For its price, it’s amazing. As a replacement for Excel - it’s fine I guess, but really depends on what your do. Excel has a lot more features than libre office doesn’t have (formatting as table, the newer formulas, and the VBA code is not the same). However if you just want it to do basic calculations with, like, excel 2010 equivalent then it will definitely work. Things like data validation, conditional formatting, nested formulas, and recording macros will work no problem.
I can’t really speak for the other products.
To answer the question, despite the few bugs and few formatting issues, YES, it is a decent replacement for MS Office.
Man I hope that is just a me-issue, but I work with excel a lot for work and try to use libre office at home. And the excel alternative is not great. I can see the similarities to excel, but when I want to use it, I have a lot of trouble finding things and using them as I am used to.
You WILL be able to do basic things and I am sure it will almost always be possible to get to similar results, but the way there does not feel the same.
It’s missing that built-in game where you explore a maze of stateful quasi-menus looking for a tool/option that you know you’ve used before.
It was decent replacement 10 years ago. Openoffice. If somehow you need to pay by subscription, I’m not sure it was missing features back then.
LibreOffice is amazing on Linux, ngl though it is a bit unpolished on both Windows and especially Mac.
The issue is that it doesn’t come with a keyboard shortcut scheme that matches Microsoft, so any company that does a trial with LibreOffice will see a massibe productivity drop right away as everyone’s muscle memories become obsolete, and you don’t want to tell Nancy the Dispatcher that she has to forget and relearn all the Excel shortcuts she’s been using for the last 20 years. She would give you a piece of her mind, once she’s back from her smoke.
It would be really awesome if there were a compatibility script or so that adjusts all LibreOffice shortcuts to match those of MS Office as far as possible.
Hey, how do you know she is named Nancy!? And that she smokes a bit too much! 😱
Calc crashes all the bloody time. want to drag a worksheet tab? crash. want to drag a field to a pivot table column? crash. want to copy a bit of a formula? crash. want to exhale? crash.
plus it has no support for tables, xlookup, or power query. it’s like an unstable version of excel from 1997.
when it comes to spreadsheets, excel is the best in twrms of stability and features and google sheets is next. calc is a distant third.
whatever they have to replace word, too, pales in comparison because it’s so much more finicky to manage styles and formatting. but it’s apple’s Pages that’s surprisingly the best–most festure-packed-- word processing application.
their powerpoint replacement is functional but doesn’t contain all the features of ms powerpoint.
Onlyoffice has a better ui in my opinion but libreoffice is good enough
It’s fine for most things
Always has been, the issue is compatibility with MS. It works like 95% of the time on normal stuff, and maybe 10% of the time on more complex stuff. But outside of compatibility with MS it is 100% great.
I find onlyoffice to be more compatible with MS
Not bad, I use it regularly but I’m not a power user. It doesn’t have the ten million and one things the other one does, the ones you never use. It’s quite light on resources. Not as intrusive either.
Give it a spin.
I was recently forced to use MS Office 355 and I was shocked by the amount of features it lacks, one might actually want to use.
Was that the web version? The last time I used Word it was the full all singing all dancing version. That was a while ago. And it was downloaded to my machine. Does it not even do that anymore?
Yes, the web version. All I wanted to do was to highlight dates more than a month ago in a different colour in Excel. But it only provided me with useless options like “current month” or “tomorrow” and no way to enter any custom conditions.
Ah, it’ll be the same Wythenshawe Excel then. I format and print my wife’s work rota each week. It’s prepared in Excel quite terribly.
The Web version didn’t have half the formatting commands the ‘real’ version had.
Libre Office had them 😉
Libre Office has a web version?
Compatibilty, stability, pdf export and import is all very good. Calc has no real differences with Excel for my use cases (less automated formatting options) Impress is a little lagging behind powerpoint in terms of compatibility and formatting option (this may nag you if you have to use templates from other people). Otherwise I have no issues working with LO on Linux in full Windows Office 365 coworkers
Do you use docx import / export? Do they work ok in your experience?
Not OP but in my experience it works fine for basic stuff, If there’s advanced formatting or complicated spreadsheet formulas you will face varying degrees of breakage. OnlyOffice is also EU and has greater compatibility, but less features.
Cool, thanks for sharing!
I used it several years ago for scientific writing. It was good back then and it is good now.
The problem is the adoption in companies/institutions that fear to miss out on something if they don’t use Office. Sadly Office files are still the business/office standard (until businesses step up and encourage people to use open document formats).
Maybe if Europe boycotts Microsoft we will see more adoption of Libre Office.
The pivot charts and tables drive me kinda nuts. Typically I have a dataset I’ve prepared in python and find pivot tables faster and easier than matplotlib. In excel I make a Data tab and connect it to an external CSV, then in another tab pick my filters, columns and rows, and then chart type. Then I iterate - run the Python again to make a new CSV and just press refresh in excel and I get updated visualisations. This workflow just doesnt work for me in Libre Office. Can’t figure out how to live link CSVs. Pivot tables are OK but oubot charts are not a thing - have to manually point them at a dataset and there’s no nice panel to choose columns and rows.
I dunno, maybe it’s just I gotta learn a different way but honestly just easier to use a windows VM for this stuff.
You should there is also OnlyOffice, which has better compatibility with Microsoft file formats (and uses Microsoft formats by default). Its also generally good, and open source.
I use both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice on different computers. Both are good.
For those who care OnlyOffice has ties to Russia
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/serious-claims-made-against-onlyoffice/11644/32
I use libreoffice.
Today I Learned, thanks for sharing.
From your linked thread it seems potentially still acceptable, being fully local , open source, and with an international contributor team. But yeah no such ties with LibreOffice.
Yep made me drop it.
