51–60 of 165 posts
My wife has used LibreOffice for years in her solo law practice. This may not have worked if she had to exchange documents with other lawyers with change tracking but either never came up or was not an issue for her. She recently got a job and has to use Office but her LibreOffice experience hasn't set her back. Don't let the naysayers stop you.
Recently, frustrated again with some excel shenanigans, I looked around and I discovered softmaker office. I immediately got a license and experimented a little. It seems very compatible with ms office. It still costs money, but less then ms. So in the near future I might try that route, along with thunderbird to replace outlook.
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Yeah, I am curious why the OP is wanting to avoid Microsoft here. It is one thing if you just want to use open source and maintain that ethos, but if the reason is to save money it makes no sense. Spending $400 a month for a 40 person startup is going to be a negligible cost. If it adds even a few hours a month of extra effort across your entire team, the cost savings are already gone. Use the thing everyone knows.
The thing that everyone knows these days is Google Docs, not Office.
The issue isnt whether LO is good (it is) but whether the LO team can compete with a trillion dollar corp that considers 365 as a central pillar of their business, invests in it accordingly, and whose changes to the software become the defacto standard overnight.
If you find an awkward corner case in any piece of software then you will find support rather lacking from the vendor. I use LO myself: I'm a business owner and can use what I damn well like! I don't force anyone else to use LO but we are a MS tin partner or something so get our tricks err drugs err software a bit cheaper.
Training: I was a trainer back in the day and it's all about concepts and not the implementation. I've used Word from v1 to date and 2.0 was a sweet spot in terms of functionality and performance (2 floppies worth of code but could do quite a lot of decent WP and rudimentary DTP stuff eg hanging indents, decimal tabstops and text/image frames with text flow. Modern LO Writer has a turtle implementation in it, coz reasons. Nowadays I struggle a bit to find things in the ribbons. Super Calc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel and LO Calc all do the same thing in the end to a greater or lesser extent. I wrote a Finite Capacity Planner (yes: Finite) in Excel for a factory around 1995. I'd have to rewrite my functions in Python or whatever but it would run in LO quite happily.
Another anecdote: My wife is not IT minded in any way as such and has worked as a classroom assistant in schools catering for special needs and adult support services etc for several decades. She has had various IT offerings foisted on her from Acorn Axxx machines to PCs running Win 9x etc. At home she used to have Windows on her laptop but I eventually had enough at Win 7 when yet another graphics "driver" update needed a good six hours on the operating table to fix. She now runs Arch (actually!) and doesn't care. It just has to work. She also uses LO, which seems to work OK and isn't the oddest office suite she's been forced to use.
Don't overthink it. LO Writer and Calc are extremely capable apps and Base looks like a pretty good effort too when I've used it and you get all the rest of it but I tend to avoid Presentation type apps (such as "Poor Point")
If you are capable of running a start up then LO will work fine. If some of your staff are incapable of any flexibility - I'd start to reconsider my choice of staff. A startup is all about being flexible and seeing opportunity and so on. If any modern IT user is "incapable" of getting on with LO then I'd question their ability to work in a startup environment.
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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 n…
Even so to address the original question - it's been my personal experience that moving docs between MS users and LibreOffice also exposes lots of funny formatting issues, particularly in Word docs. If you're not exchanging docs with others that's one thing, but IMHO you don't want to submit your resume or any equally important document written in LibreOffice format even in compatibility mode. Better to print to PDF.
Example, at our office we have a standard way of sharing info (Slack), and store shared information in Notion. But some folks use Google Docs/Sheet, some prefer Excel, or Markdown files for their on work uses
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Not my experience. I generally find MS sourced docs to be as crap as any others. I did used to teach word processing and DTP back in the day so there is that. I still have a pretty nightmareish template of styles that started off life in Word 9x and still going strong. It was for ISO9001 docs and includes three layers of table styles alone. Our ISO9000/27000 systems are all on Mediawiki these days but that template s…
I was a Libre Office user, explaining to you why I am no longer one. Clients would have problems with my documents and it made their lives hard so it became my problem. I'm a fan now of just using what works, stuck using Google for now, fortunately not needing to write serious documents with it.
You can always dump docs to pdf with LO - I think it was first with things like "Convert to pdf and email".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I am curious why the OP is wanting to avoid Microsoft here. It is one thing if you just want to use open source and maintain that ethos, but if the reason is to save money it makes no sense. Spending $400 a month for a 40 person startup is going to be a negligible cost. If it adds even a few hours a month of extra effort across your entire team, the cost savings are already gone. Use the thing everyone knows.
The thing that everyone knows these days is Google Docs, not Office.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I’ve found the new UI in Word to be a massive improvement. The ribbon is way easier for me to navigate and find functionality. Then again, I’m using the macOS version. It still has a menubar for less common functionality.
I think it depends on what kind of user you are. If you're doing ad-hoc formatting all the time, maybe the ribbon is OK. But if you are used to managing styles and religiously applying them and using templates, I found that the new UI sucks (on both Windows and Mac). The "ribbon" was widely mocked when it came out; I'm curious as to what you find easier about it.