LibreOffice vs. Microsoft Powerpoint Online

LibreOffice is a good alternative to MS Office. I like it better than Google Docs. It's compatible with MS Office applications. However, many of the features or functions are difficult to find even when utilizing the help menu. The website isn't too helpful either. My greatest disappointment is that I paid for the premium version a year ago but never received the features that were supposed to be available with a premium subscription. The upper right-hand corner of the app shows the subscription type and date of expiration of the subscription. I have premium yet every time I try to access a premium feature it requests me to pay. I have contacted LibreOffice several times over the year and they never responded or provided a refund. I can only recommend the free version because even with a premium subscription, which mine is supposed to expire on 10/22/21 (the date of this review is 08/04/21), I have yet to be able to utilize the premium features I paid for last year. I would not use this as my primary app for Word processing which is where I am experiencing the majority of the blocked features issues. Even with a paid premium subscription, I am unable to create labels. It's asking me to pay again. I think LibreOffice has greater potential but a user must get the features they paid for. I hesitate to call the company a scam but I can say I have contacted LibreOffice numerous times over the past year about the ongoing issues and have not received a response at least once. Along with the features and subscriptions issues that needed to be addressed, another area of improvement is their website. It is very difficult to locate information. Even when using the search field the instructions often do not match the app. I am not sure how often they update their online guides but I have never found it to be helpful. I have also found it very difficult to impossible to download templates. I usually get weird links with garbled codes and no template when trying to download a template. I'm not sure if it's an issue with their site or not but since they don't respond to inquiries I cannot determine a possible cause for the problem.

Some specifications of the web version are - It can open files of up to 2 Gb in size. Earlier this was called as PowerPoint web app[which has less features than the current web version]. You can edit files such as PowerPoint Presentation [.pptx], PowerPoint show [.ppsx], .odp files. But it does not support editing for PowerPoint Template [.potx], PowerPoint 1997-2003 template .pot, .pps, .pptm,.potm [only view feature is supported]. Here the online version will convert them to latest version for editing. Also, the save feature of PowerPoint online saves changes automatically, unlike desktop version where you need to go File> Save as initially, and then click Save after every change. Also password protected or digital signature based documents cannot be edited in web version.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Since I work in technical support, we use this tool everyday at the end of the shift to make the reports.
• This is one of the best tool and very simple to use.
• Since we received so many different severity tickets in my shift and we have to report it to the management and so this tool help a lot and show things clearly.
• This tool have so many templates and themes available which makes it very suitable as per the requirement.
• I love this tool and amazing to work on it. So many things to explore.

Incentivized

• Name brand office suites vendors such as Microsoft and Google have online portals where documents can be saved and shared for automation/integration. LibreOffice would do well to expand into this space.
• Memory handling in large spreadsheets (i.e., 60k rows or more) seems a bit quirky on my Macbook Air. It might just be a memory issues, but scrolling with the trackpad behaves strangely (i.e., cell selection jumps around unexpectedly).

Incentivized

• Running a presentation from PowerPoint online has been a disappointing experience. Things just don't react as smoothly as they do in the offline version because we're relying on sometimes iffy internet connections.
• Video does not play well when it's embedded and played through the online version.
• Downloading a PPT file that was created online creates almost no inconsistencies, but in my experience uploading a PPT to the online version that was created offline sometimes does create issues with fonts and formatting.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I would rather change to other tool if I could. Microsoft Powerpoint Online was top-down forced without a real technical (maybe financial only) reason, and I think the product itself looks like a poor adaptation of the offline version. In my experience, it cannot be properly used in real time collaboration, can't handle large media (images/videos), has low performance even for a single user, it is a nightmare.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It works mostly well, but I usually run into a formatting glitch while using Microsoft PPT Online.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Powerpoint's ease of use makes it stand out. You can build custom presentations easily, and even those without extensive skills can do this. It makes it a good tool for a whole organization, rather than each team having its own tool. This means you can have templates for the whole organization to use for better branding and consistency

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• A lot of ROI because their license price, 100% of return.
• Sometimes we lose time finding how to do things, lowering a little bit of productivity.
• We need to spend on training for employees because most people only know how to use Microsoft Office

Incentivized

• It has made it easier for the training to be well handled and transitioned to the work-at-home life faster.
• a lot of people is used to the installed version of PowerPoint, the online version is a familiar look and feels to the times when we were working from the office, which made the transition faster and easier for everyone.

Incentivized