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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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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been using it for years for all personal office suite uses.

Along with GIMP for photo editing

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I prefer OnlyOffice over LibreOffice cause it seems to have better support for MS formats.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I use on Windows, bc It has regex, a huge thing for me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I like Google slides, but I'm not a fan of the others.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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...

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I juggle between whatever office suite is installed at the time. I’ve found that they’re all pretty much the same. If you know one, the rest are virtually the same.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I use OnlyOffice. Mainly for the far superior MS office compatibility. Occasionally I'll use LibreOffice for the extra features not available in OnlyOffice.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have it deployed at work for my 55 users instead of getting Microsoft Office licenses for all of them. They are not sophisticated users and it suits their needs. I probably field a few more questions for it than MS Office but they would call about that too since they think I am Google.

I personally think that Calc does a better job handling various CSV files than Excel.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Not having constant internet access, LibreOffice is a valuable tool to me. I kind of dread the day when the development of fundamental desktop applications assumes a constant internet connection.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I used LibreOffice exclusively in college — it was a lifesaver for my broke ass, since most of my money went to beer and hobbies (DnD, home severs, guitars, more drinking…)

It got the job done, but I wasn’t doing a whole lot of writing fwiw. Once I got over the whole “save it using the correct format or your professors will fail you” hump, it was everything I needed and more.

Don’t do any writing that isn’t markdown now, and I write that in Vscode or Obsidian these days.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I do. I'm never going to pay for Microsoft Office. No need. Libre does fine.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I use it, I also hate it with a passion. I also hate Microsoft Office, its a little better but not worth installing and registering.

Nowadays if I need to write something I use either plain text, Markdown or LaTeX depending on what I'm doing. For presentations I use LaTeX, Draw.io or Google Slides. For spreadsheets I haven't found anything decent yet so I end up using Calc.

Anyways, the Google alternatives are decent to be honest, I just prefer to avoid Google, otherwise I would use Docs, Slides and whatever their spreadsheet app is called.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

They do, the actual document server is named collabora, and the editor suite is based on libreoffice.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yes, I've used it for years both privately and on business machines.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I use it even in the once a month time I have to touch Windows, chief.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I used it years ago when I had a writing hobby. Whenever I go back to it, I'll probably use it again. Learning it wasn't hard for me because I'm old and it wasn't very different from the word processors I'd grown up with.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I use it occasionally. Usually for reports or essays for college and working on CV/ Resumes for me and my family.

Sometimes also for other random stuff like writing speeches etc.

It has everything I need and I am used to it at this stage. Plus I like that it is open source and free.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There was a time where I'd boot up Libre office for tasks that Google docs wouldn't cover. But it's been so long I don't remember what it was.

Now I just use Docs for all my personal work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I use Calc all the time for work. A lot of our clients send in xlsx files and I can open them and get the information out of them easily. Sometimes I need to build or modify CSV files. It's a powerhouse for that.

I stylized my (for print) resume with Writer. Unless I'm working collaboratively I use writer for any documents to be printed. Any docs that aren't destined for the press are just markdown.

LibreOffice is very appreciated and I'm glad it's a standard on most distros.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Nothing to learn it's a doddle to use, My 76 year old mother was quite happily using it occasionally on linux box up until she broke her neck two weeks ago - really (4 vertebrae).

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I use libreoffice, draw, and calc.

I lost all my work to Melissa in 1999 and never used MS office again.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Much of my work us collaborative document creation. I'd love to use LibreOffice but try as I might, I can't work out how to connect it to corporate SharePoint sites etc.

Working with MS Word on anything but trivial documents is miserable. So many bugs and weirdnesses. How is it even possible for Word to let its documents become sour using its own file format!

I say "sour" because the documents are still accessible, so not fully corrupted... but over time, weirdnesses creep in such as tables losing their positioning data, cross-references breaking for no reason etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I sure do. On everything.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I do a lot of work in LibreOffice Calc these days - I use it to outline text documents as well as make computations that I can revise. It doesn't need to have tons of features to do what I want it to do, but if you dig into it, it can do some pretty powerful stuff.

Draw is also just fine for making meme text.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

@kurosawaa yep. Handy for machines I don’t need a full ms office license on

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I used it years ago, but have moved to the cloud for all my document editing needs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I tried to use LibreOffice but couldn't stand the UI coming from Windows and macOS. Honestly as much as it sucks, the either ugly design of the applications or them not being straight up available just had me move back to macOS and Windows.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I use it, still use it today. Honestly I think it's fine, I mainly have gripes about these:

  1. There are some weird compatibility issues if someone else is using Microsoft Word to write on the same document as me
  2. The slideshow is a bit clunky in terms of how things work...

Otherwise it's alright!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I use it for everything that doesn't explicitly need to be shared or anything that is going to be printed. I needed to print a document as a booklet and LibreOffice had that feature and Drive didn't.

I also keep a baseline suite of apps installed on every machine and that includes LibreOffice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, I do. It's fine, not a great UI but it gets the job done. I don't work in a ton of Office documents, but for something like basic spreadsheets it meets my needs.

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