LibreOffice vs. Widgit Essentials

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

• 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

• 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

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.

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

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.

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.