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 Read&Write is a top-notch accessibility feature. It is easy to use across all ages and can be implemented in many different ways. It is best used with individuals requiring reading & writing support, but it is also an excellent tool to use with all students!
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 text-to-speech is great. lots of options for voices and speed gives both word prediction and talk&type as writing supports the fact that it is a toolbar that can be used in native programs is huge for our students because it allows them to be independent in their learning activities Read&Write is very intuitive and requires very little training for the text-to-speech tools so it is very easy to train students and staff 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 The text-to-speech option sometimes gets glitchy. The sound doesn't always match up to the visual feedback. When creating lists of vocabulary, it is often difficult to highlight single words. Also, when using word lists, the last word is often left off. 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 As an assistive technology software that revolutionizes literacy experiences. With features like text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and vocabulary tools, it empowers learners of all abilities. Its impact extends beyond the classroom, fostering engagement, accessibility, and personalized learning.
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 Extremely user friendly and easy to use
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 Highly available
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 Integrates well and quickly
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 Any time I have ever had a question or issue with Read&Write and have contacted support they have been quick to respond. In addition, they have always been knowledgeable and have gone above and beyond to get an answer and provide support. In addition, their website and Youtube channel are amazing resources for anything from the basics to more advaced features.
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 Still trying to get all schools and teachers to buy in that students need this access
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 I've always found Read&Write superior to Kurzweil and we do have a small volume/web license of K3000 for those students that have used it in the past and I am not able to convert them to Read&Write.
Dragon is one of the Speech Recognition options. I lean towards using the Windows 11 Voice access feature as i find it superior to Read&Write in terms of accuracy.
Dragon is reserved to those that need to build a custom vocabulary. I do show the Talk&Type feature in students are on Windows 10 or earlier.
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 Easy to use
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 I have seen Read&Write be effective in supporting an insurmountable number of children in our schools. Building the confidence of students who are able to participate in classroom assignments they would not normally be able to is amazing. It has been great to see the gain of independence in students to complete class work. Read full review ScreenShots