When my in-laws and grandfather got new laptops, I installed LibreOffice for them. Put shortcuts on their desktop like they were used to seeing, Renamed them to Word, Excel, etc, and changed the icons to the MS ones. It launches the corresponding Libreoffice application of course. Only my grandfather noticed that something was different. However, he just said, "I like the new version of Microsoft Word. It is much more straight forward."
You are a Genius to change the Icon/short-Cut (?) to look like MS style. I used both LO 7.4 And used LO in the format as MS Office 2013. And everyone in the family finds it useful!
It's unfortunate that Libreoffice has to be compared to Microsoft Office all the time, because it's simply excellent when judged solely on it's own merits. That being said, this video is spot on. I actually used WPS office for a long time due to compatibility with MS Word and Excel for a while, until earlier this year when I realized that newer versions of Libreoffice actually have better compatibility than WPS for everything I use daily with the rare exception of some niche borders and WordArt. All in all, Libreoffice deserves much more love and keeps getting better with every update.
@@noturno3451 I'm sure it works well for some people and it's interface is definitely a huge part of that. I just find these days that Libreoffice does the job well enough for me to stop searching for alternatives.
It's funny you mentioned office workers. Our parent org bought MS Office for all the office staff. Some of our office staff are starting to warm up to LibreOffice (which we also install) because they've run into scenarios where Microsoft Office has failed them. In one case a document was sent to a worker in Apple's .pages format. The version of MS Office we have installed on most machines will not read .pages documents, but LibreOffice Writer will. Another time a worker was trying to copy and paste some directions from a web site into Microsoft Word, and MS Word was just creating a big mess. They were pleasantly surprised to find out that copying and pasting the same page into LibreOffice Writer resulted in a much cleaner page that they had to do a lot less work to clean up. A similar situation happened with a web site where the fields just didn't look good pasted into Microsoft Excel, but looked great in LibreOffice Calc. I have seen the inverse as well, (web sites formatting better in MS Office), but not very often. Normally, I find LibreOffice seems to work better for cutting and pasting things from the web. I also used LibreOffice, back in 2013, when I wrote a book for Packt, and no issues back then either.
Very good points Jay. I use a Linux laptop and LibreOffice in a corporate Microsoft 365 Environment and nobody has cottoned on yet 😉 Personally, I would love to see a video about how you used the FOSS tools to put together your book - from planning to drafting to any images/ covers etc. However I suspect it may be a bit niche! 😊 Great vid as always 👏
I've been using Libre Office for many years and I really hoped this video would help me make the case to other people - especially given that it runs perfectly well on Mac and Windows too, so you don't have to switch to Linux to switch to Libre Office, which can be too big a leap for some people. What they need is a stepping stone and Libre Office is perfect for the job. Using Libre Office on Mac or Windows can give people confidence and gradually enables them to let go of a lot of assumptions and their reliance on proprietary software. This is the myth that needs to be busted in my opinion. Helping people start to use FOSS applications that are also cross platform, such as Firefox, Thunderbird and GIMP means they quickly realise there's precious little day to day stuff they can't get done on Linux . . . the bridges and stepping stones are all there, we just have to help people find them!
That’s the right approach imo. I study CS in uni, and even some of my colleagues wouldn’t know how to install Linux. I think the Linux people have to realize that most people are not very technical, so the approach should be to make better FOSS apps than then priopietary alternative so normal people use them. I was able to get some people to use libre office bc it’s free and very similar to office for example
@@nicolascossio5961 That's been my approach for a long time. My 83 year old dad uses an old MacBook to run Libre Office - since his retirement he's written several novels and countless short articles with Libre Office. If I swapped his MacBook, for another silvery laptop with some sort of macos look-alike desktop, just so he could easily find Libre Office, Firefox and an email client in the "dock", I doubt he'd give it a moment's thought, or even notice. The only reason I haven't is that his 12 year old MacBook just keeps on working! My point is that most people don't consciously choose an OS, let alone a specific distro, and mostly couldn't care less, so long as it works.
So I realize it's not at all the same, but I write for a living, and I mostly rely on Markdown and Pandoc. That way I can write in my preferred text editor (Vim, of course). Markdown and Vim allow me to automate a lot of my writing, and write what I would never be able to write without it. That said, if I need to create .docx documents, LibreOffice is my absolute go-to on my Linux computer. I also recommend it to anyone who needs a WYSIWYG word processor. My parents have used LibreOffice for years, all without paying Microsoft's exorbitant license fees. IMHO, the only reason someone should use MS Office is if their company requires (and pays for) it. In fact, mine does, and I still only use it when I absolutely have to.
