Keynote, from Apple is a presentation software with tools and effects, designed to make it easy to create memorable presentations, and comes included with most Apple devices. Use Apple Pencil on an iPad to create diagrams or illustrations that bring slides to life. With its real‑time collaboration features, teams can work together, whether they’re on Mac, iPad, iPhone, or using a PC.
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LibreOffice
Score 9.1 out of 10
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LibreOffice is a free and open-source Office Suite from The Document Foundation, presented as the successor to OpenOffice.org. The suite includes Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).
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free and open source under the Mozilla Public License v2.0
The best case scenario for Apple Keynote is that you get it built-in with any MacBook, so you don't have to download anything and you're good to go for any sort of presentation. One more thing which I really admire about Keynote is that it has really cool animation style, You can literally create some basic video content using Keynote. Animations are also very easy to use, so If you want to have more animations you can just use Keynote instead of Powerpoint. Keynote has never been less appropriate until you have Windows as your Operating System. Another time where Powerpoint takes an edge is when you have to use a lot of features.
LibreOffice suite is very well suited either for personal use as it is fully free. Or it is also very well suited for business uses in offices ranging from small to large as it is very feature rich. My experience with LibreOffice suite is extremely satisfying due to its full set of varied features.
The text word processing (Writer) has come a long way and, if you are able to install your corporate fonts, there is basically nothing LibreOffice cannot handle. It works very well with document reviews and comments, and it can save in a variety of formats, making it compatible with the likes of Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
The spreadsheet software (Calc) can also handle most of the common tasks you may need, link various sheets, and perform some automated functions quite well. It is, I must say, somewhat less complete than the word processing side (Writer).
The Draw program allows you to do organizational charts and basic publications very well. It was a deficit in the past, but not anymore.
The way you adjust timings for builds and transitions was a bit counterintuitive for me. Once I got the hang of it, it was fine. The timings don't work the same as they do in PowerPoint. So if you are a PowerPoint user, that may be something you have to adjust to when you switch to Keynote.
I feel that adding images can be clunky when working with image placeholders. Apple Keynote forces you to use the Photo app to replace image placeholders.
We use it consistently and have a lot of documents in the OpenDocument format so it will be necessary to use LibreOffice or a compatible product such as Openoffice in the future to be able to open these files. Because the license fee for Libreoffice is zero it is not very costly to keep using it - the costs are mostly for keeping it installed on the office PCs and regularly updated, and solving employee issues with the user support.
Most people can quickly start using Writer or Calc or Impress for basic tasks even if they see Libreoffice for the first time, because the interface is similar to older (97-2003) MS Office or other software. Some features are less intuitive than in recent MS Office and some power users of MS Office need to re-learn some things before being proficient in Libreoffice.
Libreoffice is a desktop app not requiring any server part so it is always available when the PC is working normally. Installing it on another machine if one PC fails is very quick and easy. This is a non-issue.
For big/imported tables or text documents with images loaded from the internet it is sometimes getting very slow, RAM and CPU intensive, and sometimes even hangs due to some memory leaks or other bugs. This is a long-term problem and is still not resolved perfectly.
Support is not officially offered. However, you can find answers to any usage questions or trouble-shooting online easily, typically starting with a Google search. (I believe that all forums / tips for OpenOffice apply equally to LibreOffice, and vice versa.) While Microsoft Office, for example, officially includes support, I find that typically you end up going to a Google search in any case. So, this is not really a downside. However, in all these cases, you end up doing a lot of figuring things out for yourself.
Generally easy to perform, issues are how to ensure regular automatic updates on Mac OS X. Fortunatly we have only a few machines with OS X run by management and we can do these updates manually occasionally. Windows updates are quite easy with the support of third party software such as Ninite or Chocolatey, and Linux updates are super-easy thanks to the package manager (apt-get).
While I don't use Keynote for every slide deck project need (software preference often is dictated by what the client has access to), I will promote KeyNote as the preferred format if the client is software-agnostic. The drag and drop feature is incomparable with other software options — a feature I've come to love and miss when I am required to use another program. As previously mentioned, the smooth interface and master template user-friendliness also helps raise Keynote above their competition.
As noted previously, LibreOffice blows Google Docs (G Suite) out of the water in terms of singular application quality, and comes close but misses the mark as a drop-in replacement to Microsoft Office. We currently are evaluating the latest release of LibreOffice to see if we can replace Microsoft Office with it entirely as we've had more time to fill in the holes that were left when losing out on Outlook and OneNote and all of the integrations that come with Microsoft Office.
With more users using it in the company there are more cases when a simultaneous editing of the same document is needed and this feature is lacking in Libreoffice even though the files concerned are shared and synced by some solution (we use ownCloud). Google Docs or MS Office365 via Sharepoint/Onedrive offer a better function for this.
I am able to quickly create and edit word processing documents and spreadsheets which are for all intents and purposes equivalent to documents I could create and edit in other tools such as Microsoft Office and Google Docs/Sheets.
Lack of an online portal for sharing documents necessitates the use of Google Sheets for automation/integration. Ideal would be an all-in-one solution.
Having open-source software that provides common functionality eliminates the need for expensive licenses.
Lack of dedicated support is negligible. Most issues can be resolved using online search.
