CHAPTER 5

Productivity Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

Introducing LibreOffice

Other   Useful  Productivity    Software

Productivity    Applications    Written for Microsoft   Windows

References

Many businesses have already found a way to benefit from free and open

source software, such as office productivity suites like LibreOffice. These
suites offer cost benefits such as not having to pay license fees or support
costs. However, more applications beyond these are available in Ubuntu. In
this chapter, we explore some of them.

NOTE

It’s    important   to  understand  that    even    though  free    and open    source  software

does    very    well    most    of  the time,   especially  with    less-complex    documents,  it

is  not 100%    compatible  with    Microsoft   Office. Why is  this?   Microsoft   is

notoriously secretive   about   its proprietary file    formats,    and the only    way

that    free    and open    source  alternatives    could   ensure  compatibility   would   be

to  reverse-engineer    each    file    format, an  exercise    akin    to  taking  apart   a

telephone   to  see how it  works.  This    reverse-engineering is  difficult   to  do  in

a   legal   way and is  rarely  perfect.    However,    many    open    source  alternatives

manage  to  maintain    a   very    high    standard    of  importing   and exporting,  so

you should  not experience  too many    problems    except  with    documents   of

great   complexity. For example,    this    book    was written using   LibreOffice,

whereas the post-production at  the publisher   uses    Microsoft   tools.

The biggest compatibility   issue   between Microsoft   Office  and suites  like

LibreOffice is  that    Microsoft’s Visual  Basic   for Applications (VBA)  and

scripts produced    using   it  do  not transfer.   If  you use VBA scripts,    you need

to  find    another way to  perform the functions   for which   they    were    written.