Really glad for you😊. Only if the rest of the masses could also do likewise... In an ideal world, open doc format and FOSS app like LibreOffice is the default defacto standard. Ppl wonldn't be "forced" to buy/use proprietory product if they choose otherwise😊. Hope to see the daylight soon; then keeping windows in VMs would become purely a hobby, past-time and hobby. P/S: heard that VIM & Latex makes a great pair.
I spent the last ten years doing a degree in computing and IT and a masters in software engineering. I used Libre Office for all my assignments. Never had an issue.
I appreciate the point that you are making. I often find that LibreOffice project does not get the respect it deserves. We take it too much for granted. It is a remarkable office suite and I think deserves more recognition. Thanks for making this video.
I am an economist (Msc student) and work as a research assistant part time. All of my colleagues use Windows and excel. There are things that only excel can do, but I don't care about those. I am supposed to be the tech expert in the group, but when people send me huge excel files and expect me to be able to open them, it is frustrating that Libreoffice can't handle the whole file. Other office suits on linux just crash and Libreoffice cuts of many of the columns of the dataset. I may want to do things in Libreoffice and might be able to do them, I can't convince everyone to use it, nor can I change all of the existing literature's replication material written with excel in mind. (even importing and exporting xlsx files from matlab requires some of the excel libraries)
Just a note... I use the current version of Linux Mint and Ubuntu Studio along with both Windows 10 and 11. LibreOffice automatically updates on the two Linux systems and it's a bit more manual in Windows. You're absolutely correct on the compatibility improvement. I was frustrated about a decade ago and didn't pick it up again until last year. What a difference! No issues thus far and, more importantly, I haven't had any of those frustrating corruptions! That is why I dropped it years ago. I still prefer Excel but I think it's the customization goodies that I use and don't care to learn the nuances of LibreOffice Calc. When my Office 2019 licence is no longer useful, I will not be purchasing another MS Office licence and run LibreOffice only (unless something new and better comes along}. I enjoy your videos. Thank you for producing them.
I do like Libre Office a lot, but if only it had a better Icon Set to use in dark mode, the standard ones aren't very legible. Maybe you can also create a video, on how you use Writer, showing some of the cool things you do while writing the book.
The icons often depend on the theme of your distribution, with some distributions even going as far as to put the icons into a different package that's not always installed by default. On my side, I've never had that issue with the Flatpak version.
I ***LOVE*** LibreOffice. It's to the point where I've transitioned 2 small businesses into it (freelancers). Technically, is it inferior to MS Office... well yes, but only at the 70% tile+ of high end capabilities (e.g. MS Office's vector drawing in Powerpoint is far superior to LO Impress). BUT, I was able to adapt my operations to work within its constraints and now I have complete privacy and true cross platform portability, at no cost. LibreOffice + Ubuntu/Mint/PopOS is a true replacement for Windows / MacOS for most people. Even though I can get M$ Office for $10, I'll not go back. Now if there were only open source software to let me create SCORM modules with LibreOffice Impress...................
I wrote my thesis with Libre Office. I used Writer for the text document, I did my calculations using Calc, and did the presentation with Impress. I also did some light "DTP" with Writer ( imported pictures, diagrams, calculation tables etc on the document ). It did the job just fine, and I continue to use it professionally in my work laptop.
If you are doing any type of documentation that you would need to keep for a potentially long period of time (such as a master copy of a final draft of a book, quarterly/yearly spreadsheets for expenses and/or taxes, presentations for corporate training, etc.), then you should consider saving the “master” copies in ODF (Open Document Format) and make sure that they are the ones backed up instead of saving in some proprietary, binary-blobbed MS Office document format (especially avoid saving in OOXML, Microsoft’s Office Open XML format). This will ensure you data will be able to be read by any future FOSS office app that supports ODF.
I appreciate your points, which are all quite sensible. There is an element that is holding back a nice slice of potential users in academia, and that's the integration with reference managers such as Endnote or others. If libreoffice made integration with cite-while-you-write databases or made an open source reference manager system on their on, I think a lot of the windows based academia would flock to linux. I know I would for my work laptop.
Thank you for this video. I use LibreOffice all the time for years and it's an awesome piece of software. It's so cool to see that other people have a great experience with LibreOffice as I do =)
Very good video, Jay. I'm running a Kubuntu Focus laptop from Tuxedo Computers and as a developer, I use LibreOffice daily for my source code documentation. I have not had any issues with LibreOffice.
