It’s very good but M$ make every attempt to avoid making it interoperable with Word
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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M$ loves locking users into their totally bulls*it ecosystem with deliberately broken "standards." LibreOffice, on the other hand, actually respects open formats like ODF and doesn't treat interoperability as a threat. Word still can't properly open documents it didn't create, unless you pay the vendor tax and pray the formatting survives....
I think they deliberately mess with the formatting text in exported to "word doc" format files from LibreOffice too.
My first experience with it was that dark theme was bugged and the interface wasn’t intuitive
I bring this up often because its so amusing to me.
Last year I did a lot of interviews with developers of popular Steam Deck and Linux programs. All went really well, and were quite fun to do.
One 'dev' (I use that term so loosely because I found out GPT is heavily used for their work) freaked out though when they saw my document I sent initially was an .odt file.
Knowing I am a pen-tester, they freaked out and told the public at large I was trying to hack them with a weird file type.
.odt
It still makes me laugh. Anyway, I swear by LibreOffice, I use it daily and love it so much!
if a specific format isn't requested or required, and the formatted text document is not expected to be edited by the recipient--only read, possibly by computer, or printed, i would default to using a pdf.
That's funny! If someone was trying to infect my PC via e-mail, I would expect them to be sending pdf files.
Most of these were not on-the-spot interviews. They were very informal questions and answers.
So Writer felt appropriate to me - the questions were there, they can copy to paste elsewhere, or enter their own answers in the document.
offtopic but your english is great :)
I do a lot of work with CSV files and LibreCalc is so much better for them. You can actually tell it how to delimit the file and to put quotations around each field.
Some programs actually advise against using excel if you're going to work on a CSV to upload into the program, which is funny considering it's meant to be the industry standard.
P. S. For anyone that would like to use LibreOffice at work, download portableapps and get it from there. It's so portable it can get around IT administration requirements
On behalf of cyber and IT, just ask IT to install the thing, please. They can't really say no to a free app and bypassing restrictions ends badly for everyone. I had a user do that with video editing software... seriously, what could go wrong? Ransomware. Literally ransomware. Lucky for antivirus it stopped it but yeah, please work with IT.
They can't really say no to a free app
What? At my workplace there's a bunch of stuff we aren't allowed to install that's free with the reasoning being security concerns.
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They can't really say no to a free app
A co-worker was told (verbatim) by the head of IT that " we don't use open source". So yeah...
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They can and most of the time they do complain about free apps
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I agree with LibreCalc and CSV, in some internationalclasses we always had issues with excel saving CSV in actually different formats depending on the machine locale. LibreCalc never had this problem.
You can visually theme it so it looks differently
Indeed, LibreOffice Calc is a near-daily fixture in my operational workflow. The insistence on proprietary, data-harvesting alternatives like Google Docs is… unnecessary. For Debian-based systems, the installation process is straightforward: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa & sudo apt install libreoffice, referencing the official documentation at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Install/Linux
(Is debian considered a "debian-based" distro?)
Debian users, ignore the above. Debian explicity warns against using ubuntu ppa
The correct way to get libreoffice in debian is just to apt install libreofffice... It's already in the main debian repos
Ribbon bar shit, personally I hate the MS ribbon bar. So for me the LO interface is way better. Just depends on what you like and what you learned and know well.
and libreoffice still has a ribbon interface if you like that.
Yeah; it's pretty great. It lacks the excel functions, but if you know some python that is a total non-issue.
I do wish it had a self hosted docker though. I could see Proton mail and thunder mail adopting it that way, which would be neat.
Yes. Its the obvious choice for desktop.
But if you want web, have you tried CryptoPad.
Collabora used to offer Libre Office online, now it’s their Libre Office fork
Rollapp lets you use LibreOffice online but I don’t think there is collaboration
Yes
Almost anytime i want to do something a bit more interesting in Excel i have to look for a solution on the web too. And i am considered one of the better Excel users in my working environment.
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