Nick, maybe at some point you could elaborate on the whole Database Integration, especially the driver setup and where to get them with a nice Document. I remember that when I started, I had headaches for weeks. I still don't know why to take the route via the Database application. Maybe I haven't figured that out.
Nick! The stupid ribbon interface was *the* reason why I switched to LibreOffice long before I moved to linux! Why would you wish that ugly thing on the rest of us?
Little tip for next time you make a video that could potentially be used on windows as well Instead of C:\Users\Username\Appdata\Roaming just type %APPDATA% And instead of Instead of C:\Users\Username\Appdata\Local just type %LocalAppdata%
Some handy tips. I've been using LibreOffice for years now. Partly because by the time I got my hands on MS Office I had gotten so used to Libre's UI that everything else just feels weird to me now. It's still a piece of software I happily recommend to anyone who needs to get work done.
I feel weird in MS Office now as well. I'll add the MS fonts and change the ribbon layout. LibreOffice Calc is the tool that needs the most work. Writer is perfectly fine as is.
i still have old fogies who hate it and i wish i had seen this video first, they want the office they know, sometimes with the EXACT buttons. i've compared office 2013 and office 2016 on to laptops side by side with the EXACT same UI and because it 2016 was a slightly darker shade of grade it broke thier brain.
This video came at the perfect time for me. I'm slowly trying to transition to Linux, and currently that involves switching away from closed source applications to open source cross platform ones. Office was the big hurdle for me because a. LibreOffice's layout was way to confusing with the little muscle memory I have, b. it sometimes didn't seem to correctly display math formulas saved in Word as an odt, c. the default template feeling ever so slightly off and d. Word doesn't like it when I save an odt with Windows Ink content, the 'drawing area' should be converted to an image but everything is all over the place. The last problem is Word's fault and at this point I'm using Paint to quickly make those sketches, but knowing that LibreOffice has even more extensive toolbar customization and knowing that it can convert certain Office-features for you (and that I should change the default way Word interprets math thanks to that compatibility table), I'm one step closer to ditching Office and one step closer to going full Linux. Thank you for the video man
OR... you can just stick to industry standard and stick with Office. Listen, sometimes these youtubers who are not in touch with the real world, often without non-youtube jobs tend to forget these things. It is just not ok to work in any serious business (or if in college, graduate school, professional schools like Law, Medicine) to be risk major compatibility issue, and also expect your colleagues to some how also be ok with your FOSS software. At best, maybe go with Only Office; but otherwise stick to Microsoft Office.
@@Powerincarnate. Most of the critic points the guy above (@The ChargedCreeper) noticed are easily fixable by setting some configs and adapting to a different UI. The only really limitating one is the problem with math formulas, which LibreOffice is not good at, just as MS Office. That's why I suggested LaTeX, which is the standard for math. I think no one forces you to use FOSS software, neither I can see why some colleagues would pretend you to pay some hundreds euro for the MSOffice license, while you can do essentially the same job (and also work on MS formats) with FOSS. As far as I know, using LibreOffice (or other FOSS) you do not risk any "major compatibility issues" with MSOffice software, whichever your business is.
Just a note that it’s not “Microsoft Office” any more, it’s all been rebranded as “Microsoft 365”. Which is kind of amusing, since I think Microsoft has yet to manage 365 days in a row without an outage.
My guy, thanks for putting this together. Most of LibreOffice/Excel tutorials stop after adding a ribbon/fonts. Thanks for the extra detail here. My job in finance keeps me tied to Excel, and OnlyOffice isn't as robust (no SOLVER) as LibreOffice. Here's to reinstalling Linux and trying this out!
Your videos are awesome and you are one of the only channels I still watch on RUclips. Thanks for all your effort! I really wish that Libreoffice would enable a lot of this by default as when some users download and install it, they will be immediately shocked by the user interface and find an alternative like only office.
I needed this, thank you for sharing. It's easy to get lost in all the menus and features when you deal with hundreds of programs daily, and having someone show you how to make your life (and the others you work for) just a bit easier is appreciated.
Another guy insinuated that OnlyOffice is more like MS Office. Do you agree? NextCloud uses OnlyOffice, but most people say OnlyOffice isn't as feature-rich as LibreOffice. Just curious.
@@genkiferal7178 Onlyoffice is less customizable and doesn't have desktop theme integration. I have also heard it's related to Russia. But it has better compatibility with Microsoft
I use WPS, Libre, and OnlyOffice. Due to its Chinese roots, WPS is the best for multi-lingual word processing in Asian languages. The Japanese functions really well. Thanks for the advice on Libre.
Thank you for another super-helpful video. Great to see that you have covered one of the most important issues for those looking to switch to Linux. Having grown up with Microsoft Office (on PC and Mac), I was concerned about its perceived stranglehold as it does not run on Linux. I now feel more confident that switching to Linux will not isolate me from those using Microsoft Office on other operating systems.
In most cases it's now better than sharing files between MS Office Windows and Mac used to be a while ago. I haven't tried any really complex formatting like automatic numbering, table of contents, etc. in Libre Office in a long time and hopefully won't have to anytime soon (it wasn't a part of my studies I particularly enjoyed and my job doesn't involve any of that).
Nice video, thanks. I've been working with LibreOffice for a couple of years and do all my consulting work with it from reports, to presentations and data analysis (that even Excel cannot handle). Yet, this video has taught me a few things. Well done!
Thank You so much for this one, I got really tired using office online for friends and libreoffice for my own stuff, this video probably fixed most of my issues with libreoffice compatibility, actually I never digged into settings.
Very nice video, I love LibreOffice and use it even on my Win11 and MacOS computers! The only thing I don't like on these two OS's is that dark mode isn't yet implemented as well as on Linux...you have to enable Experimental Features from the Advanced menu, restart the program and then it's sorta dark mode but you still have to tweak a couple things and it doesn't look 100% complete and integrated with the system. On Linux no matter the distro, it just works and is coherent.