@@LearnLinuxTV I have the M2 Gen 4 Kubuntu Focus laptop with 64G RAM, 4TB Storage (2 2TB M.2's), onboard graphics and a NVIDIA RTX 3070 graphics card, a 15.5 inch 1440p 165Hz panel, I7 12th gen Processor . It can drive 4 4k external monitors but at the moment, it's driving 2 4k monitors and a 1080p front camera for my daily stand-ups. I figure that since I'm still working remotely, I would "Go big or go home"! I've added dual boot capability to it so I'm running both Kubuntu (daily driver) and Windows 11. I really like it and it fits my current needs. Plus, it's pretty much future-proof....at least for a good while anyway. :-)
While LibreOffice is the default for me as well, there is a feature with PowerPoint that my colleagues tend to use that simply doesn't exist in LibreOffice Impress and it's the SmartArt feature. Sure, Impress will correctly render the SmartArt graphic, but if you need to go in and add or remove elements, the "Smart"/functional capabilities found in PowerPoint are not present in Impress. Other than that, everything else works just fine for me with LibreOffice. In fact, I completed a Cybersecurity certification with an online university recently and the instructors used MSOffice. I not only was able to open their coursework, but I created ALL of my assignments using LibreOffice (I just saved them in Office format) and not ONE instructor noticed anything wrong.
Good points Jay. However there is one more reason I think people face this issue, even with latest versions. That is, Microsoft bundles a lot of fonts by default with Microsoft Office, and these fonts are proprietary. No one notices since many use MS Office and these fonts are there for them. Now if you open these in LibreOffice or any other open-source office suite, they'll have the font replaced with a default font, and that messes up the proportions. Things like replaced font can be too big or too small compared to MS fonts happen. If the document is using table layouts, good luck since this makes the doc look pretty bad. We can't have these fonts legally shipped with LibreOffice.
In that case, I think the best course of action is to ensure that we don't create any new documents that use those fonts. If they're causing a compatibility issue, time to purge them.
It is common to have function-alike Free fonts with identical metrics to proprietary ones. This should stop unwanted reformatting, at any rate. But this can happen even with Microsoft 365† on its own, just moving between different installations on different machines. †Yes, Microsoft is getting rid of the “Office” part of the name.
Outstanding concepts you presented here. I especially liked the lots of Linux users in a room and giving their opinions of LibreOffice. IMHO, you were spot on with that one. Keep up the good work!
"Shotcut" is a fantastic open-source video editor. I can't attest to whether it has the features you need or not, that's beyond my abilities. But it is worth a look.
Would be awesome if you could do an equivalent video about Gimp as well because it is normally written off as well in comparison to photoshop. Think it's very underrated as well
Libre office felt a little off, but it's practical. I switched to Only Office briefly after seeing people shilling for it. It looked good. Then I copied an entire txt document. Instances of the apostrophe was replaced with weird symbols. Documents containing comments didn't show up unless I clicked onto each line. Libre office is miles ahead. When it comes to compatability with MS office docs, I'll still use wps writer, but Libre Office will always be installed as a great backup. But for my older 32 bit computers, nothing beats the snappiness of abiword.
Debian has libre office 7.0 in the main repo, but 7.4 in the backports (which you'd use if you wanted the latest stuff). It's not any major version behind and the latest is easily available. Also having written a book in libre office doesn't really prove that it's not inferior to ms office. You can still write a book with inferior software.
I think if the publisher, or yourself, finds the right template to base the document on, you can pretty-much do anything and publish any document Microsoft Office can do. LibreOffice got me through a University Masters course here in Australia and I had to provide all my documents as DOCX, as well as provide those documents to an online system that had to read and check them for the teachers/lecturers and there was NEVER an issue.
Agree. I ditched MS Office aproximately. ten years ago and I begun to use LibreOffice instead even on Windows PCs since then. I am updating regularly, and never had a single problem, neither with early docx conversions.
I did not enjoy the gui experience on windows (scrolling up/down was a nightmare). But there’s also the frustration of learning a new software. I feel like people often forget how much learning to took to get familiar with Microsoft office. But with the subscription model of office, an alternative is pretty much required. Or just do everything at work.
Distributions should simply rely on the Flatpak version of LibreOffice, and the Document Foundation should officially declare that the preferred installation method for Linux, instead of anyone maintaining stuff separately. There are good reasons for distributions to want to control packages when it comes to various aspects of the system. But none of these reasons would apply to office productivity applications, where standardization is really important!
LibreOffice is great, but I never really got the hang of using it until I changed the User Interface to Tabbed. It makes it look more like Microsoft Office and makes the transition easier. I find most people dont adopt free software due to the way they look and feel, even if the functionality is there. Having a familiar, clean interface goes a long way.
