LibreOffice vs. Prezi

LibreOffice is well-suited for just about anyone who has used MS Office or Google Docs. I find it to be more powerful and feature-rich than both, and its ease of use and intuitiveness are far better. I've primarily used Writer and Calc, but also have some experience with Impress, Draw, and Base, and find them top-notch as well. On the other side of things, I find collaboration to be more difficult than with Google Docs, and to a degree, even MS Office. LibreOffice does have a fairly robust Tools > Share Spreadsheet… feature, but I've never been able to find one for Writer. I have little need for collaboration, but when I once did, I found it somewhat convoluted.

Incentivized

I believe Prezi is well suited when an author wants to create a more compelling presentation. It is also most useful when using it to explain processes, flows, and/or other visual elements. From another perspective, when it is necessary to create something more quickly, Prezi may not be the right solution, when compared to PowerPoint, for example. There are nice templates, but the creation process may not be so fast and simple.

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

• Prezi can provides a literal "big picture" view of the presentation content. This helps the audience understand what the presentation is ultimately all about.
• Prezi is anything but bland. It animates the content and makes it feel like you are "in" the material.
• Prezi presentations can incorporate video, images, text and more. There are many options to present content to an audience.

• 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

• Can be buggy and crashes mid design.
• Not suitable for simple presentations.
• Hard to create something quick and simple, so even after we gained experience we still had a hard time using it to deliver a presentation overnight.
• Can be slow to load a presentation, so we always setup 5-10 minutes before our actual presentation time and made sure everything is loaded and ready to go.

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

For all of the reasons in the foregoing evaluation. Its menus are clean, intuitive and straightforward. Any function I need to use can be accessed via keystrokes, without having to stop, move my hand to the mouse, deal with it, and then get back to the keyboard to proceed. It helps me keep my mind on my work and not worry about dealing with the mouse all the time.

Learning to use Prezi and create new presentations is very simple and easy to do. It does not require new skills or a long training process, since in general the use is quite intuitive (and if you have any questions there are many videos on how to use it). Its operation in both the browser version and the app is very good and fluid, managing to perform all the tasks you want properly.

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

It is a modern and easy-to-use tool (after a while) that allows you to make dynamic and trained presentations without the need to be an expert user. It has allowed me to improve the attention and motivational processes of my students. In addition, it has many [community users] who make videos and teach the many uses that you can use Prezi. And because, despite the restrictions of the free version, everyone can access and make use of Prezi and thus improve their boring ppt and inject some vitality into them.

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

Versus Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice is a workable solution for collecting, manipulating and reporting data. Excel is not. Apache OpenOffice is the idea LibreOffice is based on, but LibreOffice has advanced beyond OpenOffice. New features, within the LibreOffice framework are much quicker and easier to distribute to the end users (me) than OpenOffice. The last version of WordPerfect I used was a DOS version. I moved to Microsoft Word and then they changed everything with the 2007 version. I immediately started looking for an alternative and found LibreOffice Writer. I no longer have any interest in using Microsoft Office products.

We also tried Powerpoint and Visio to prepare hierarchical presentations, but it was not as easy, and it was kind of difficult to edit. Prezi provided built-in zoom-pan animation, which made it easier. Also, there were many samples from the Prezi community that one could learn from. Finally, Prezi Classic was free and there was not any limitation in using the free version.

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

• I have been able to use it sufficiently for documents I would normally use MS Excel for.
• I have had limited use with Writer so I can't accomplish much with it and have to use an alternate program.
• I have been able to use Impress a little but a lot of the features, like with Writer, are blocked even with a Premium subscription which means I must use an alternate program.

• Prezi is really a sunk cost for us. The positive is to stand out when other organizations are presenting in a more traditional way
• Ability to explain complex concepts is a plus
• Instant save of work and access through the cloud is another very positive aspect which makes the paid version worth it

Incentivized