Using Manjaro, I have both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice. Plus, in my line of work (state school teacher in Spain), I do lots of work using Google's tools. Among the three, for complex work I vastly prefer LibreOffice -especially for my grammar videos (presentations) and graphic design in text-based documents. As for the layout of the applications themselves, let's just say that when MS Office switched to the ribbon layout, that was the exact moment I got rid of it (I was still letting myself be used by Windows then). Can't stand it, and it's why I *only* use OnlyOffice to open *.docx files, which by default it does way better than LibreOffice. Any LibreOffice devs reading this: all my respect and love, and please keep the current default layout.
Merci pour tous ces conseils Nic :) Je devais justement chercher ces fonctions de compatibilité, tu tombes à pic 👍 Maintenant, il ne reste plus qu'à trouver tous ces paramétrages en francais !😅
I just use OnlyOffice! I LOVE it! Only had a slight issue with page sizes on PDF export for spreadsheets. Otherwise it's been flawless and feels very high end
Videos like this and channel like this must be watched by everyone. And only then people can see Linux as user friendly and not frightening as they think.
LibreOffice is a great office suite, I like it so much and to me it's mandatory to install it alongside Ms-Office, however, it still needs some tweakings especially when managing non-latin languages
**Never** change away from the native file format by default !!! You'll introduce an ever-worsening irrecoverable corruption through incompatibilities with the foreign format and bugs in the software !! **Always** save in the native file format 1st, *_then_* save **a copy** in the foreign ! I still +liked and added to tuts list.
For budget reasons these days Ive been distro hopping and finally staying in MX Linux, and this video was very helpful to customize LibreOffice, thank you so much! New subscriber here
I am actually thankful that LibreOffice does not have the ribbon menu by default. I don't like it and the current default suits my workstyle much better. ... but I can understand why people who are used to MS Office want something they already know.
Stopped using Libre Office after trying OnlyOffice. Night and Day difference. OK, Libre Office has some more stuff, but if you want good compatibility with Office documents, then nothing beats Only Office as far as I know.
WPS Office? Though last I heard, LO has improved their compatibility by _a lot_ . OnlyOffice still has some issues with PivotTable when I checked early this year, LO handled it better though it still messed with the formatting (but at least it remains interoperable between LO and MSO).
+1 for Libre Office from me - use it all the time and rarely have interoperability problems with my MS work buddies. Will definitely add some of the tweaks you showed - thanks Nick! 👏
Excellent video, I switched from LibreOffice a few years back to OnlyOffice. I don't require the sheer metric-ton of features LibreOffice has and instead prefer the more MS Office user experience out of the box that OnlyOffice provides.
Sounds pretty complicated, not going to lie. That boat has sailed for me, especially as I both work in a very MS Office centric office and does distro-hopping for fun, especially since WPS Office via Flatpak is an option. It's a pain having to set Libreoffice up every time I distro-hop, and it's really not good whenever a co-worker or client sent me a file and when I sent it back some of the colors or formatting is different from what they set (it was really annoying dealing with pivot table and making sure it doesn't mess with either of those). WPS Office just does it better, and yeah, I don't like it either, but it's just the best option on Linux unless you really need the really advanced features like scripting (though it's not like LO is good with MS Office scripts/macros either). I honestly wouldn't use it if it doesn't come in Flatpak where I could just disable network access via Flatseal. But I could, and I did, so I can move on with my work. Office suite and office work is just boring. No matter how much I try, I just don't have the same passion required for going open source with them unlike I do with the OS. So I just want to be done with it and move on, hence giving up and using WPS Office and MS Office via Crossover and TeamViewer.
I have used OpenOffice for YEARS and loved it- mostly b/c MS Office was so inaccessibly expensive for me... and I moved to LibreOffice about a year ago and it's amazing. I love it. I use it on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It's great.
Remember when the ribbon interface was forced upon us, it was pretty much universally abhorred. Not using the ribbon interface is a major plus for power users. It is a pity that Steve Ballmer ignored this criticism, he did that with Vista and Windows 8 as well and it finally cost him his job. Unfortunately this happened too late for Office to return to a sane interface, one that has not been slowing down users for 15 years. You should be praising Libre Office where it improves on MS Office and not suggesting ways to nerf it.
LibreOffice can also do a fair job emulating the sidebar interface style found in Apple's office suite, and I recommend trying it. It's missing a few features-for example POSITION and Size doesn't let you set the position. It's literally in the name, but LibreOffice doesn't do it. You have to open a stupid dialog box for that. Even so, the sidebar is really good if you have a wide display (and at this point we all do), rather than the ribbon designed in the age of 4:3.
Uni student here, in the old side which was a teenager in the late 90s, and Linux only user since 2005. I tried many things as to send the projects and essays without using Windows. As you said, calc compatibility is very bad. We are forced to use calibry light, which doesn't exist in Linux When there are many lists, it always gets messed up. I am lazy and we are forced to use a lot of referencing. As far as I know, only Office 365 allows to just fill the fields and the suite will add the references automagically according to whichever standard you need (Harvard referencing on my case). When I am not using references, I tend to use Office97 on a Win9x VM, because I love the interface there and I hate ribbon, and... Well, clippy for nostalgia and nuissance. If I can I use LibreOffice, and import as pdf as you recommend. For anything else, VM with windows 10 and my student license of Office... I can't wait to wave it all goodbye.
For basic stuff the open source offices are adequate. As a data analyst though, Excel is king and probably always will be. There's just too much advanced functionality that alternatives don't even begin to address.