The great thing about LibreOffice is that you don't have to use that horrible tabbed/ribbon interface that takes up so much room and makes things harder to find. Honestly nothing beats the old toolbars where you can drag/drop customize each toolbar. It's so much more efficient for people who do work. I know some people like the ribbon, but it's nice that LibreOffice can do both.
They both work well. I use Libre at home and Ms at work. The only pain I have is for example to remenber to use alt+return in excel and shift+return in Calc for a linebreak. But this is minor.
Regarding writer and impress, i didn't face any issue submitting my postgraduate thesis. The problems began when i was trying to run excel documents full of micros, controlling rs232 to usb controllers for their data manipulation. There was no way to come across to a solution even if i installed libreoffice on windows environment.
I paused this briefly. I am not a seasoned or even veteran Linux user. I think I've tried maybe 4 distros and currently use none. I do like it, but unless you really have a grasp, it's hard to figure out workarounds to the hardware that only favors Windows. Or at least I'm not good at it. I too enjoy Libre Office and have been using it to write my first fiction novel. I'm curious if there is a particular item in the Libre Office suite that you use or just the main base version? Additionally, I've used Grammarly to help watch out for bloopers as I write. I guess we'll say I'm in a few months writers block right this moment because I didn't utilize a story board of any sort. I did make notes on characters, but didn't outline any character development, so I have to kind of make it up as I go along. This is kind of a TEOTWAWKI book, kinda. That's the closest genre I can niche it.
Many publishers require you to submit manuscripts in Word format (as their designers do the layout in any case), and editors will collaborate with you through the "Track Changes" features of an MS-Word-compatible word processor.
The problem with LibreOffice and Gimp are the same: User interface and user experience, that's something Microsoft and Google are masters of. Not even Mac can make such interfaces as MS and Material Google. If there was a new design in these programs,they would explode in popularity.
I don't agree, personally. There's nothing wrong with the UI in LibreOffice and Gimp. If people don't like the UI, then that falls into my point about people hating change. They hate the UI just because it's not the app they are accustomed to.
UI fads come and go. For example, have you seen the new Microsoft 365 branding? Seems that is reintroducing gradients and shadows and the whole faux-3D thing. So will the actual look-and-feel of the software leave its “flat” look behind to follow suit? Or will there be this disconnect between the offscreen and the onscreen product experience? Microsoft’s Ribbon was already looking pretty dated, but this design churn will just add to the mess.
Good thing that we have Krita because i really don't like the UI of Gimp (it hasn't change in ages) even though its quite a powerful image editing software - I never used Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
I've been using Libreoffice for over a decade at this point. It was a little rough at the beginning. But its gotten to the point where there really isn't any reason to shell out the money for MS office if you have any choice on it. The only thing I can see being an issue is maybe relearning navigating the menus and formatting documents. Some of the gui is a tad different from MS office.
In years of using FOSS software for documents two things stand out as the most common causes of "incompatable" issues. They all center on a page not displaying the same. Doing a deeper dive: 1) I've seen lack of the same fonts on the FOSS installation. MS Truetype is directly downloadable / installable which fixes a LOT of complaints. Queue lecture to use common fonts as much as possible/always! 2) A minor on I've seen only a few times is printer margins been too small. How does this change things? Two different printers and the author crowding the margins. When printed the document gets mushed L-R on the PC having the narrower margins. Easy fix is always use margins over a half inch and preferably 3/4 inch. 3) Rarest of rare (2022) is a Windows power user typing to leverage a feature present in Office 2013 or newer that Libre Office hasn't made a compatibility fix. Queue lecture of least common denominator for these folks. Like you said this complaint was much more prevalent LONG ago (2010) but *it needs to die.* It's so old it has grey whiskers!
I love Libreoffice, I just installed it for a friend. One of the things that I love is its compatibility with Microsoft office and that I can export documents in PDF and protect it with a password, in the past I had to buy Adobe to be able to do it, now no more!
What about using *comments?* LibreOffice has an unfixed bug pertaining to floating objects (like images and comment bubles) that will make the document lag and stutter like mad (when scrolling) once you have more than 2 or 3 of those in the document
I've written books through Packt - and I know that Packt supplies authors with prebaked template chapters that were designed for Microsoft Word. Packt knows that many/most of their authors are open source geeks and accommodate Libre Office use. FWIW I've also written books on my own using an open source toolchain that I designed myself.
