Today I did my first advanced spreadsheet on LibreOffice after switching to Linux, and it handled itself pretty well. I had to search for some features on the web at first, but after I got it down, I felt comfortable using it. Also, LibreOffice’s default menu layout is not pretty, but I can find all of the functions with just a click, unlike MS Office’s ribbon menu where I had to click around to find what I was looking for. Sorry for bad English.
It’s very good but M$ make every attempt to avoid making it interoperable with Word
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 :)
You can visually theme it so it looks differently
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
A co-worker was told (verbatim) by the head of IT that " we don’t use open source". So yeah…
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.
That may be true for Discord but for FOSS products the security concern is the attack surface (more to patch).
Like I said to the other commenter, if they say no they should have to justify that (in written form, argued, with points), even if the reason you want it is familiarity with the tool, workflow speed ups, or it has a nicer UI. Make them work harder if they say no, and make it really clear you will go away quietly if they say yes.
I do think that companies asking users to use standard tools so they can build processes and training materials is reasonable. Using other tools means more attack surface, it means more updates, more documentation, less familiar people and it means more risk.
Also assuming your company is like most and forgets to document everything
alongside the crucial processes, if you know how to do something and tie it to a FOSS product instead of say excel, they won’t be able to hire a grad that can work for cheaper and do the thing half as well.My point is it does do something for them, but not as much as they think. They didn’t pay for the office suit for you to not use it. However, if you don’t need it, they can also stop paying for it. Justification is important. So is making ITs life difficult by making them justify decisions.
Bypassing them makes the incident response team’s life difficult, not ITs.
They should have to justify that
Have you worked somewhere before? Yeah, they should, but they won’t. It’s easier and cheaper to say no to everything unless there’s a serious tangible business reason that you need to use it, at which point they’ll look into it.
My company has rejected a bunch of stuff with the only reason being “Security Risk” with no further reasoning provided when asked. It’s super aggravating.
I had a user do that with video editing software… seriously, what could go wrong? Ransomware. Literally ransomware.
What app was that? I’m guessing the software was not FOSS.
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.
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.
Is a self hosted docker different from this?
Yeah; it’s pretty great. It lacks the excel functions, but if you know some python that is a total non-issue.
Yes
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
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
I am so close to loving libreoffice but trackpad gesture scrolling is broken and it’s kind of not optional on a laptop. With a mouse, I am a big fan.
This works out of the box on KDE (should work on GNOME too), what desktop environment do you use?
Cinnamon, Mint 22. It works, but badly. Two finger scroll does nothing for a second, then jumps to the destination. You don’t see anything in between, which is not how that interaction is meant to go (I start the gesture, realise I overshot the top of page two, then adjust back up, read the top, then keep on scrolling - all without releasing the gesture).
This thread describes it well: https://www.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/enf3p4/touchpad_scroll_speed/
edit: i started digging into this again. I think it’s just sensitivity being way too high within LO. If I go one mm at a time it works as expected. But of course I want to browse docs as comfortably as I browse pages on firefox.
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.
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.
However, in direct comparison with SoftMaker Office (which, admittedly, is not free software), LibreOffice is inconsistent, sluggish, unstable and less compatible with Microsoft formats.
For me MS Office aren’t compatible with LibreOffice is because MS fault not LibreOffice
I’m all for LibreOffice and Open Source, but I do not agree on this point. Microsoft created the format and application and LibreOffice is a third party that tries to be conform.
I usually work with MS formats on LO (only because they need smaller space for small files, in larger files, MS formats are objectively bulkier). My observation is that MS messes with formatting of files made on LO, no matter which format you pick… even with whitespace of otherwise plain unfomatted text at times.
It is definitely a MS issue, and it is not about formats they have made public.
How is it Microsoft’s fault that the LibreOffice team fails to properly support its formats? Others can do it.
