It might sound like a pretty obvious thing, but have you tried changing the tools into the "Tabbed ribbon" that office uses instead of the classic old 90s organization scheme in options ?
I have come to notice that when people who don't really work with computers very well, in particular boomers, say that they can't stand LibreOffice, they mean they don't like the layout of the tools, because they can't find anything they need. I suppose they just got used to where everything is with modern office.
Just change it and see if she will like it better. Usually solves it for the boomers i help. Nothing is holding LibreOffice back more than their default layout scheme. They really don't know their target audience's pain points AT ALL. Just goes to show why you need to study your users using the product without being explained anything.
I don't get why their default is a layout that has been outdated for 24 years. Nostalgia or what? Only really old people who used computers in the 90s a lot will intuitively find it useful.
I've had success using a cracked Office 2013 installation. The older ones don't have as sophisticated anti piracy measures and don't unactivate themselves as often.
I eventually got my dad to use Libre office. There are several different ui layouts and one of the is really similar to ms office.
Out of curiosity: what she doesn't like?
I bought my license for like 4 or 5 usd after a life of sailing and using libreoffice, not on ebay but on one of those praised website that sells key for games and such
run irm https://massgrave.dev/get | iex in Powershell and follow the instructions
Profit!
What doesn't she like about LibreOffice, out of curiosity? It's easy to make the layout like Office
(View > User Interface > Tabbed) if that's her problem - I felt the exact same way, but the second I found out I could do that, I never went back.
Massgrave is a tool that can create legit (oem) keys for windows and office out of thin air*
it’s not literally creating them from nothing, it’s using a system Ms themselves run to get working keys. Evidently they don’t have a huge problem with it.
Turns out the powershell step is enough to get 97% of users to shell out cash.
And also, the biggest source of revenue is institutions who either will pay for the enterprise license, or can be sued for a good payday if they try to pirate.
Done this a while ago for my brother who needed Office for work but isn't as tech minded as I am. It's honestly a fantastic tool, kudos to the creator!
Not OP, but I'm aware of it just from seeing it mentioned in threads like this. There might be a community or list available showing all these cool things but a lot of the time it just goes around by word-of-mouth.
But, seriously, I'm pretty obsessed with piracy stuff and have spent an insane amount of time poring over lists like FMHY so it's like trivia to me now
Simpler interface but lacking more advanced features of MS Office or Libre. It has the features 90% of users actually use though.
Nearly perfect DOCX formatting compatibility. The only thing I have ever noticed when collaborating with Word users is the bullet symbols on list items may be different on my end.
Onlyoffice sucks very bad with macros in my experience, lacks some advanced functions, and infuriatingly doesn't seem to have options search, but other than that it's fantastic, very intuitive, ergonomic and sleek option.
You might also find the Python library pandas useful. Its “DataFrames” can mirror your excel data 1:1 and you have convenience methods like to_excel(). Easy to combine with numpy for performant matrix math.
XLSX just becomes a container for storing/sharing your data, and while Python is used for analysis. I would use matplotlib for plotting rather than embedding in the sheet.
Glad to see someone mention OO. I was going to, and saw your comment. I will always be down for LibreOffice, but OnlyOffice might be the "best" option for lots of people that are easily intimidated with change (or more specifically how something looks different). Even if it is lacking on some features, it just matters how the person it is recommended to uses MS Office. Being fair using MS Office or any of the similar suites is overkill for what they do. If smaller programs like Wordpad (RIP) or opensource Rich Text Format editors could handle so many general purpose documents.
i don't want to start a war but sorry, office is the defacto when it comes to office work and libreoffice still have many problems with formatting and editing existing .docx files (things seem better when it comes to .xlsx and .pptx) not to mention that your documents might not look similar on both due to missing proprietary fonts.
its a good software in itself its just that its compatibility with office is a little dodgy
Idk i have never worked with a complicated odt document Although, I would expect some problems because of fonts
Come to think of it. I tried that a couple months ago and The results weren't so great.( I told word to specifically save my docx document in ODT format)
I don't understand why ODT is complicated. It's a zipfile with inspectible data. The standard document is also not as vendor-specific as MS OOXML which is thousands of pages that everybody gave up upon.
I still don't really know what you mean. How a document looks like depends on you. I've got very many fonts available, much more than average Microsoft Office user has. And it's easier to use LibreOffice from my point of view, because it emphasizes structure. It looks much cleaner by default than MS Word. The only thing MS Word is better in is typesetting. LibreOffice simply fails to place letters properly.
Documents produced by office suites are not really good for publications. They are very annoying to handle, no matter if it's MS Office or Libre. The cheapest option to have something professional is LaTeX.
I'd argue that no one gives a shit what the docx looks like as long as it looks good as a PDF or presentation slide.
And for that I use whatever is at hand, which mostly consists of Gsuite shit at work. Sometimes O365 for school (because NA is stupid) or work. At home it's Libre still Gsuite...
This really depends on what she’s using it for. If she’s going to use it for anything business related, she needs a legal copy. That includes her sitting down to write the next great American novel or Sookie Stackhouse series. If she’s just needs to open recipes someone else sends her, not a problem at all.
I've been using it in a windows VM. Unfortunately for my work, I need the formatting of Excel and Word to be legit that I can't for the life of me seem to replicate in Only or Libre. That and PDF rendering always gets a little wonky somehow.