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Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

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Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#1

Post by gtf21 »

We're a ~40 person startup, about to scale post-series A. We have been using Google Suite since the beginning in 2015, and honestly it's just terrible software and feels like it has had zero updates in 7 years. One of the biggest problems for me with Gsuite is that there is no real offline support (I know there is supposed to be, but it has never worked for me, plus the drive isn't available offline). I work a lot on trains crossing Europe, or sometimes on flights. I just want to have my files accessible.

I use LibreOffice personally, and I'm thinking about moving the team to it before we seriously grow.

Has anyone tried this in their companies? Was it successful? I'm especially interested in companies of a similar size (or larger) than ours, and those where not everyone is super technical / a software engineer.

My big concerns are support and training, I think there are companies who offer this which would make it a lot easier.

(Edit: to be clear, our CFO will probably continue to use Excel, as will some of the team who build very complicated modelling sheets as that is what they're used to, but I'm thinking for the rest of us who mostly need decent spreadsheets, and good word-processing and presentation tools).

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#3

Post by rossdavidh »

Well, this is probably smaller than the companies you're thinking of, but my wife's retail store (two owners, just her and her business partner, 0 employees) use LibreOffice. They aren't trying to do any fancy graphing. For basic word processing and spreadsheet calculations, it works fine. It can produce some graphs, but I think in this area it is not as good as Excel (although I haven't used Excel in a while). Not too much of a training load, if they've used other office suites.

I don't really think there's anything I know of (that a normal small company would use especially) in which LibreOffice will not be as good or better than Google Suite, so if that's what your current office suite is then the transition should not be too painful. Googling for the answer works for most questions.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#4

Post by posguy »

rossdavidh wrote: post #3

Well, this is probably smaller than the companies you're thinking of, but my wife's retail store (two owners, just her and her business partner, 0 employees) use LibreOffice. They aren't trying to do any fancy graphing. For basic word processing and spreadsheet calculations, it works fine. It can produce some graphs, but I think in this area it is not as good as Excel (although I haven't used Excel in a while). Not t…

There are a few IT people and Managed Service Providers I deal with that have become pretty adept at cutting over small and midsize businesses from G Suite to Microsoft 365.

The office suite is better, the email client configurability is significantly better (from what they claim, I'm a Thunderbird on Linux person), and you get single sign on too.

My firm uses our own mailserver (with DKIM and SPF), LibreOffice for doing our cost comparisons for clients and other document generation needs, and has been pretty happy with that. We are split across Windows, Linux and MacOS, the sole tether for about half of our Windows users is a dependence on iTunes backup (since apparently they don't trust iCloud, ugh...) for their iPhones, preventing a migration to Linux.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#8

Post by dhruvkar »

We're a ~40 person wholesale distribution company and I moved our company to LibreOffice. We also use Google Suite.

The issues I face with my company are usually accountants/bookkeepers are used to using Excel. LibreOffice usually can handle anything they are wanting to do. It just means a little extra time googling/playing around with it to work the same way. I try to keep everything on Google Sheets however.

That said, if we were scaling post Series A (we are not), I'd look to see whether there are teams that need advanced modeling or feel comfortable with Excel. Everyone whose job is not spreadsheet wrangling can go with LibreOffice and Google Sheets.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#9

Post by yaks_hairbrush »

ISL wrote: post #6

I feel like the biggest blocker to modern adoption of LibreOffice is the inability to collaborate in ways that Google Docs enables. Are there open-source implementation of Docs, even poor ones?

Maybe this: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#10

Post by thecleaner »

ISL wrote: post #6

I feel like the biggest blocker to modern adoption of LibreOffice is the inability to collaborate in ways that Google Docs enables. Are there open-source implementation of Docs, even poor ones?

Or to run on MacOS without crashing.
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