The professional data analysts don’t use Excel. They would use Python+Jupyter+Pandas+Matplotlib. Excel has too many problems, like misinterpreting text data in strange ways, or dropping rows if there are too many to import.
The ttf-mscorefont package offer almost 20 years old ttf versions of ms fonts, and that means no smart features, different metrics, small glyph coverage and other issues. Since their release, ms changed everything about those fonts:and yes, they did that on purpose. Those old and crappy fonts only share the name with modern times new roman, arial, etc., so it's better to NOT use them. If, to ensure compatibility, you want modern MS fonts, you need to buy said fonts (AFAIK, copying them from a windows installation is illegal).
Thanks for telling us how to switch to the Tabbed interface and not telling us how to switch back 🙂. You had me all "outraged on the internet" for the 5 seconds until I found the show menu bar button. Jeez, I was so close to tweeting about it. (just kidding). But, seriously, thanks for an informative video. I recently cancelled my Office 365 subscription so my kids will be hassling me next month when Word stops working.
No one will discuss the document footers and headers. Microsoft Word has comprehensive footers. Auto create date auto print date document name which may be different from document title and file path. These are helpful and interesting when "embedding" several individual documents into an aggregated longer document. Luxurious and flexible
for Home use LO is enough to get around, Word and Email is easy was never the problem. Excel, and VBA plugins are the things, and Powerquery, and all database related stuff.
There is a 3rd party software that I use for mass mailings (there's a lot of them out there) that checks on the accuracy of all the addresses in your excel file mailing lists and corrects them. Anyway, When I import an excel list into Libre Office to work on, everything goes fine. If I import that Libre Office exported excel file into excel, everything goes fine. However, if I export from Libre office to an excel file and then import that excel file into the mass mailing software, it will say that there's a ridiculous amount of records in the file. Ex. If there are actually 300 addresses in the excel file, the mass mailing software will say that there are 2 million addresses. When you use the "preview file" option in the mass-mailing software, you'll find that all those extra record lines are blank. So, there's some sort of corruption of background data that happens in the conversion to a MS Excel file from Libre Office. In order to fix this problem, one would have to import that corrupted file into excel and export it as a new excel file, then import that into the mass-mailing program.
I use Excel with VBA Macros for work. That program is so powerful and there just isn't an equivalent for Linux. It would be nice if Microsoft released a Linux version of Excel so that I could use it on my home computers.
Things like spill arrays and the filter function are really useful in o365. The reason I've switched to only using Excel (where I used to almost only use LibreOffice calc) is specifically for these features. If excel was not so slow, the new lambda function feature of also really powerful. I also heavily use the "format as table" feature which defines a table in Excel that you can reference the columns of. LibreOffice calc is lacking in these areas. It would be great if calc didn't have to play catch up and struggle to stay compatible with the excel format, but could instead branch out to implementing it's own new and useful features. I think a good alternative to excel would be something that's intentionally not compatible with the Excel file format, but is more effective for users. But it would be good if at least basic copy-paste worked between them. But I think trying to make a product that can work with the excel file format is not a good way to make a good alternative.
For a moment there I thought the tuxedo laptops open by magically sticking the lid to your finger.... Pretty neat shot by the way. It would be cool if laptops actually opened this way... Steve Jobs would do it.
I tried extensively for personal projects and found out that still MS Excel and Access is better option than their counterparts. I had to go back. Few crucial features (for my project) was missing.
Thank you for this, Nick. I wish you would call out LibreOffice's biggest incompatibility with MS Office and that is Calc is not compatible with Excel's Table's that are created via the Ctrl+T shortcut. I understand it is open source and there are only so many contributors, but this has been in Excel since 2007 and is pretty well entrenched by now (i.e. it's not going away). I have tried Only Office (thanks again, to your previous video, Nick) and while it does work with tables created in Excel (did not test the opposite situation) I did not try it out long enough to see if all of the functionalities are there (i.e. when you create a table it automatically creates ranges based on the column headings and data in those columns, not sure if Only Office can work with those), I can use Calc for about 75% of my uses in which I can work around not having the Table functionality, but it's that last 25% that gets me. I can understand newer functions like Xlookup, Unique, etc. not being integrated into Calc yet, but why has the Table functionality not been adopted? Otherwise, I do LOVE LibreOffice, Writer is every bit as good as Word for my uses and is worth the download, alone, to break away from at least one of MS's office products (I rarely use the other apps in the suite).
Sorry to bear the bad news, but this has been extensively discussed already and they simply won't back down. The LibreOffice team is passionately against implementing this table functionality, which they deem redundant or useless, no matter how many users ask for it.
@@mad_vegan I saw that some developers were supportive of it when it came to a potential Google Summer Of Coding suggestion. But that was years ago. It's a shame, if that is their stance, because it holds back Calc, IMHO. I understand they don't want to be just a clone of MS Office, but this hurts compatibility substantially not to mention productivity.
@@mad_vegan LibreOffice developer here. I don't know anybody who is opposed to implementing this (I checked our bugzilla for what is written there - bug number 132780 for example), quit the opposite - a lot of developers would like to have this in LibreOffice. The problem is that this is a larger feature that needs to change the Calc core, UI and import/export filters and without funding it is hard for anyone to find time to implement it. There are already parts implemented, but mostly to be able to round-trip a xlsx document in LibreOffice and not loose the table data in the process.
@@quikee9195 👏Kudos for all the great work from all you devs. It's a very impressive suite! Like tons of others, I do hope you'll be able to implement the Table feature soon. It's literally the only thing that keeps me with MS. I also understand the funding situation. That's why it's important that everyone who appreciates and/or uses the software contribute financially, otherwise we're all held hostage to the subscription model. 💲💲💲❗❗❗
@@quikee9195 Thank you for the insight. I noticed that the Google Summer of Code proposal indicated 350 hours to accomplish this. That is quite a bit of time to devote, so I understand the cost perspective. Perhaps a Kickstarter can be started and funded by those of us requesting this feature can be used to fund this change?
