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I have been using Libreoffice for a while. I am not a poweruser of these kinds of apps, but I still need them.
I have been very happy with them and they are decently customizable. The ram usage difference between this and the office suite was bigger than I expected.
There is one thing I have not been able to figure out.
Is there a way to make the "web View" the default when opening a document?
I've been using it for years and usually install it on new computers my relatives ask me to set up. I'm not sneaking it in. If they need ms office for work, I'm not going to screw it up for them.
I stopped for a long time because of a terrible bug that deleted an important file, but in the years since I started using it again, I've never had the same problem.
I like it for writing up work emails and printing out estimates. I used to have trouble keeping my intended layout, but not so much these days. Everything I do is pretty uncomplicated, though.
LibreOffice is great, especially for home/private use or if you're converting everything to PDF anyways.
It, and all of the ms alternatives, fall short in having 100% match for MS, so the more complex the document, the more likely formatting errors will appear.
For everyone wanting to do that:
If you value MS office compatibility over all else, OnlyOffice is a better choice. I still use LibreOffice for PDFs, though.
Their site is a bit confusing. It's not clear whether it is free or if their is a cost to use it.
I'm not sure I follow, OnlyOffice is FOSS, buit has hosted solutions you can pay for, or you can download it for free to run as desktop apps or to self-host.
Agreed, I've had much more success with the horrors of .docx-compatability with OnlyOffice. It's not 100% perfect either, but has brought me less suffering overall. As much as I'd like to avoid Microsoft Office, depending on your situation that may unfortunately not always be so easy.
Draw is an amazing pdf editor for basic stuffs.
Firefox also has PDF editing abilities
I was thinking more in deep editing like texts, pictures, etc. It's what I call the basic stuffs. It's not Adobe level but more than fine for the vast majority.
Yeah Draw is really powerful mut messes up PDFs way too often. Firefox has the best WYSIWYG editor for PDFs, KDEs Okular is a bit worse in text inserting but powerful too.
Calc is fine, Writer is... alright and can be used if compatibility with MS stuff for collaboration is not your primary goal. But my main complaint is about Impress, which still can't manage inline formulas, so I can't use it for scientific presentation without ugly and time wasting workarounds That's a pity.
Freeoffice gangs has joined the chat....
WPS Office gangs has joined the chat....
YOZO Office gangs has joined the chat....
No love for the onlyoffice gang
Why not? In my experience it is the most compatible with MS office
Oh, I use onlyoffice, it was just a silly joke that they weren’t mentioned :)
"Compatible" with Microsoft Office, just don't expect for your colleagues to be able to open the document in Microsoft Office after you edited it in LibreOffice.
It really depends on the document. I've never had a issue personally but when I heard about issues its normally with specific elements.
Microsoft doesn't follow there own spec but with each libreoffice release they fix the issues created by Microsoft
OnlyOffice seems to have really good compatibility to me. And runs native in-browser for Next cloud integration.
Have you used it lately? Broken layouts don’t happen for me very often in the last few years (I work in an office with libreoffice/word used beside each other daily).
LibreOffice is compatible with Microsoft's OOXML spec. They sold every suite on it in the nearly 20 years ago to stop fines from the EU. They sold competing suites on it instead of using anything else available.
Microsoft however never actually fully supported their own spec and will save as "OOXML Transition" or whatever they call it now because they've been in 'transition' for nearly 20 years but still have proprietary blobs inside of it. You can however make MS Office save in OOXML Strict which is supposed to be compliant to the now ISO spec that LibreOffice actually supports.
This isn't LibreOffice's fault.
as long as you save it as a compatible .doc .docx or something, it should work. obviously word can't open a .odt file.
"Can open" and 'can open without the layout being broken" are different things.
Microsoft office has been able to open odt files since 2010.
Furthermore, LibreOffice does not always create/save files 100% compatible with MSO. I used to use Libre office because free. Word documents I have created/edited in LibreOffice were always a little broken layout wise when the document is opened in Word.
Whether it is because LibreOffice does a shitty job converting to docx when saving, Microsoft added in some anti competitor shit in Word or that the docx standard is vague is a discussion for another time.
Word can in fact open odt files. It was added quite a long time ago. Don't know how good the compatibility is, though
From my experince, and odt made in Libreoffice is what works best in both it and Word. But that's just how it's been for me, so who knows what weird things happen to other people when going back and forth between them.
Hmm I'll just send documents as .odt then. Embrace the libre way
and please do as .pdf aswell if you have students. Sometimes one of our profs powerpoint slides dont show equasions with a libre Software. So annoying!
My physics prof made it a whole thing and told us that the slides on Canvas are uploaded with .pdf so you can open it in the browser just fine without needing open office or something on Linux. First time a prof ever recognized the Linux community. I love physicists.
In my experience, it's normally the other way around. I have no trouble opening doc and docx files made in libreoffice with MS office, but vice versa can sometimes be a little bit chancey.
Of course PowerPoint vs Impress just destroys the formatting both ways.
you can even rotate a PDF without having to pay for a subscription. i'm looking at you, adobe acrobat.