suites can open and edit universal formats and directly connect to the Internet.

Two of the most popular office suites are free for everyone and work well with each other: LibreOffice and Google Drive. Both are compatible with almost every operating system.

LibreOffice was designed to work equally well on Windows, Mac, Linux distros, and several other operating systems. Google Drive can be interacted with most Web browsers. It officially supports FireFox, Chrome, Safari, Explorer, and Edge. Firefox and Chrome have versions for the previously mentioned operating systems.

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New blog compares Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, and Google Drive

Posted on by timcdana in Google Drive, Office Suite Overview

 One of OS-College’s key focuses is on applications that run equally well on multiple operating systems. They have the same features and tools, regardless of the platform they run on. The first set of applications covered by this communication and education firm is one of the most universal types of applications: office suites. Every industry and almost every person who operates a computer uses one.

 

Microsoft Office has become the most popular office suites over the past few decades. There are other suites, however, ones that work equally well on multiple operating systems. Since Office dominates the market, however, and is the standard for most workers, the purpose of this blog is to compare them and their features to Microsoft Office.

 

This article is first in the series that compares LibreOffice, and sometimes Google Drive, to Microsoft Office. Most of the articles will only compare LibreOffice and Microsoft Office. These two are most alike. They both can be installed on an operating system. They also have many more features than Google Drive and its applications. However, Google Drive has many of the same tools that the other two have and some features that they do not have, so some articles will include Drive.

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