Thanks for the useful tips. For the ms fonts, you show the ms-ttf-fonts package from the AUR, the arch wiki recommends to use ttf-ms-win11-auto (or win10) instead.
As an academic, Impress is the least Microsoft-compatible program from the big three in LibreOffice. I expect some vector objects to move themselves after re-opening the slideshow, and I've never been able to embed movies in a way that they remain after re-opening the file. I may try OnlyOffice, and a colleague has shown me that it's possible to use Google Docs as a Powerpoint substitute. I should add that an important extension in LibreOffice (Writer) is the reference manager, Zotero. I've changed reference managers twice already over the years, and have thus needed to re-import my citations, and I'm hoping Zotero will have some staying power.
10 месяцев назад
Hey Nick, you won't read this, but thats the reason we use foss: liberty of choice. Let the usar choose wich interface he likes.
If I want to share office documents with someone it is better to use Google office. I am 100% sure that it will work perfectly, but at the same time, we can work together mostly. In other choices, I use Libre office every time
@@TheLinuxEXP when they change it to ribbons as a default option, I won't complain either. I think you can always adjust yourself to the developer's preference in a couple of days, most of the time.
Don't save in MS format by default. If creates problems when reopening documents especially with stlyes. Using the multisave extension is much better as it allows you to automatically save to MS formats in addition to the standard ODF formats.
For me, I just use Only Office for ms office formats, which people send to me. But if I create a new document for myself, I use ODF with libreoffice as it has more features.
If I knew about onlyoffice in my student years, I'll probably should've been able to stick to Linux. Libreoffice at the time didn't had tabed style interface and I constantly had issues where my doc was completely fine on my screen and then completely destroyed when I try to print it in local copy centers. I wish I also knew about save as pdf option too, but either way, that wouldn't fix my experience completely because we used to co-work on the same docs to, and If I shared one or made changes in Libre it always was messed up for others.
When I was a student, nothing could beat LaTeX + vim. Being able to do everything on keyboard gave such a boost in efficiency. Being able to share code for equations and figures between reports and presentations made things so convenient.
I wonder if it's possible to submit an MR so that all of these changes are done under a "mimick MS Office" type configuration. Linux definitely needs to have the option for those who don't want to tinker like this for wider adoption. Love the video, I've been struggling w/ this myself!
I love LibreOffice. I realized my bachelor degree thesis in LibreOffice. However, I switched to Office. I still have LibreOffice installed. Bu I think that in 2022 having Impress, or Calc crash on me when inputting basic data, losing my data, is unacceptable. And don't tell me about the autosave option - I should put it autosave each 60 seconds and we know how long it takes LibreOffice to start doing its stuff.
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Nick, maybe at some point you could elaborate on the whole Database Integration, especially the driver setup and where to get them with a nice Document. I remember that when I started, I had headaches for weeks. I still don't know why to take the route via the Database application. Maybe I haven't figured that out.
Portmaster’s pretty cool, Spotify has like 3k connections and it blocks 90% of them.
The theme option is for 7.4 (Linux Mint 21 has 7.3). Just installed the appimage 7.4 and works well now.
Nick! The stupid ribbon interface was *the* reason why I switched to LibreOffice long before I moved to linux! Why would you wish that ugly thing on the rest of us?
Little tip for next time you make a video that could potentially be used on windows as well
Instead of C:\Users\Username\Appdata\Roaming just type %APPDATA%
And instead of Instead of C:\Users\Username\Appdata\Local just type %LocalAppdata%
Wow, I didn't even know LO had extensions.
This video is 100% much more useful than most LO configuration videos out there.
I have as always loved using extensions.
Some handy tips. I've been using LibreOffice for years now. Partly because by the time I got my hands on MS Office I had gotten so used to Libre's UI that everything else just feels weird to me now. It's still a piece of software I happily recommend to anyone who needs to get work done.
I feel weird in MS Office now as well. I'll add the MS fonts and change the ribbon layout. LibreOffice Calc is the tool that needs the most work. Writer is perfectly fine as is.
i still have old fogies who hate it and i wish i had seen this video first, they want the office they know, sometimes with the EXACT buttons. i've compared office 2013 and office 2016 on to laptops side by side with the EXACT same UI and because it 2016 was a slightly darker shade of grade it broke thier brain.
The video we all needed, to help out new Linux users.
This video came at the perfect time for me. I'm slowly trying to transition to Linux, and currently that involves switching away from closed source applications to open source cross platform ones. Office was the big hurdle for me because a. LibreOffice's layout was way to confusing with the little muscle memory I have, b. it sometimes didn't seem to correctly display math formulas saved in Word as an odt, c. the default template feeling ever so slightly off and d. Word doesn't like it when I save an odt with Windows Ink content, the 'drawing area' should be converted to an image but everything is all over the place. The last problem is Word's fault and at this point I'm using Paint to quickly make those sketches, but knowing that LibreOffice has even more extensive toolbar customization and knowing that it can convert certain Office-features for you (and that I should change the default way Word interprets math thanks to that compatibility table), I'm one step closer to ditching Office and one step closer to going full Linux. Thank you for the video man
On Linux, the replacement for Paint is KolourPaint.
If you need to use math formulas on a regular base, I suggest you to use LaTeX instead.
OR... you can just stick to industry standard and stick with Office. Listen, sometimes these youtubers who are not in touch with the real world, often without non-youtube jobs tend to forget these things. It is just not ok to work in any serious business (or if in college, graduate school, professional schools like Law, Medicine) to be risk major compatibility issue, and also expect your colleagues to some how also be ok with your FOSS software. At best, maybe go with Only Office; but otherwise stick to Microsoft Office.