Libre Office is cool, but has a lot to improve. Working with tables is easier in OnlyOfficce than Libre Office. One of the worst problem is working with a background image in a page. For compatibility by using the document in other program, the best way is insert the image in the header section, and locate the image on the bottom. When you do this way, the image background is portable to different document types, and recognized by MS Word or Only Office, but Libre Office try to select the image everytime you click with the mouse in a place of the page without text. This behaviour is anoying and makes you waste too much time.
@@LearnLinuxTV Sure, there is no perfect software, but a sutable software for everyone. You can always still writting in wordstar like JRR Martins if you feel confortable with.
I have been using Libre office on-and-off in between Microsoft office versions since 2007 and I have encountered all the issues you address. I even had the same opinion about it not being very usable, but Libre office has come a loooooong way since I used it the last time. The only grieve I have at the moment is that Libre Write has too many features hidden away in the drop menus in stead of being in the interactive "ribbon" interface. Maybe i'm just too accustomed to Office365 at the moment, but it took way too long to figure out how to change the size of a textbox in centimeters and insert text columns. The only app I miss is a OneNote alternative in Libre Office. That would be cool.
Why not use another notes app. alongside it? Obsidian is brilliant though not strictly speaking open source, or there is also Legseq, which is open source. Other people like Joplin, too.
I had a friend who don't like change, he been using the same browser for years, and he always used wonder why he had so many problems using the software until I told him to update. I put it down to old age. 😊
To be fair, I've come across younger people that hate change too. It all depends on the person and what's important to them. This is especially difficult to navigate if the individual sees technology as a means to an end, and nothing more.
I'm using libre office since day 1 and I 100% agree with you. I used to create a lot of large network diagrams and I remember reaching a scale where only the last version of libre office draw could handle it. As it was at work, windows actually allowed me to install the last version but my own kubuntu at home wouldn't have that ! Even worst, if you search hard enough you can install the last version of libre office using their repo as a source for it...Why debian-ubuntu can't have the last version of a software like windows does by default ? Why a simple office suite can affect the stability of your OS ? This debian-ubuntu oudated software habbit combined with their popularity, is a big problem for linux.
I've just started watching but this might be my foray back to Libre Office. Not because it was bad, but my partner is a lawyer and uses office ALL THE TIME, and the formatting would often get stuffed up when saving as a DOCX for consumption by others that do use MS.
Interesting. I recently needed to make sure I had MSOffice compatability. After some searching, it seemed the consensus was to scrap LibreOffice and use OpenOffice. That's what I ended up doing, but I would have much preferred to stay in LibreOffice.
its very good it just doesnt hold a 1:1 conversion usable system. i used to go to school and run linux, i used the documents created my ms office and it always ended up in a unusable mess because libre office didnt support formatting parts.
As I mentioned in the video, my publisher and the editors that I've worked with use MS Office. When sending a document back and forth (and there were quite a few files) we never had a single issue, not even formatting. So the only conclusion I can come to is that you must be using an outdated version (or something else is causing your issue).
As a masochist and version control fan I of course use (XeLa)TeX for most of my sophisticated documentation. And always hold hope for some successor that's less flaky and more reliable while keeping all the features I need (markdown is great but including stuff other than plaintext in it, like formulas, pictures, technical graphics, footnotes or bibliographies quickly gets unportable. In the meantime, tectonic - TeX engine/distro- is at least is a nice improvement over miktex and texlive.
I was using LibreOffice back when it was OpenOffice (pre-fork) and StarOffice before it. I always found it to be an excellent product which has only gotten better in time. Does it have some problems? Sure. Are they deal breakers? Not on your life. What I find the case with so many of these critics is that it becomes trendy to hate on certain things without any real foundation. I know people who have complained about LibreOffice. When I ask them how long they spent using it, the answer typically goes some thing like, "Oh I opened it up and looked at the program and it just does not compare to Microsoft." Really? You opened it and had a look around? Even learning the intricacies of Microsoft will require more than a test drive and yet the decision that Libre is awful is made by people who have never even tried it (in most cases). I am not prejudiced against those who may actually give Libre a fair try and still have reservations. But I rarely see anyone condemning Libre who has spent more than a few minutes lurking about in it.
Hi, I agree with you about LibreOffice, I used Libre back in a day when I was Windows user, because I dont want to pay for MS Office , so everything is possible if you want , thank you
I am a primary school teacher in a village school. We have an old pc with Windows 8.1 and an older version of Ms office. And I download materials for children from a website teachers share their worksheet. And I think they use newer versions of Ms office and almost all the documents are broken on our pc. So I don't even open the word files but PDFs. I definitely must try libre office. Already I use libre office on my own laptop but I don't need office indeed. I use it very rare. So I didn't notice that libre office compatibility increased.
