14.04 Replacing LibreOffice With OpenOffice

Recently I was asked to replace the bundled LibreOffice with OpenOffice on a vanilla install of Ubuntu 14.04. It's kind of tricky because you have to remove everything connected with LibreOffice before OpenOffice will install.

First, uninstall LibreOffice. I tried several methods but, in the end, the following was the only one that worked. Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) & type:

sudo apt-get remove --purge libreoffice*.*

Download OpenOffice into your Downloads folder and then right-click on your download and click Extract Here. The resultant directory (/home/usr/Downloads/en-GB)^* contains a sub-directory called, DEBS - change to this directory using the terminal:

cd /home/usr/Downloads/en-GB/DEBS

Now do:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Not quite finished: we need to integrate OpenOffice into the Ubuntu desktop. Change directory to the ./DEBS/desktop-integration folder:

cd ./desktop-integration

Now run the dpkg instruction again:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Now, exit the terminal and you should find OpenOffice in the dash.

Sources & References:

• OpenOffice: Downloads
• Ask Ubuntu: How Do I Install OpenOffice.org Instead Of LibreOffice?

Notes:

1. ^* Where usr is your user name & en-GB is your installation file after extraction.