@@Powerincarnate. Most of the critic points the guy above (@The ChargedCreeper) noticed are easily fixable by setting some configs and adapting to a different UI. The only really limitating one is the problem with math formulas, which LibreOffice is not good at, just as MS Office. That's why I suggested LaTeX, which is the standard for math.
I think no one forces you to use FOSS software, neither I can see why some colleagues would pretend you to pay some hundreds euro for the MSOffice license, while you can do essentially the same job (and also work on MS formats) with FOSS. As far as I know, using LibreOffice (or other FOSS) you do not risk any "major compatibility issues" with MSOffice software, whichever your business is.
Just a note that it’s not “Microsoft Office” any more, it’s all been rebranded as “Microsoft 365”.
Which is kind of amusing, since I think Microsoft has yet to manage 365 days in a row without an outage.
My guy, thanks for putting this together. Most of LibreOffice/Excel tutorials stop after adding a ribbon/fonts. Thanks for the extra detail here. My job in finance keeps me tied to Excel, and OnlyOffice isn't as robust (no SOLVER) as LibreOffice. Here's to reinstalling Linux and trying this out!
Your videos are awesome and you are one of the only channels I still watch on RUclips. Thanks for all your effort! I really wish that Libreoffice would enable a lot of this by default as when some users download and install it, they will be immediately shocked by the user interface and find an alternative like only office.
another group or dev would have to offer a separate package for this so that LibreOffice didn't get sued for copywrite infringement, though
I needed this, thank you for sharing. It's easy to get lost in all the menus and features when you deal with hundreds of programs daily, and having someone show you how to make your life (and the others you work for) just a bit easier is appreciated.
I recently swithed from MS office to LO, just saw this video and all my doubts cleared in one single place. Thank you👍
I like the new transitions you are using! Really modern in my oppinion.
Also, OnlyOffice ftw
Another guy insinuated that OnlyOffice is more like MS Office. Do you agree? NextCloud uses OnlyOffice, but most people say OnlyOffice isn't as feature-rich as LibreOffice. Just curious.
@@genkiferal7178 Onlyoffice is less customizable and doesn't have desktop theme integration. I have also heard it's related to Russia. But it has better compatibility with Microsoft
@@user-tc9tb3a thanks. Slava rodu. Russia is not the enemy - globalists are. Zelenskyy is a globalist, the enemy within.
I use WPS, Libre, and OnlyOffice. Due to its Chinese roots, WPS is the best for multi-lingual word processing in Asian languages. The Japanese functions really well. Thanks for the advice on Libre.
Thank you for another super-helpful video. Great to see that you have covered one of the most important issues for those looking to switch to Linux. Having grown up with Microsoft Office (on PC and Mac), I was concerned about its perceived stranglehold as it does not run on Linux. I now feel more confident that switching to Linux will not isolate me from those using Microsoft Office on other operating systems.
In most cases it's now better than sharing files between MS Office Windows and Mac used to be a while ago. I haven't tried any really complex formatting like automatic numbering, table of contents, etc. in Libre Office in a long time and hopefully won't have to anytime soon (it wasn't a part of my studies I particularly enjoyed and my job doesn't involve any of that).
Nice video, thanks. I've been working with LibreOffice for a couple of years and do all my consulting work with it from reports, to presentations and data analysis (that even Excel cannot handle). Yet, this video has taught me a few things. Well done!
Thank You so much for this one, I got really tired using office online for friends and libreoffice for my own stuff, this video probably fixed most of my issues with libreoffice compatibility, actually I never digged into settings.
This video is a great help for someone moving over from MS Office to LibreOffice.
Very nice video, I love LibreOffice and use it even on my Win11 and MacOS computers! The only thing I don't like on these two OS's is that dark mode isn't yet implemented as well as on Linux...you have to enable Experimental Features from the Advanced menu, restart the program and then it's sorta dark mode but you still have to tweak a couple things and it doesn't look 100% complete and integrated with the system. On Linux no matter the distro, it just works and is coherent.
Using Manjaro, I have both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice. Plus, in my line of work (state school teacher in Spain), I do lots of work using Google's tools.
Among the three, for complex work I vastly prefer LibreOffice -especially for my grammar videos (presentations) and graphic design in text-based documents.
As for the layout of the applications themselves, let's just say that when MS Office switched to the ribbon layout, that was the exact moment I got rid of it (I was still letting myself be used by Windows then). Can't stand it, and it's why I *only* use OnlyOffice to open *.docx files, which by default it does way better than LibreOffice.
Any LibreOffice devs reading this: all my respect and love, and please keep the current default layout.
thank you soo much , i switched to linux few days back and this was the only video i needed
I'm new to Linux, and this video is super helpful. Thank you!
the mind, the soul, idea, intent, reason, fear, ignorance, health, dream
Merci pour tous ces conseils Nic :) Je devais justement chercher ces fonctions de compatibilité, tu tombes à pic 👍 Maintenant, il ne reste plus qu'à trouver tous ces paramétrages en francais !😅
You forget to mention 1 point that Libre Office Base is not compatible with Microsoft Access or vice versa.
You give very nice tips.
MSO isn't compatible with itself, either. Use FOSS.
I just use OnlyOffice! I LOVE it! Only had a slight issue with page sizes on PDF export for spreadsheets. Otherwise it's been flawless and feels very high end
Does OnlyOffice looks and feel more like MS Office/365?
@@genkiferal7178 Far more in my opinion.
参考になりました。アリガトウゴザイマス。LibreOffice日本語では縦書き、日本の暦も使えるので、とても有益です。LibreOffice日本の開発者たちに感謝しています。ファイル形式はODFで統一することができる場合は極力ODFにしています。いざというときはPDFで出力をすれば最低限閲覧だけでもできるので、たいていの場合は何とかなっています。
Videos like this and channel like this must be watched by everyone.