I almost always try to avoid using an office suite. I prefer using Markdown or Latex, in both you just add a few additional characters to add some formatting. It makes me much faster because in a office suite i tend to spend way more time fiddling around to get the formatting right. And it can be added to source control and be compared with any diff viewer, that fits me way more as a developer. And to me LibreOffice's interface looks outdated, a ribbon interface looks just so much better.
Microsoft’s Ribbon was designed before modern widescreen monitors became popular. Note that most text documents are in a portrait orientation, so their visible portion along their long side is limited by the height of the monitor. Which Microsoft wastes by using so much of it to hold the Ribbon. This is why the LibreOffice Sidebar is more efficient, since by taking up space along the long dimension of your monitor, it leaves more room for you to see your actual document.
Markdown is too simple to be useful for anything but trivial formatting. Latex is better but a royal pain without a GUI. I've been using Latex since the 90s with Unix platforms in academia. It universally sucks compared to office products with GUIs. If LibreOffice adopted something like HTML style markup it would make manual editing easier. I do agree the GUI sometimes gets in the simply because it's buggy. For example, select a single line, change it to Heading 1 and the whole document goes to Heading 1.
Yeah, I like to draft papers in markdown, but usually have to get them out into Word format for publishers, who in the arts/humanities often accept nothing else. What would be brilliant would be if LibreOffice has a markdown import function to make this easier without fiddling with pandoc on the command line. Where a word processor really shines (I think) is in much longer documents (like a book) and in managing footnotes, etc. - as well as the kind of process of editing/correction that change-tracking offers.
While I truly want to use libreoffice, only thing that stops me using is Calc vs excel. Coz I don't see anyone doing dashboard level work using calc and can't rely for things like financial modeling.
You left out one point. Some people feel better when they pay for software. They feel as though they have gotten something for their money. "Free" doesn't fulfill that need. Reminds me of the early 2000s when companies bought IBM mainframes. Buying blue meant not making a bad decision. There are some inherent differences between MS Office and LibreOffice, namely in the macro languages. But here, few people use that capability no matter which software they are using. I particularly enjoy using Draw. There is no equivalent in the MS suite. I'm a visual person and it is a quick way for me to put together an illustration or montage.
That depends on a few factors, such as whether or not the company you work for even allows you a choice of software to use in the first place. Some are more progressive than others.
Tell them to standardize their document format on ISO 26300, which is a properly-specified, easily-understood standard with a diverse ecosystem, instead of that supposedly-open-but-still-proprietary complicated mess that Microsoft has been pushing.
I use Libreoffice Calc everyday and it's great. I also like to use dark themes but Libreoffice Calc looks absolutely terrible in dark mode no matter what icon I use. It forces me to use a light theme.
I'm being nick-picking: one can still argue that if you had used MS word, you could have your book done a lot sooner. But I do agree with what you said. LibreOffice is a lot better now. I recently made a pptx using Office 365 online and represented it in my laptop using LibreOffice Impress, no issue at all.
No one ever say libreoffice is incompetent(at least I don’t think that), it is just MS office being way more popular, and a lot more accessible with its web version. Also more companies use Windows and MS office so it is a standard. For me the major thing is file formats. It is not 100% compatible. Format is always off there and here, it is never perfect and annoying. WPS office is not bad. I use that sometimes. I think you are being too hard on Linux distro. Many distro are maintained by one of two persons. It may be hard for them to keep testing the latest and greatest version of libreoffice. So I understand they have to seek stability in their Distro.
I keep a Windows machine for three applications: iTunes, Photoshop, and games. Linux is great, I have it on my four laptops, but I NEED iTunes, Photoshop and I play games. GIMP just is not ready. LibreOffice is on all my machines, Linux, Windows, and Mac. Just wonderful in the new versions.
Itunes works via wine depending on the version and how you set it up. Gimp can do everything Photoshop can do. It isn't that gimp isn't ready..it's just that so far you have no been patient enough to try learning how the work flow in GIMP works. And unless the ONLY games you play are Microsoft store or E.A.C tech required games..chances are they will work one way or another in Linux.
