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

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

#11
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?

Sandstorm.io is Docs-like in it's collaboration features. But the OP specifically discussed offline operation as an important functionality, so cloud-based collaboration tools without a local application may not fly.

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

#12
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.

Huh? I use LibreOffice frequently on macOS without any crashing at all. Is this a common issue?

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

#13
The company my wife works for is using LibreOffice entirely. Said company is a national retail service, focused on books and school related consumables, with around 40 stores opened throughout the entire country. And is using this since at least 2017, the year my wife went to work for them, possible since their beginnings in early 2000's, but I'm not sure since I haven't asked.

When she started to work for she asked me if we have LibreOffice on our computers because she had to edit some documents she took from work. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they relied on LibreOffice for document management. Nowadays LibreOffice is installed on all our home computers alongside Microsoft Office as well. She can switch to whatever she finds easier and I taught her to always convert her documents to .RTF to be sure she has no problem switching between home and work.

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

#14
Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point, I wouldn't recommend it. Spending 10 USD per user/month on Microsoft 365 is a small investment but it gives most users instant familiarity with the tools and provides you with tools for collaboration (drafting contracts for instance). I don't think you can save money if you look at training effort alone. In the worst case you will be seen as hard to integrate (and hence buy) as a company because of a weird office stack.

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

#15

Have a look at the plans of Schleswig-Holstein, a federal state of Germany. The want to switch 25.000 PCs to LibreOffice and Linux from Windows/MS Office. Details here: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-s...

How will they do without document review and collaborative editing features?

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

#17
Given how precious and valuable time is I don't really get the aversion to using Microsoft or something similar. Pricing has come down so much that it's less than people spend on coffee. If you are working on something worthwhile it doesn't seem worth the effort to avoid using mainstream, productive and cheaply available commercial software.

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

#18
post #14

Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point, I wouldn't recommend it. Spending 10 USD per user/month on Microsoft 365 is a small investment but it gives most users instant familiarity with the tools and provides you with tools for collaboration (drafting contracts for instance). I don't think you can save money if you look at training effort alone. In the worst case you will be seen as hard…

The maximum weirdness I have seen:

"I think your tabstops are inconsistent."

Granted, I don't do complex spreadsheet formatting.

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

#19
post #4

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 d…

> the email client configurability is significantly better

I'm gonna have to disagree on this one. Outlook 365 is ass-tastic. It doesn't even have feature parity with the web app, and is full of weird bugs and limitations. Just off the top of my head:

- Moving old messages between folders in the native app requires downloading the full message then uploading it again

- Calendar subscriptions sync from web client to native app, but not the other way around

- Calendar colors on the native app are limited to a preset pallete of 8, while the web app allows custom colors

- The new mail notification icon sticks on if another client reads the new message

- Cannot sync certain types of rules with the exchange server

- Warns you about "dangerous attachments" if you open an attachment that _you_ just added to an unsent email

- No way to block specific addresses / domains besides a local-only(!) rule to always put them in junk

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