I have been using Libreoffice for a while. I am not a poweruser of these kinds of apps, but I still need them.
I have been very happy with them and they are decently customizable. The ram usage difference between this and the office suite was bigger than I expected.
There is one thing I have not been able to figure out.
Is there a way to make the "web View" the default when opening a document?
I've been using it for years and usually install it on new computers my relatives ask me to set up. I'm not sneaking it in. If they need ms office for work, I'm not going to screw it up for them.
I stopped for a long time because of a terrible bug that deleted an important file, but in the years since I started using it again, I've never had the same problem.
I like it for writing up work emails and printing out estimates. I used to have trouble keeping my intended layout, but not so much these days. Everything I do is pretty uncomplicated, though.
LibreOffice is great, especially for home/private use or if you're converting everything to PDF anyways.
It, and all of the ms alternatives, fall short in having 100% match for MS, so the more complex the document, the more likely formatting errors will appear.
Agreed, I've had much more success with the horrors of .docx-compatability with OnlyOffice. It's not 100% perfect either, but has brought me less suffering overall. As much as I'd like to avoid Microsoft Office, depending on your situation that may unfortunately not always be so easy.
I'm not sure I follow, OnlyOffice is FOSS, buit has hosted solutions you can pay for, or you can download it for free to run as desktop apps or to self-host.
Yeah Draw is really powerful mut messes up PDFs way too often. Firefox has the best WYSIWYG editor for PDFs, KDEs Okular is a bit worse in text inserting but powerful too.
I was thinking more in deep editing like texts, pictures, etc. It's what I call the basic stuffs. It's not Adobe level but more than fine for the vast majority.
Calc is fine, Writer is... alright and can be used if compatibility with MS stuff for collaboration is not your primary goal. But my main complaint is about Impress, which still can't manage inline formulas, so I can't use it for scientific presentation without ugly and time wasting workarounds That's a pity.
"Compatible" with Microsoft Office, just don't expect for your colleagues to be able to open the document in Microsoft Office after you edited it in LibreOffice.
Edit: Don't expect your colleagues to be able to open it without the layout being broken.
In my experience, it's normally the other way around. I have no trouble opening doc and docx files made in libreoffice with MS office, but vice versa can sometimes be a little bit chancey.
Of course PowerPoint vs Impress just destroys the formatting both ways.
From my experince, an odt made in Libreoffice is what works best in both it and Word. But that's just how it's been for me, so who knows what weird things happen to other people when going back and forth between them.
and please do as .pdf aswell if you have students. Sometimes one of our profs powerpoint slides dont show equasions with a libre Software. So annoying!
My physics prof made it a whole thing and told us that the slides on Canvas are uploaded with .pdf so you can open it in the browser just fine without needing open office or something on Linux. First time a prof ever recognized the Linux community. I love physicists.
Microsoft office has been able to open odt files since 2010.
Furthermore, LibreOffice does not always create/save files 100% compatible with MSO.
I used to use Libre office because free.
Word documents I have created/edited in LibreOffice were always a little broken layout wise when the document is opened in Word.
Whether it is because LibreOffice does a shitty job converting to docx when saving, Microsoft added in some anti competitor shit in Word or that the docx standard is vague is a discussion for another time.
LibreOffice is compatible with Microsoft's OOXML spec. They sold every suite on it in the nearly 20 years ago to stop fines from the EU. They sold competing suites on it instead of using anything else available.
Microsoft however never actually fully supported their own spec and will save as "OOXML Transition" or whatever they call it now because they've been in 'transition' for nearly 20 years but still have proprietary blobs inside of it. You can however make MS Office save in OOXML Strict which is supposed to be compliant to the now ISO spec that LibreOffice actually supports.
Have you used it lately? Broken layouts don’t happen for me very often in the last few years (I work in an office with libreoffice/word used beside each other daily).