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?
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I don’t need any office program very often but LibreOffice is my go-to if I have a choice. I prefer flatpacks for the quickest updates.
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 can be convenient if you’d like to bundle the read-only PDF with an editable ODF source.
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 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.
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.
I use it, still use it today. Honestly I think it’s fine, I mainly have gripes about these:
- There are some weird compatibility issues if someone else is using Microsoft Word to write on the same document as me
- The slideshow is a bit clunky in terms of how things work…
Otherwise it’s alright!
Yes, I do. It’s fine, not a great UI but it gets the job done. I don’t work in a ton of Office documents, but for something like basic spreadsheets it meets my needs.
i just started using it. admittedly, a rarely do, but it’s great
For basic word processing and excel like items I’ve used it and recommend it for others. Especially when I’m on my Linux desktop. I’ve used it for some small businesses as well so they could open and send files for work.
I use on Windows, bc It has regex, a huge thing for me.
I do a lot of work in LibreOffice Calc these days - I use it to outline text documents as well as make computations that I can revise. It doesn’t need to have tons of features to do what I want it to do, but if you dig into it, it can do some pretty powerful stuff.
Draw is also just fine for making meme text.
I tried to use LibreOffice but couldn’t stand the UI coming from Windows and macOS. Honestly as much as it sucks, the either ugly design of the applications or them not being straight up available just had me move back to macOS and Windows.
I do. I’ve used it for many years - back to when it was OpenOffice and I even dabbled with StarOffice before that. It’s not as good as MS Office but it does the job. I also use Office 365 and G Suite occasionally. It’s definitely a good thing that we have LibreOffice.
I use it several times a week, mostly for spreadsheets. At work I’m forced to use microsoft office365 but off the clock I do a lot of sidegig data management (open source and game related) using libreoffice.
Some of said data is being ordered before being pit in a large unweildy database - its easier to do the edits in libra than in the actual database, at least till the team cleans up that mess of a database.
I use libreoffice, draw, and calc.
I lost all my work to Melissa in 1999 and never used MS office again.
I use it for everything that doesn’t explicitly need to be shared or anything that is going to be printed. I needed to print a document as a booklet and LibreOffice had that feature and Drive didn’t.
I also keep a baseline suite of apps installed on every machine and that includes LibreOffice.
