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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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 you can use to avoid having to maintain two separate files — the rendered PDF and original ODF file.
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’ve been using it for years for all personal office suite uses.
Along with GIMP for photo editing
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.
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 use on Windows, bc It has regex, a huge thing for me.
I use OnlyOffice. Mainly for the far superior MS office compatibility. Occasionally I’ll use LibreOffice for the extra features not available in OnlyOffice.
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it dies what it’s supposed to do.
Sounds like a real killer app
I do. I’m never going to pay for Microsoft Office. No need. Libre does fine.
I use it. It’s rare, because I tend to use emacs+org-mode for private documents, or one of various other formats for interchange, but when I need to work with Microsoft Word or Excel documents, I use it.
Also, abiword theoretically is a lighter-weight editor for RTF documents, but in past years, I’ve found it to be pretty unstable, so I tend to use LibreOffice to view RTF documents.
Been using it (or OpenOffice) since I was in high school. So probably since shortly after OpenOffice first released in 2002. Then in college I would have switched over to LibreOffice once it forked off in like 2010 or 2011, whichever it was.
I used OpenOffice then switched to LibreOffice in recent years. I also use Word and occasionally BBEdit but mostly stick with OpenOffice for as I only need simple text editing, basic tables etc Edit: to add that I also use Google Docs and Google Keep when I want something quick and dirty that’s going to later be available anywhere I might possibly need to access it
Sure, used it at a job this past year, writer and calc.
After spending a couple of days to secure a PC to be able to do my job I was not going to spend another week getting them to find me an office license.
Had no issues with sharing documents with colleagues (except excel not parsing a regex from calc) or with the public. Way more issues with people not actually understanding how to use word and excel and do proper formatting. Calc also had a gui method to multi-criteria filtering that the various versions of excel around the office did not.
I also used Impress to edit some PDFs for another older gig. Bit clunky and you must have the fonts used in the original. Just remember a pdf may be a hassle to edit but it is editable and not proof of anything (on it’s own).
If you find yourself not able to commit to LibreOffice you can always try OnlyOffice. For people that are used to the Microsoft products, those are quite easy and samey feeling replacement’s.
I use it and it works just fine for my needs. I wouldn’t say I’m a heavy user though but it does everything I need it to do and it does it well.
