Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Powtoon is a very capable suite of tools that help a developer create training videos that look way better than they should. I've used it to create fun, attention-getting commercials for new topics, I've used it to enhance what would otherwise be boring step-by-step tutorials, and I've used it to create all manner of "Explainer videos" for all kinds of topics - this is where it EXCELS! In my opinion, its biggest limitations are limits on imported video (max of 90 seconds), which mean that you have to do a lot of extra work to break up and import anything of substantive length. And because it presents your personal library of imported images and audio ONLY sequentially, it's VERY LIMITED in the re-usability of those assets - it's way faster to just import a new instance of an image and audio than to try to find it in your library.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Powtoon is very easy to use; no previous experience is needed. It has a lot of features (images, backgrounds, videos, sounds, etc.) It automatically saves your work After you have created your video, you can download it to your computer in different resolutions Read full review Cons 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). Read full review Comparing it to Vyond, it is more time consuming to make videos. The timeline could be easier to understand. They recently started upcharging to use some scenes. This has made updating some of my videos challenging as the scenes that were included as part of my plan are now an upgrade to use. They don't have a voice over option. I have actually taken some of the videos out of the platform over to Vyond to add voiceover. Some items they have introduced, like turning a powerpoint into a video really don't work. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Jacob Wall Senior Technical Writer / Client Services
Read full review I have never needed the support feature. As I mentioned, everything was intuitive to me however I have taught myself Adobe, Final Cut and
iMovie so most of these programs became intuitive.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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).
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Powtoon has the advantage over traditional video editing software in terms of the library of characters and elements that can be easily dragged and dropped onto the canvas. Powtoon is easier to use and has a more intuitive user interface than
Vyond .
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review We don't have to spend money on traveling to a location to do an actual live shoot. I'm spending less time on hand animating videos. We used these to create teaser videos for our professional development offerings. I believe because of the captivating graphics, we had a lot more people driven to our site. Read full review ScreenShots