LibreOffice is preinstalled in Pop OS, and as someone who loves the idea of FOSS I want to use it, but inevitably I just use Google docs or Office Online. Is it really worth learning? Has anyone successfully incorporated it into your workflow?
If you need collaborative editing then Google’s office suite is unmatched. Otherwise LibreOffice is perfectly fine as an alternative to keep your personal data off the cloud.
I used OpenOffice, and later LibreOffice, for all of my assignments in grade school and college. If you know how to use one office suite then you essentially already know how to use them all. There are some guides that can help you find certain features in the menus.
Compatibility-wise, if you intend to share documents across systems that may also require editing the documents, avoid saving documents in the Microsoft OOXML formats; use the Open Document Formats instead. You may also want to embed the fonts used in the document in case the person who opens the document doesn’t have the same fonts. As a good portion of document layout issues are caused by missing fonts being replaced by substitutes that have different character heights and widths.
Finalized read-only versions of your document should be exported as PDFs. LibreOffice does have the option of generating a hybrid PDF that contains the original ODF source embedded in it. Which you can use to avoid having to maintain two separate files — the rendered PDF and original ODF file.
Although I would recommend Scribus over LibreOffice Draw because it’s much easier to snap elements to a precise grid for perfect precision with a printer.
I’ve almost never needed “collaborative” editing. What’s your workflow typically like?
Every month, marketing shares a draft of the blog article for review, and we add notes to the document in realtime.
I use LibreOffice! Calc, Draw, and Writer are very user friendly once you get used to where the tools are. Impress is a pretty good replacement for Powerpoint: the stock graphics leave a lot to be desired–but that’s a simple fix with a good stock image service. About the only thing LO doesn’t do is notes, but I’d check out Xournal++ if you were looking for a way to replace OneNote. Plus, LibreOffice doesn’t push OneDrive down your throat. It’s been a win-win for me.
Another thing to consider if you really like typesetting is to learn LaTeX: it’s a slightly steep learning curve(especially for advanced topics), but it’ll do things that your typical WYSIWYG word-processing suite couldn’t dream of doing. Plus there are a lot of templates available that you can adapt for your purposes.
I exclusively use the libre office suite and its apps since many years, but it’s defo not user friendly lol. The UX is confusing, outdated and ugly af. But at least it’s open-source, free and useful.
I mean, have you seen how the current MS Office is “organized”? To be fair though, it is a little unpleasant to look at. I wonder if anyone’s cooked-up a nice GUI mod…
Nothing compares to the joy of updating all your plots based on a script and automatically having the updated plots teplaced in your document with any changes to the script also being added to the appendix without any manual changes being necessary
I do. I’m never going to pay for Microsoft Office. No need. Libre does fine.
Nobody pays for Microsoft Office… get real.
lol
I’ve been using it for years for all personal office suite uses.
Along with GIMP for photo editing
Same, I’ve used a lot of office suites over the years so they’re all the same to me. LO is free so I use it at home and store my files on Cryptomator+Dropbox.
Excited for Gimp 3.0, the dev snapshots are working well now but I’ll need the Resynthesizer plugin.
Yes. I’ve been using it since the old OpenOffice days. It works well, it’s easy to learn, it’s well supported, and it’s free.
I use nothing else, unless my employer forces me to use MS office, offline. No online documents here, you never know when they sell your data…
The answer is all the time. They sell your data all the time.
I use it for pretty much everything that I would use Microsoft Word for. Essays, signs, résumés, legal documents… lots of uses.
I use libreoffice, draw, and calc.
I lost all my work to Melissa in 1999 and never used MS office again.
I use OnlyOffice. Mainly for the far superior MS office compatibility. Occasionally I’ll use LibreOffice for the extra features not available in OnlyOffice.
For me, yes, and not just for personal or academic use. I’ve created and editted countless business documents with it. I’ve gotten at least four jobs with the resume I wrote with it.
I use collabora, which is essentially an online webUI implementation of libreoffice that can integrate with nextcloud, which I self-host.
All the benefits of an online office suite, all on my own hardware.
Nothing to learn it’s a doddle to use, My 76 year old mother was quite happily using it occasionally on linux box up until she broke her neck two weeks ago - really (4 vertebrae).
Oh man. Hope she survived and can still have a few good years.
Ah she doing okay, they have her in a neck brace for next three months and doing physiotherapy to keep her mobile, she has to have a nurse accompany her to stop her toppling over that kind of thing. She is stuck in hospital for the next few weeks until she is safe to let home and has home help.
Happy to hear this.
I use Calc all the time for work. A lot of our clients send in xlsx files and I can open them and get the information out of them easily. Sometimes I need to build or modify CSV files. It’s a powerhouse for that.
I stylized my (for print) resume with Writer. Unless I’m working collaboratively I use writer for any documents to be printed. Any docs that aren’t destined for the press are just markdown.
LibreOffice is very appreciated and I’m glad it’s a standard on most distros.
I have been using it forever. I love it, and usually install it for friends and family members. Drive is fine, but they are indexing and reading your data, and I prefer to own my software.
I have it deployed at work for my 55 users instead of getting Microsoft Office licenses for all of them. They are not sophisticated users and it suits their needs. I probably field a few more questions for it than MS Office but they would call about that too since they think I am Google.
I personally think that Calc does a better job handling various CSV files than Excel.
