The best open source office suite available
September 18, 2018
The best open source office suite available
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with LibreOffice
I currently have Microsoft Office and LibrefOfice installed in my computer and use LibreOffice way more often for a couple of reasons... Mainly my job requires me to manipulate .csv files and Excel does a very poor job of opening it (it always assumes the delimiter character is ";" while I never saw it being used in my life, everyone - and their dogs - use "," as a delimiter), so you need to rename it to .txt in order for Excel to ask you), while LibreOffice always open it correctly. The other reason is its interface. Call me a dinosaur, but I'm still not a fan of the "ribbon" interface of MS Office, while LibreOffice's interface resemble the "legacy" (pre 2003) MS office interface.
The only program that I still prefer the MS option for is for presentations, but I still find PowerPoint BAD, so LibreOffice's Impress is even worse. (For context sake, I'm a designer used to Adobe Creative Cloud programs so it's natural to feel limited by presentation programs.) Im currently testing other alternatives for that.
Apart from that, LibreOffice offers some programs that are way superior to MS Office's options such as "Draw" (way better than Visio), its equation editor "Math" (way better than MS Office equation editor) and "Charts". So basically LibreOffice made most of its programs "as- ood" as MS alternatives (except Impress) and took some small MS Office features (Visio/equation editor/charts) and made them into full features programs as differential.
It does miss a key feature though... the CLOUD.
If you don't use Office365 Cloud features, PowerPoint isn't your main application, and aren't in love with the MS ribbon interface, LibreOffice is likely an as good (or better) option for you.
The only program that I still prefer the MS option for is for presentations, but I still find PowerPoint BAD, so LibreOffice's Impress is even worse. (For context sake, I'm a designer used to Adobe Creative Cloud programs so it's natural to feel limited by presentation programs.) Im currently testing other alternatives for that.
Apart from that, LibreOffice offers some programs that are way superior to MS Office's options such as "Draw" (way better than Visio), its equation editor "Math" (way better than MS Office equation editor) and "Charts". So basically LibreOffice made most of its programs "as- ood" as MS alternatives (except Impress) and took some small MS Office features (Visio/equation editor/charts) and made them into full features programs as differential.
It does miss a key feature though... the CLOUD.
If you don't use Office365 Cloud features, PowerPoint isn't your main application, and aren't in love with the MS ribbon interface, LibreOffice is likely an as good (or better) option for you.
- Work with CSV files (MS is reeeeally bad at this and it's very important for my job).
- Diagrams.
- Formulas.
- Its interface (but hey, its a question of taste on this one).
- Format compatibility (they use Open Document Format, NOT a proprietary format as MS and are fully compatible with MS ones).
- Impress, I'm very unimpressed by it! (see what I did there?)
- But to be fair, I also consider MS Office's alternative BAD. (from a designer's standpoint)
- Cloud Integration (that could be a deal-breaker for O365 users).
- It could be prettier (its UI feels dated, but please don't copy the Ribbon interface).
- We saved some O365 license money on users that do prefer to use LibreOffice.
- The ROI is instant as its a free suite.
- I'm way more productive eliminating unnecessary steps required by Excel to open CSV.
- Apache OpenOffice, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Office 2016
Mainly CSV and other formats compatibility, when compared to MS alternative, it's faster than cloud-based solutions (Google Docs, Zoho), I don't have to wait for MS Office to look at what I have in the cloud before saving something, its interface is better than MS Office, for my taste, and it's more feature-rich than Apache OpenOffice.