Opuscula LibreOffice, MS Office Compared

IS THERE ANYTHING AS GOOD AS Microsoft Office?

Office has it all: word processor, spread sheet, data base, presentation application.

And they all work together.

What’s not to like?

IF YOU ASK ME, “What’s not to like” my answer is, in importance to me:

Constant modifications of the Graphical User Interface (GUI or “gooey”)
Cost of frequent “upgrades”
Sometimes incompatibility between current and previous iterations
Microsoft’s insistence on knowing everything about the user

I’ve been around computers for awhile. I’m no guru; I leave the geek stuff to my Second Born, but I well remember CP/M, Commodores, “Trash” 80s, and I’ve used applications running on CP/M, DOS, Unix, DEC Vax, HP-UX, Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, and of course, Microsoft. My first computer was a two-floppy CP/M all-in-one that included a green monitor and an Epson dot matrix printer.

ANYWAY, for the reasons above, I am migrating to LibreOffice. It may not have everything MS Office has, but it has what I need: word processor, spread sheet, data base, presentation application.

And they all work together.

Just like MS Office.

The actually work very similarly to MS Office. There ARE some differences in the UI (nee GUI) and somethings that work in MS Office may – as they did with me – force the user to seek help from a very active, and helpful, user group.

I hand code HTML for Google blogs. Converting hard returns in MS Word is a search and replace operation:
Find=^p
Replace=^p</P><P>.

Doing the same thing in LibreOffice is
Find=$
Replace=\n</P><P>;

I needed user group help to manage this, but having done it several times, it is as natural for me now as the MS Office process was.



Image capture with Win 10 Snipping Tool

Does MS Office even have a user group?

I use the word processor daily.

I use the spread sheet frequently.

So far I’ve only played with the presentation software and looked briefly at the database application.

I miss not having a hard copy manual to reference, but even Microsoft stopped producing them.

I find LibreOffice’s online HELP to be more accurate than Microsoft’s HELP. Very often with Microsoft I’ll be instructed to click on something that is not in my copy of the software. Maybe it was in a previous sub-iteration, but it was dropped – for whatever reason – in the version running on my computer,

I’m still running MS Windows 10 as the Operating System (OS). I bought a copy of Linux on a thumb drive, but it was missing a critical component. I could have downloaded the Linux OS and done away with Windows, but my son’s the computer mavin, I’m just a user.

Windows and Linux/Ubuntu can co-exist on the same hard drive if it has the capacity.

MS Office works on a Windows OS and a Mac OS.

LibreOffice works on Windows, Mac, and Linux/Ubuntu OSs. It is the same across the board, save for Mac’s unique keyboard.

MS Office saves files in MS formats, RTF, and text. LibreOffice save files in its OpenOffice formats AND MS Office formats. It also opens MS Office files. MS Office opens only MS Office formats, RTF, and text files.

The price is the same on all platforms: $0. (Donations accepted to support/encourage development at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/.)

My copy of LibreOffice has been updated several times. There is no change in the UI. I did not have to RESTART after an update. And, unlike MS updates, I was asked if I wanted to install the update and when I accepted the update, it was completed in a minute or two – unlike MS Windows updates that seem to take 30 minutes or more.

I’ve been using MS Word since a 5 1/2-inch floppy was stapled into the November 1983 issue of PC World.¹ Word then ran on MS-DOS and IBM’s PC-DOS. It was the first WYSIWYG word processor that did not require a proprietary platform (e.g., Xerox).

Then a technical writer, Word was THE word processor of choice; writers could see italics, bold, underscore and evern ^super and _sub script. Today, only simple text editors such as MS Notepad and Gedit, lack WYSIWYG displays.

But that was then and this is now.

By the way, WYSIWYG is neither a MS or Apple invention. It first was implemented on a XeroxPARC computer. Turn the proprietary monitor on its side to see landscape format!

The only MS Office application I can’t seem to replace is Outlook. I tried several and none was satisfactory. Perhaps on a Linux/Ubuntu OS I’ll find something close to Outlook.

Bottom line: Yes, Virginia, there is – actually “are” – free alternatives to Microsoft Office. Likewise, there are free alternatives to Microsoft Windows (and Apple OSs).

Getting up to speed with LibreOffice is no more difficult than figuring out where Microsoft moved a favorite feature or function when in released its latest and, maybe, greatest upgrade.

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Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#Origins

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