Itunes seems designed to _prevent_ you from doing things, instead of _enabling_ you to do them. For example, many years ago, when my mother had an Ipod, I put a bunch of stuff on it that my nephew had asked her to ask me for. The Free software I had available let me freely move audio and video clips between my Linux PC and the Ipod (at least that earlier model, anyway). But when she went back home, there was no way Itunes would let him get those songs off the Ipod onto his Windows machine, so he had to lose them when it did a sync.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 " Itunes seems designed to prevent you from doing things, instead of enabling you to do them " I couldn't agree more. That's why I stopped using it over a decade ago, but because my baby boomer mother is hellbent on continue using it, It's up to me to figure out many ways to fix it or keep it working. But for kicks..I figured out how to get it working in Linux on my test rig. Foobar2000 lets you transfer itunes music back and forth..not just one way ;)
On my arch install, loading pdfs took minutes, even smaller ones. I remember not having very many issues with it the last time I used it, but wps-pdf worked wayyyyyy better specifically for pdfs. Have not tried regular word documents with libre office, but at least for pdfs on my arch install it was not worth using
i dont have issues with writer, it is equally as terrible as ms word (trying to move around text frames and images is not fun.) calc is pretty bad. the spreadsheet app in gdrive is better than that. base is fine until you start attempting to format reports. the presentation app similarly does its thing until you attempt to move beyond the starter template.
Some good points made, but the whole video would have been half as long if you didn't keep repeating the same point in slightly different wording. For myself, I always found the MS user interface easier to find things in than Libre Office. I've used Libre Office for many years but I often find myself having to google to find where a particular command is accessed, while Office seems to place commands more logically.
NGL, I thought this was a video on using LibreOffice to create epub ebooks. I know I can just export to epub, but I really wanted to see the process from a writer's POV.
When my in-laws and grandfather got new laptops, I installed LibreOffice for them. Put shortcuts on their desktop like they were used to seeing, Renamed them to Word, Excel, etc, and changed the icons to the MS ones. It launches the corresponding Libreoffice application of course. Only my grandfather noticed that something was different. However, he just said, "I like the new version of Microsoft Word. It is much more straight forward."
Yes, that is how I'd put it, straightforward. A good thing
That's nice work :))
You are a Genius to change the Icon/short-Cut (?) to look like MS style. I used both LO 7.4 And used LO in the format as MS Office 2013. And everyone in the family finds it useful!
It's unfortunate that Libreoffice has to be compared to Microsoft Office all the time, because it's simply excellent when judged solely on it's own merits. That being said, this video is spot on. I actually used WPS office for a long time due to compatibility with MS Word and Excel for a while, until earlier this year when I realized that newer versions of Libreoffice actually have better compatibility than WPS for everything I use daily with the rare exception of some niche borders and WordArt. All in all, Libreoffice deserves much more love and keeps getting better with every update.
Give a try on any office
OnlyOffice it's good too
@@noturno3451 I'm sure it works well for some people and it's interface is definitely a huge part of that. I just find these days that Libreoffice does the job well enough for me to stop searching for alternatives.
is there a good publicly available MS Office files to test its compatibility with Libreoffice?
@@zukxxxx0 actually people are too lazy to learn new things that's why libreoffice is in shadows
It's funny you mentioned office workers. Our parent org bought MS Office for all the office staff. Some of our office staff are starting to warm up to LibreOffice (which we also install) because they've run into scenarios where Microsoft Office has failed them. In one case a document was sent to a worker in Apple's .pages format. The version of MS Office we have installed on most machines will not read .pages documents, but LibreOffice Writer will. Another time a worker was trying to copy and paste some directions from a web site into Microsoft Word, and MS Word was just creating a big mess. They were pleasantly surprised to find out that copying and pasting the same page into LibreOffice Writer resulted in a much cleaner page that they had to do a lot less work to clean up. A similar situation happened with a web site where the fields just didn't look good pasted into Microsoft Excel, but looked great in LibreOffice Calc. I have seen the inverse as well, (web sites formatting better in MS Office), but not very often. Normally, I find LibreOffice seems to work better for cutting and pasting things from the web. I also used LibreOffice, back in 2013, when I wrote a book for Packt, and no issues back then either.
Very good points Jay. I use a Linux laptop and LibreOffice in a corporate Microsoft 365 Environment and nobody has cottoned on yet 😉 Personally, I would love to see a video about how you used the FOSS tools to put together your book - from planning to drafting to any images/ covers etc. However I suspect it may be a bit niche! 😊 Great vid as always 👏
I've been using Libre Office for many years and I really hoped this video would help me make the case to other people - especially given that it runs perfectly well on Mac and Windows too, so you don't have to switch to Linux to switch to Libre Office, which can be too big a leap for some people.
What they need is a stepping stone and Libre Office is perfect for the job. Using Libre Office on Mac or Windows can give people confidence and gradually enables them to let go of a lot of assumptions and their reliance on proprietary software. This is the myth that needs to be busted in my opinion.
