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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I’ve been using it for years for all personal office suite uses.
Along with GIMP for photo editing
Same, I’ve used a lot of office suites over the years so they’re all the same to me. LO is free so I use it at home and store my files on Cryptomator+Dropbox.
Excited for Gimp 3.0, the dev snapshots are working well now but I’ll need the Resynthesizer plugin.
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.
Yes. I’ve been using it since the old OpenOffice days. It works well, it’s easy to learn, it’s well supported, and it’s free.
I use nothing else, unless my employer forces me to use MS office, offline. No online documents here, you never know when they sell your data…
The answer is all the time. They sell your data all the time.
I prefer OnlyOffice over LibreOffice cause it seems to have better support for MS formats.
Yep, LibreOffice misses up with the format sometimes so I wouldn’t use it on documents that I’m gonna send to someone
Used LIbreOffice throughout college. I use it when I need to, though I don’t use any office productivity apps beyond a spreadsheet these days. When I DO need something like that, I Just use the LibreOffice integrated into Nextcloud.
Well, I have a license for MS Office from work that I have never actually installed, because Libre Office is just much simpler to deal with. I’m sure at some point I will need it, but since WFH started there has been no such time.
Honestly, I have no idea how people can stand MS Word. It’s a complete piece of shit that barely works. If you want it for a text editor, you will have a much better experience with any other suite. But Excel is good, and Power Point does that thing it does quite well (if that’s a good thing, it’s up to opinion). Those are harder to replace.
I use LibreOffice to fill out important documents and taxes. I don’t trust google, or myself for that matter, to hold that kind of data securely in the cloud without encryption.
I use on Windows, bc It has regex, a huge thing for me.
I used OpenOffice and then LibreOffice all the way through college. However in the past couple years I moved to a combination of Office 365 and VSCode because I used the OneDrive cloud storage which comes at a pretty solid discount.
I don’t enjoy using Google docs - but I seem to be an exception to the rule there. Most people seem to see no reason to have anything else.
same here! The whole Google suite is just so unbearably slow at the school i go to, but we’re all forced to use it.
I like Google slides, but I’m not a fan of the others.
I use LibreOffice! Calc, Draw, and Writer are very user friendly once you get used to where the tools are. Impress is a pretty good replacement for Powerpoint: the stock graphics leave a lot to be desired–but that’s a simple fix with a good stock image service. About the only thing LO doesn’t do is notes, but I’d check out Xournal++ if you were looking for a way to replace OneNote. Plus, LibreOffice doesn’t push OneDrive down your throat. It’s been a win-win for me.
Another thing to consider if you really like typesetting is to learn LaTeX: it’s a slightly steep learning curve(especially for advanced topics), but it’ll do things that your typical WYSIWYG word-processing suite couldn’t dream of doing. Plus there are a lot of templates available that you can adapt for your purposes.
I exclusively use the libre office suite and its apps since many years, but it’s defo not user friendly lol. The UX is confusing, outdated and ugly af. But at least it’s open-source, free and useful.
I have been using it forever. I love it, and usually install it for friends and family members. Drive is fine, but they are indexing and reading your data, and I prefer to own my software.
I used to use it for all my office needs, then Google docs got really good!
I think owncloud/nextcloud use libreoffice code for their collaborative office suites behind the scenes.
They do, the actual document server is named collabora, and the editor suite is based on libreoffice.
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 can be convenient if you’d like to bundle the read-only PDF with an editable ODF source.
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.
For me, yes, and not just for personal or academic use. I’ve created and editted countless business documents with it. I’ve gotten at least four jobs with the resume I wrote with it.
