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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?

#31

Post by teddyh »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #25
gbear605 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not macOS here but I've crashed LibreOffice products (usually Writer) countless times on Debian by doing such things as moving/resizing line drawings, attempting to add basic charts, attempting to adjust wrap settings for images, replacing images with other images, and setting tab stops when there are things other than pure text in the flow. I can live with most of these, although they are annoying. I just wish I had…

Do you run Wayland, by any chance? Last I tried Wayland, Libreoffice simply crashed on startup.

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

#32

Post by xvilka »

kzrdude wrote: post #15
kappuchino wrote: post #5

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?

LibreOffice is working on them: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Collaborative_Editing

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

#33

Post by kayodelycaon »

devit wrote: post #29

In general "Office" applications are a bad solution to any problem, so not using them at all is best. For text, Markdown with inline semantic HTML if necessary and CSS stylesheets if needed is better, since it properly separates style and presentation unlike word processors. For modelling, Jupyter-like notebooks are much better than spreadsheets since they properly label objects, don't make everything a 2D grid, and…

None of these solutions with work with non-programmers.

Except maybe Gimp? Most people in offices don’t do image editing…

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

#34

Post by jbay808 »

jefurii wrote: post #26

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.

I use LibreOffice in my engineering practice. Even when exchanging documents with lawyers and other clients, containing extensive change tracking and comments, none of us had difficulties on any side of the exchange. At one point I had to update to a more recent version to access the "resolve comment" feature, but that was about it.

(Random additional comment: One thing I especially like about LibreOffice Calc over Excel is its process for importing CSV files).

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

#35

Post by kayodelycaon »

NonNefarious wrote: post #30
cortesoft wrote: post #23

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.

Unfortunately Office is no longer "the thing everyone knows." It has become a hideously dysfunctional mess, primarily because of UI-design defects. Style management stands as a particular example. Now you must wade through dozens of unwanted canned styles to find the ones you've set up... if I remember correctly. For the style mess and other UI regressions that I haven't taken the time to catalog, I switched to Libre…

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.

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

#36

Post by Seanambers »

midnitewarrior wrote: post #24

Never had success with it, being 97% as good as Microsoft Office isn't the same as being Microsoft Office. Formatting issues when sharing documents, tables that get blown out, looks kind of amateur sending those messed up documents to others unfortunately.

Yeah, whenever dealing with someone who uses O365 you are going to run into issues with everything from formatting to formulas to error messages.

Not worth it imo.

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

#37

Post by midnitewarrior »

gerdesj wrote: post #28
midnitewarrior wrote: post #24

Never had success with it, being 97% as good as Microsoft Office isn't the same as being Microsoft Office. Formatting issues when sharing documents, tables that get blown out, looks kind of amateur sending those messed up documents to others unfortunately.

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.

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

#38

Post by Hnrobert42 »

What OSes do you use? What field are you in? Do you share documents outside the company? How much do you use comments, especially @tagged comments? Do you need versioning? Fo you need collaborative editing? What file storage do you use? How much do you all author documents, presentations, spreadsheets? Do your users use laptops directly or do they use keyboards and mice?

But really, probably none of that matters. If you think Google Workplace is too clunky, you’ll never be happy with LibreOffice. Just get O365 and get back to work. It’s not worth saving ~$5k annually.

For the last 4 years, I’ve been CIO and VP Eng of a now-series B company. We’re at about 70 FTE. We use Google Workspace and O365. We tried to move everyone to Google, but we couldn’t do it. As you noted, there’s just too much missing from it.

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

#39

Post by 4oo4 »

xvilka wrote: post #32
kzrdude wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

LibreOffice is working on them: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Collaborative_Editing

I think you can already do this with LibreOffice Online/CODE?

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

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

#40

Post by ryaniscool »

So I used to be a huge MS Office file format geek because of my work with Apache POI (https://poi.apache.org/). I spent some time playing around with LibreOffice API's to try to use them for file format conversion.

I feel like LibreOffice/OpenOffice file compatibility with MS Office peaked in the early 2000's. The last time I tried to load a Word doc in LibreOffice a few years ago, it looked very janky. About the same as it did in 2004.

Sadly, I still receive 2 or 3 Office attachments a week. So MS Office compatibility is still very relevant.

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