How is Libre office nowadays? Is it a decent replacement to Microsoft Office?
Home | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft
It's fine for most things
The issue is that it doesn't come with a keyboard shortcut scheme that matches Microsoft, so any company that does a trial with LibreOffice will see a massive productivity drop right away as everyone's muscle memories become obsolete, and you don't want to tell Nancy the Dispatcher that she has to forget and relearn all the Excel shortcuts she's been using for the last 20 years. She would give you a piece of her mind, once she's back from her smoke.
It would be really awesome if there were a compatibility script or so that adjusts all LibreOffice shortcuts to match those of MS Office as far as possible.
Hey, how do you know she is named Nancy!? And that she smokes a bit too much! 😱
Not bad, I use it regularly but I'm not a power user. It doesn't have the ten million and one things the other one does, the ones you never use. It's quite light on resources. Not as intrusive either.
Give it a spin.
I was recently forced to use MS Office 355 and I was shocked by the amount of features it lacks, one might actually want to use.
Always has been, the issue is compatibility with MS. It works like 95% of the time on normal stuff, and maybe 10% of the time on more complex stuff. But outside of compatibility with MS it is 100% great.
I find onlyoffice to be more compatible with MS
I used it several years ago for scientific writing. It was good back then and it is good now.
The problem is the adoption in companies/institutions that fear to miss out on something if they don’t use Office. Sadly Office files are still the business/office standard (until businesses step up and encourage people to use open document formats).
Maybe if Europe boycotts Microsoft we will see more adoption of Libre Office.
Compatibilty, stability, pdf export and import is all very good. Calc has no real differences with Excel for my use cases (less automated formatting options) Impress is a little lagging behind powerpoint in terms of compatibility and formatting option (this may nag you if you have to use templates from other people). Otherwise I have no issues working with LO on Linux in full Windows Office 365 coworkers
Do you use docx import / export? Do they work ok in your experience?
Not OP but in my experience it works fine for basic stuff, If there's advanced formatting or complicated spreadsheet formulas you will face varying degrees of breakage. OnlyOffice is also EU and has greater compatibility, but less features.
There is no "import/export" process, you just open it and it works. It fails sometimes for docx, but only for the fancy page layouts (like if you want a full page background image for your company official documents ; or if an ass overloads tables in the file). Even if it fails the document shows up with all the text, it is just the layout that will be different.
The pivot charts and tables drive me kinda nuts. Typically I have a dataset I've prepared in python and find pivot tables faster and easier than matplotlib. In excel I make a Data tab and connect it to an external CSV, then in another tab pick my filters, columns and rows, and then chart type. Then I iterate - run the Python again to make a new CSV and just press refresh in excel and I get updated visualisations. This workflow just doesnt work for me in Libre Office. Can't figure out how to live link CSVs. Pivot tables are OK but oubot charts are not a thing - have to manually point them at a dataset and there's no nice panel to choose columns and rows.
I dunno, maybe it's just I gotta learn a different way but honestly just easier to use a windows VM for this stuff.
It's missing that built-in game where you explore a maze of stateful quasi-menus looking for a tool/option that you know you've used before.
You should there is also OnlyOffice, which has better compatibility with Microsoft file formats (and uses Microsoft formats by default). Its also generally good, and open source.
I use both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice on different computers. Both are good.
For those who care OnlyOffice has ties to Russia
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/serious-claims-made-against-onlyoffice/11644/32
I use libreoffice.
Yep made me drop it.
Today I Learned, thanks for sharing.
From your linked thread it seems potentially still acceptable, being fully local , open source, and with an international contributor team. But yeah no such ties with LibreOffice.
To answer the question, despite the few bugs and few formatting issues, YES, it is a decent replacement for MS Office.
Man I hope that is just a me-issue, but I work with excel a lot for work and try to use libre office at home. And the excel alternative is not great. I can see the similarities to excel, but when I want to use it, I have a lot of trouble finding things and using them as I am used to.
You WILL be able to do basic things and I am sure it will almost always be possible to get to similar results, but the way there does not feel the same.
Its pretty good for most office users. You can select the office theme and ribbon toolbar layout and it's pretty familiar feeling.
Depends what you need. Even more so in a spreadsheet have I been told by my spouse (she is using advanced XL features a lot in her job). It also depends on what OS it's installed. I find it worse on macOS (much less well integrated) and real excellent on Linux.
I quite like using LO Writer as it's easy to set it up once and for all and have it behave exactly like I want it to be, including the very few extensions I use. Once configured, it's then very easy to backup all settings for quick re-installation or even to copy them onto another machine. It's also great to use different profiles for different pen names (ie having different dictionaries, rules, shortcuts,... depending the type of content one is working on) :)
I much prefer Writer's management of styles compared to MS Word too. I just think it's better... but it still is not perfect.
Depending your specific needs Writer may lack a few advanced stuff (stuff I'm confident 99% users will never use). I also don't like how keyboard shortcuts are managed as you can't really modify them freely but at least once can change them.
I will always make sure to install whatever the latest version is (the one installed with my distro always lags behind) as each update brings its fair share of improvements and bug corrections.
For writing, I use two different 'workspace': VSCodium (+Markdown and Hugo) for blogging, and LO Writer for anything longer. I consider both apps very reliable tools. I also like how I can easily tweak them to fit my needs and preferences.
I would not want to go back to using Word even though I never was a hater of Word. I started using Word in the 90s and I've been using it without any serious issue or drama up until I switched to Linux and LO a few years ago. Heck, I even managed to keep working with files I created back in the 90s without any difficulty, despite MSWord few format changes.
Calc crashes all the bloody time. want to drag a worksheet tab? crash. want to drag a field to a pivot table column? crash. want to copy a bit of a formula? crash. want to exhale? crash.
plus it has no support for tables, xlookup, or power query. it's like an unstable version of excel from 1997.
when it comes to spreadsheets, excel is the best in twrms of stability and features and google sheets is next. calc is a distant third.
whatever they have to replace word, too, pales in comparison because it's so much more finicky to manage styles and formatting. but it's apple's Pages that's surprisingly the best--most festure-packed-- word processing application.
their powerpoint replacement is functional but doesn't contain all the features of ms powerpoint.
Haven't used it in a while. But it has good support. And is definitely fine for most basic usage. Just give it a try eh.
LibreOffice is amazing on Linux, ngl though it is a bit unpolished on both Windows and especially Mac.
It's the right side of the java nightmare that it was. Much much better but until that java runtime disappears ..
It's my daily driver and is the central application with which I work.
It's OK but I struggle with Charts and Pivot tables in Calc. Excel is just better.
It’s my suite of choice unless I’m in a context where OneDive/SharePoint is important.
Libreoffice is like the 2003 MS office but better, which makes it superior to anything in the market right now. Onlyoffice is number 2, as it has greater compatibility to MS office but it also imitates MS office, which makes it worse to me but easier to switch for someone addicted to Microsoft products.
You can change the style in libre office if you prefer something close to one of the other MA versions.
Onlyoffice has a better ui in my opinion but libreoffice is good enough
For its price, it's amazing. As a replacement for Excel - it's fine I guess, but really depends on what your do. Excel has a lot more features than libre office doesn't have (formatting as table, the newer formulas, and the VBA code is not the same). However if you just want it to do basic calculations with, like, excel 2010 equivalent then it will definitely work. Things like data validation, conditional formatting, nested formulas, and recording macros will work no problem.
I can't really speak for the other products.
It was decent replacement 10 years ago. Openoffice. If somehow you need to pay by subscription, I'm not sure it was missing features back then.