install openoffice ubuntu

How to Install OpenOffice in Ubuntu

OpenOffice is a popular office productivity tool that provides a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation creator, all bundled together. It is a very mature software that has been in development for quite sometime. It works well on Windows, Linux & Mac systems. In this article, we will look at how to install OpenOffice in Ubuntu & Debian systems.


How to Install OpenOffice in Ubuntu

Here are the steps to install OpenOffice in Ubuntu.


1. Remove LibreOffice/old office

OpenOffice and LibreOffice use same libraries and can cause conflict in case they need different versions of same library. So it is advisable to remove LibreOffice or any older versions of OpenOffice before installation. Open terminal and run the following commands to do so.

$ sudo apt remove libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-impress libreoffice-calc
libreoffice-math libreoffice-common libreoffice-ogltrans libreoffice-core
libreoffice-pdfimport libreoffice-draw libreoffice-style-breeze libreoffice-gnome
libreoffice-style-colibre libreoffice-gtk3 libreoffice-style-elementary
libreoffice-help-common libreoffice-style-tango libreoffice-help-en-us libreoffice-writer

Next, run the following command to remove any other packages that were automatically installed during the installation of any of the above packages and are not currently required.

$ sudo apt autoremove


2. Install Prerequisites

You need to install Java Runtime Environment to be able to use all features of OpenOffice. You can install it with the following command.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo sudo apt install openjdk-8-jre


3. Download OpenOffice

Latest version of OpenOffice is not directly available on Ubuntu repositories. So go to OpenOffice download page. Select “Linux 64-bit (x86-64) (DEB) from first dropdown. Select language of your choice from second dropdown, and also the latest version from third dropdown.

Click “Download Full Installation” to download the full installation package as a .tar.gz file.

You can also copy that link address and use wget command to download it. Here is an example to download OpenOffice 4.1.7

$ sudo wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/files/4.1.7/binaries/en-US/Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.7_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz/download


4. Extract downloaded tarball

Run the following command to extract the downloaded tarball.

$ sudo tar -xvf Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.7_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz

We have downloaded the English version for our example so the extraction will create a EN-US folder in your present working directory. cd to that folder and its DEBS subdirectory since we are installing OpenOffice for Ubuntu (Debian).

$ cd EN-US/DEBS/


5. Install OpenOffice

Run the following command to install OpenOffice deb packages.

$ sudo dpkg -i *.deb

If you have desktop for your Linux you can integrate OpenOffice with your desktop environment with the following commands.

$ cd desktop-integration/
$ sudo dpkg -i *.deb


6. Setup OpenOffice

You can easily start OpenOffice with the following command. We call openoffice4 since our software’s major version is 4, derived from 4.1.7.

$ openoffice4

You can also open it from Desktop. You will see the following wizard. Just click Next and then click Finish.

You will see the following screen which lists all the applications available as a part of OpenOffice suite. Click the application of your choice to start working with it straight away.

That’s it. In this article, we have learnt how to download & install OpenOffice for Ubuntu and other Debian systems.

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