And only then people can see Linux as user friendly and not frightening as they think.
It's been quite a while since I looked at LibreOffice and your video really impressed me with how far the office suite has come.
LibreOffice is a great office suite, I like it so much and to me it's mandatory to install it alongside Ms-Office, however, it still needs some tweakings especially when managing non-latin languages
**Never** change away from the native file format by default !!! You'll introduce an ever-worsening irrecoverable corruption through incompatibilities with the foreign format and bugs in the software !!
**Always** save in the native file format 1st, *_then_* save **a copy** in the foreign !
I still +liked and added to tuts list.
Thank you for all the work you are doing to make open source software more popular.
For budget reasons these days Ive been distro hopping and finally staying in MX Linux, and this video was very helpful to customize LibreOffice, thank you so much! New subscriber here
I am actually thankful that LibreOffice does not have the ribbon menu by default. I don't like it and the current default suits my workstyle much better.
... but I can understand why people who are used to MS Office want something they already know.
I like Libre Office even more now.
This is the best guide for compatibility with MS Office I have seen!
Stopped using Libre Office after trying OnlyOffice. Night and Day difference. OK, Libre Office has some more stuff, but if you want good compatibility with Office documents, then nothing beats Only Office as far as I know.
OnlyOffice is really good, yeah!
WPS Office? Though last I heard, LO has improved their compatibility by _a lot_ . OnlyOffice still has some issues with PivotTable when I checked early this year, LO handled it better though it still messed with the formatting (but at least it remains interoperable between LO and MSO).
+1 for Libre Office from me - use it all the time and rarely have interoperability problems with my MS work buddies. Will definitely add some of the tweaks you showed - thanks Nick! 👏
i was going to do vm stuff to install office for school, now i can use LibreOffice! thanks for the tip
The timing of this video couldn't be any better! 🙂 Thank you Nick!
Thanks for great Bude as New Linux user coming from MOffice
Excellent video, I switched from LibreOffice a few years back to OnlyOffice. I don't require the sheer metric-ton of features LibreOffice has and instead prefer the more MS Office user experience out of the box that OnlyOffice provides.
thanks for this comment. that is what I needed to know.
I'm an old time Linux user, and this video was worth watching. Enlightening, I might say. Thanks!
Sounds pretty complicated, not going to lie. That boat has sailed for me, especially as I both work in a very MS Office centric office and does distro-hopping for fun, especially since WPS Office via Flatpak is an option.
It's a pain having to set Libreoffice up every time I distro-hop, and it's really not good whenever a co-worker or client sent me a file and when I sent it back some of the colors or formatting is different from what they set (it was really annoying dealing with pivot table and making sure it doesn't mess with either of those).
WPS Office just does it better, and yeah, I don't like it either, but it's just the best option on Linux unless you really need the really advanced features like scripting (though it's not like LO is good with MS Office scripts/macros either). I honestly wouldn't use it if it doesn't come in Flatpak where I could just disable network access via Flatseal. But I could, and I did, so I can move on with my work.
Office suite and office work is just boring. No matter how much I try, I just don't have the same passion required for going open source with them unlike I do with the OS. So I just want to be done with it and move on, hence giving up and using WPS Office and MS Office via Crossover and TeamViewer.
Nah, it’s like 5 minutes to do all this
Settings can be "exported" and "imported" after quick search (I don't know if it also saves fonts but I guess that it does not).
Happy birthday Nick! Also, as someone switching to LibreOffice from iWork and MS Office, this was super helpful.
I have used OpenOffice for YEARS and loved it- mostly b/c MS Office was so inaccessibly expensive for me... and I moved to LibreOffice about a year ago and it's amazing. I love it. I use it on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It's great.
Remember when the ribbon interface was forced upon us, it was pretty much universally abhorred. Not using the ribbon interface is a major plus for power users. It is a pity that Steve Ballmer ignored this criticism, he did that with Vista and Windows 8 as well and it finally cost him his job. Unfortunately this happened too late for Office to return to a sane interface, one that has not been slowing down users for 15 years. You should be praising Libre Office where it improves on MS Office and not suggesting ways to nerf it.
LibreOffice can also do a fair job emulating the sidebar interface style found in Apple's office suite, and I recommend trying it. It's missing a few features-for example POSITION and Size doesn't let you set the position. It's literally in the name, but LibreOffice doesn't do it. You have to open a stupid dialog box for that. Even so, the sidebar is really good if you have a wide display (and at this point we all do), rather than the ribbon designed in the age of 4:3.
Wait, Apple has an office suite?
@@mr.sidious9163
Yes. And it's free but not open source. It's called iWork. And it's online version is literally called "iWork for iCloud"...
When my students try to use the Office subscription excuse... Libreoffice! 🤠
I wish I could upvote this video a thousand times.
Uni student here, in the old side which was a teenager in the late 90s, and Linux only user since 2005.
I tried many things as to send the projects and essays without using Windows.
As you said, calc compatibility is very bad.
We are forced to use calibry light, which doesn't exist in Linux
When there are many lists, it always gets messed up.
I am lazy and we are forced to use a lot of referencing. As far as I know, only Office 365 allows to just fill the fields and the suite will add the references automagically according to whichever standard you need (Harvard referencing on my case).
When I am not using references, I tend to use Office97 on a Win9x VM, because I love the interface there and I hate ribbon, and... Well, clippy for nostalgia and nuissance.
If I can I use LibreOffice, and import as pdf as you recommend.
For anything else, VM with windows 10 and my student license of Office... I can't wait to wave it all goodbye.
What a wonderful video, REALLY helpful thank you 😊🎉
You are a true master. A savage.. Excellent presentation.
Very useful. Thanks a million for this walktrough, Nick.
This a fantastically useful video. Clear, concise, and I refer to it often. Thank you!
For basic stuff the open source offices are adequate. As a data analyst though, Excel is king and probably always will be. There's just too much advanced functionality that alternatives don't even begin to address.
And yet excel still uses visual basic for scripting. I love excel but damn the VBA
The professional data analysts don’t use Excel. They would use Python+Jupyter+Pandas+Matplotlib. Excel has too many problems, like misinterpreting text data in strange ways, or dropping rows if there are too many to import.
The ttf-mscorefont package offer almost 20 years old ttf versions of ms fonts, and that means no smart features, different metrics, small glyph coverage and other issues. Since their release, ms changed everything about those fonts:and yes, they did that on purpose. Those old and crappy fonts only share the name with modern times new roman, arial, etc., so it's better to NOT use them. If, to ensure compatibility, you want modern MS fonts, you need to buy said fonts (AFAIK, copying them from a windows installation is illegal).
Oh I hate those fonts. They have an awful bitmap which seems to have been drawn by a toddler
Okay, but how can we make MS Office more like LibreOffice?
Thanks for telling us how to switch to the Tabbed interface and not telling us how to switch back 🙂. You had me all "outraged on the internet" for the 5 seconds until I found the show menu bar button. Jeez, I was so close to tweeting about it. (just kidding). But, seriously, thanks for an informative video. I recently cancelled my Office 365 subscription so my kids will be hassling me next month when Word stops working.
been using libre office years now. works wonders
No one will discuss the document footers and headers. Microsoft Word has comprehensive footers. Auto create date auto print date document name which may be different from document title and file path. These are helpful and interesting when "embedding" several individual documents into an aggregated longer document.
Luxurious and flexible
for Home use LO is enough to get around, Word and Email is easy was never the problem. Excel, and VBA plugins are the things, and Powerquery, and all database related stuff.
Thanks, I learned several new things. Particularly, about the wonderful extensions.
There is a 3rd party software that I use for mass mailings (there's a lot of them out there) that checks on the accuracy of all the addresses in your excel file mailing lists and corrects them.
Anyway, When I import an excel list into Libre Office to work on, everything goes fine. If I import that Libre Office exported excel file into excel, everything goes fine. However, if I export from Libre office to an excel file and then import that excel file into the mass mailing software, it will say that there's a ridiculous amount of records in the file. Ex. If there are actually 300 addresses in the excel file, the mass mailing software will say that there are 2 million addresses. When you use the "preview file" option in the mass-mailing software, you'll find that all those extra record lines are blank. So, there's some sort of corruption of background data that happens in the conversion to a MS Excel file from Libre Office. In order to fix this problem, one would have to import that corrupted file into excel and export it as a new excel file, then import that into the mass-mailing program.
Thank you for all your great enthusiastic videos. ❤
I use Excel with VBA Macros for work. That program is so powerful and there just isn't an equivalent for Linux. It would be nice if Microsoft released a Linux version of Excel so that I could use it on my home computers.
Thank you for your video. I use LibreOffice Writer for my Math documents
Things like spill arrays and the filter function are really useful in o365. The reason I've switched to only using Excel (where I used to almost only use LibreOffice calc) is specifically for these features. If excel was not so slow, the new lambda function feature of also really powerful. I also heavily use the "format as table" feature which defines a table in Excel that you can reference the columns of.
LibreOffice calc is lacking in these areas. It would be great if calc didn't have to play catch up and struggle to stay compatible with the excel format, but could instead branch out to implementing it's own new and useful features.
I think a good alternative to excel would be something that's intentionally not compatible with the Excel file format, but is more effective for users. But it would be good if at least basic copy-paste worked between them. But I think trying to make a product that can work with the excel file format is not a good way to make a good alternative.
Wow thanks I literally needed this for the first time for homework
I did not know about the tabbed UI. Thanks a million for that!
I use LibreOffice on Linux & Windows. I have for years, all the way back to when they were from Sun.
Banging Video, tons of learning points, Brilliant..."Make Libre Office Great Again"!! Thanks Nic
For a moment there I thought the tuxedo laptops open by magically sticking the lid to your finger....
Pretty neat shot by the way.
It would be cool if laptops actually opened this way...
Steve Jobs would do it.
I've been using Libre for years. I took one look at Apple's Numbers on my new Mac and downloaded Libre.
Numbers is a joke!
@@TheLinuxEXP I feel underwhelmed by many of Apple's software offerings. (Sending this from my Linux tablet) 🤫👀
Libre Office 7.5, this version they greatly expanded the capabilities of Calc.!
As always writing a comment to support the channel
Ok this is great - thanks so much for the effort. I wish I had this about 18 months ago!
I tried extensively for personal projects and found out that still MS Excel and Access is better option than their counterparts. I had to go back. Few crucial features (for my project) was missing.
Yeah, if you depend on advanced Excel features, or Access, it’s hard to find a replacement
Access is a pretty rubbish database. Even SQLite is better than that.
On Arch based distros, you can use the AUR ttf-ms-win11-auto to have up-to-date Microsoft fonts.
Thank you for this, Nick. I wish you would call out LibreOffice's biggest incompatibility with MS Office and that is Calc is not compatible with Excel's Table's that are created via the Ctrl+T shortcut. I understand it is open source and there are only so many contributors, but this has been in Excel since 2007 and is pretty well entrenched by now (i.e. it's not going away). I have tried Only Office (thanks again, to your previous video, Nick) and while it does work with tables created in Excel (did not test the opposite situation) I did not try it out long enough to see if all of the functionalities are there (i.e. when you create a table it automatically creates ranges based on the column headings and data in those columns, not sure if Only Office can work with those), I can use Calc for about 75% of my uses in which I can work around not having the Table functionality, but it's that last 25% that gets me. I can understand newer functions like Xlookup, Unique, etc. not being integrated into Calc yet, but why has the Table functionality not been adopted? Otherwise, I do LOVE LibreOffice, Writer is every bit as good as Word for my uses and is worth the download, alone, to break away from at least one of MS's office products (I rarely use the other apps in the suite).
Sorry to bear the bad news, but this has been extensively discussed already and they simply won't back down. The LibreOffice team is passionately against implementing this table functionality, which they deem redundant or useless, no matter how many users ask for it.
@@mad_vegan I saw that some developers were supportive of it when it came to a potential Google Summer Of Coding suggestion. But that was years ago. It's a shame, if that is their stance, because it holds back Calc, IMHO. I understand they don't want to be just a clone of MS Office, but this hurts compatibility substantially not to mention productivity.
@@mad_vegan LibreOffice developer here. I don't know anybody who is opposed to implementing this (I checked our bugzilla for what is written there - bug number 132780 for example), quit the opposite - a lot of developers would like to have this in LibreOffice. The problem is that this is a larger feature that needs to change the Calc core, UI and import/export filters and without funding it is hard for anyone to find time to implement it. There are already parts implemented, but mostly to be able to round-trip a xlsx document in LibreOffice and not loose the table data in the process.
@@quikee9195 👏Kudos for all the great work from all you devs. It's a very impressive suite! Like tons of others, I do hope you'll be able to implement the Table feature soon. It's literally the only thing that keeps me with MS. I also understand the funding situation. That's why it's important that everyone who appreciates and/or uses the software contribute financially, otherwise we're all held hostage to the subscription model. 💲💲💲❗❗❗
@@quikee9195 Thank you for the insight. I noticed that the Google Summer of Code proposal indicated 350 hours to accomplish this. That is quite a bit of time to devote, so I understand the cost perspective. Perhaps a Kickstarter can be started and funded by those of us requesting this feature can be used to fund this change?
thank you! I really appreciated this video! It was super helpful to get things figured out with this program!
Thanks for the useful tips. For the ms fonts, you show the ms-ttf-fonts package from the AUR, the arch wiki recommends to use ttf-ms-win11-auto (or win10) instead.
Thank you. The video was very useful.
Excellent tutorial. Merci beaucoup.
This video answered a lot of my questions.
As an academic, Impress is the least Microsoft-compatible program from the big three in LibreOffice. I expect some vector objects to move themselves after re-opening the slideshow, and I've never been able to embed movies in a way that they remain after re-opening the file. I may try OnlyOffice, and a colleague has shown me that it's possible to use Google Docs as a Powerpoint substitute.
I should add that an important extension in LibreOffice (Writer) is the reference manager, Zotero. I've changed reference managers twice already over the years, and have thus needed to re-import my citations, and I'm hoping Zotero will have some staying power.
Hey Nick, you won't read this, but thats the reason we use foss: liberty of choice. Let the usar choose wich interface he likes.
This is a good idea for a video series. I personally prefer the pre-ribbon interface, but there are a lot of weirdos out there who like the ribbon.
MS Office is actually really good. It would be great to see Ms release it on Linux.
They did for OSx, so why not?
Because MS doesn't want people using Linux. They want them on Windows mostly. They are in to make money.
I don't know... Until libre works on something like power query and morph and zoom transition, no can make me abandon Ms Office suite. ☺️☺️
If I want to share office documents with someone it is better to use Google office. I am 100% sure that it will work perfectly, but at the same time, we can work together mostly. In other choices, I use Libre office every time
Very useful presentation. Thank you Nick.
Ribbon interface is for dummies. you can search any option in the libreoffice with a shortcut. I use shift+esc.
Yeah, most people are never doing that. Visual icons will always be more suited to the general public
@@TheLinuxEXP when they change it to ribbons as a default option, I won't complain either. I think you can always adjust yourself to the developer's preference in a couple of days, most of the time.
Don't save in MS format by default. If creates problems when reopening documents especially with stlyes. Using the multisave extension is much better as it allows you to automatically save to MS formats in addition to the standard ODF formats.
Perfect video for me. I'm learning and this save my life ✌️✌️✌️
Thank you Nick. 🙇🙇🙇
For me, I just use Only Office for ms office formats, which people send to me.
But if I create a new document for myself, I use ODF with libreoffice as it has more features.
Thanks + Gracias x One Million
If I knew about onlyoffice in my student years, I'll probably should've been able to stick to Linux. Libreoffice at the time didn't had tabed style interface and I constantly had issues where my doc was completely fine on my screen and then completely destroyed when I try to print it in local copy centers. I wish I also knew about save as pdf option too, but either way, that wouldn't fix my experience completely because we used to co-work on the same docs to, and If I shared one or made changes in Libre it always was messed up for others.
When I was a student, nothing could beat LaTeX + vim. Being able to do everything on keyboard gave such a boost in efficiency. Being able to share code for equations and figures between reports and presentations made things so convenient.
Excellent explanation
Extra thanks for this useful video with tips I was not aware of.
I wonder if it's possible to submit an MR so that all of these changes are done under a "mimick MS Office" type configuration. Linux definitely needs to have the option for those who don't want to tinker like this for wider adoption.
Love the video, I've been struggling w/ this myself!
Do you mean a “PR” instead of a “MR”?
I love LibreOffice. I realized my bachelor degree thesis in LibreOffice. However, I switched to Office. I still have LibreOffice installed. Bu I think that in 2022 having Impress, or Calc crash on me when inputting basic data, losing my data, is unacceptable. And don't tell me about the autosave option - I should put it autosave each 60 seconds and we know how long it takes LibreOffice to start doing its stuff.