Helping people start to use FOSS applications that are also cross platform, such as Firefox, Thunderbird and GIMP means they quickly realise there's precious little day to day stuff they can't get done on Linux . . . the bridges and stepping stones are all there, we just have to help people find them!
That's actually a really good strategy for people when it comes to moving to Linux, something I've recommended in the past.
That’s the right approach imo. I study CS in uni, and even some of my colleagues wouldn’t know how to install Linux. I think the Linux people have to realize that most people are not very technical, so the approach should be to make better FOSS apps than then priopietary alternative so normal people use them. I was able to get some people to use libre office bc it’s free and very similar to office for example
@@nicolascossio5961 That's been my approach for a long time. My 83 year old dad uses an old MacBook to run Libre Office - since his retirement he's written several novels and countless short articles with Libre Office. If I swapped his MacBook, for another silvery laptop with some sort of macos look-alike desktop, just so he could easily find Libre Office, Firefox and an email client in the "dock", I doubt he'd give it a moment's thought, or even notice. The only reason I haven't is that his 12 year old MacBook just keeps on working!
My point is that most people don't consciously choose an OS, let alone a specific distro, and mostly couldn't care less, so long as it works.
So I realize it's not at all the same, but I write for a living, and I mostly rely on Markdown and Pandoc. That way I can write in my preferred text editor (Vim, of course). Markdown and Vim allow me to automate a lot of my writing, and write what I would never be able to write without it.
That said, if I need to create .docx documents, LibreOffice is my absolute go-to on my Linux computer. I also recommend it to anyone who needs a WYSIWYG word processor. My parents have used LibreOffice for years, all without paying Microsoft's exorbitant license fees. IMHO, the only reason someone should use MS Office is if their company requires (and pays for) it. In fact, mine does, and I still only use it when I absolutely have to.
Really glad for you😊. Only if the rest of the masses could also do likewise...
In an ideal world, open doc format and FOSS app like LibreOffice is the default defacto standard. Ppl wonldn't be "forced" to buy/use proprietory product if they choose otherwise😊.
Hope to see the daylight soon; then keeping windows in VMs would become purely a hobby, past-time and hobby.
P/S: heard that VIM & Latex makes a great pair.
I spent the last ten years doing a degree in computing and IT and a masters in software engineering. I used Libre Office for all my assignments. Never had an issue.
I appreciate the point that you are making. I often find that LibreOffice project does not get the respect it deserves. We take it too much for granted. It is a remarkable office suite and I think deserves more recognition. Thanks for making this video.
I am an economist (Msc student) and work as a research assistant part time. All of my colleagues use Windows and excel. There are things that only excel can do, but I don't care about those. I am supposed to be the tech expert in the group, but when people send me huge excel files and expect me to be able to open them, it is frustrating that Libreoffice can't handle the whole file. Other office suits on linux just crash and Libreoffice cuts of many of the columns of the dataset. I may want to do things in Libreoffice and might be able to do them, I can't convince everyone to use it, nor can I change all of the existing literature's replication material written with excel in mind. (even importing and exporting xlsx files from matlab requires some of the excel libraries)
Just a note... I use the current version of Linux Mint and Ubuntu Studio along with both Windows 10 and 11. LibreOffice automatically updates on the two Linux systems and it's a bit more manual in Windows. You're absolutely correct on the compatibility improvement. I was frustrated about a decade ago and didn't pick it up again until last year. What a difference! No issues thus far and, more importantly, I haven't had any of those frustrating corruptions! That is why I dropped it years ago. I still prefer Excel but I think it's the customization goodies that I use and don't care to learn the nuances of LibreOffice Calc. When my Office 2019 licence is no longer useful, I will not be purchasing another MS Office licence and run LibreOffice only (unless something new and better comes along}. I enjoy your videos. Thank you for producing them.
I do like Libre Office a lot, but if only it had a better Icon Set to use in dark mode, the standard ones aren't very legible. Maybe you can also create a video, on how you use Writer, showing some of the cool things you do while writing the book.
The icons often depend on the theme of your distribution, with some distributions even going as far as to put the icons into a different package that's not always installed by default. On my side, I've never had that issue with the Flatpak version.
So what choice of icon sets do you get with Microsoft?
You can change icon sets
@@sourabhuwusingh I know, but haven’t found one that I really like.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I don’t know, don’t use it, also not sure why that is relevant to my remark on readability?
Been a sub to you since you only had roughly 8k subs. Glad to see your channel and works grow.
I'm using Linux Mint LMDE, and the first thing I did after watching this was to get the Flatpak version of LibreOffice. Thank you!
I ***LOVE*** LibreOffice. It's to the point where I've transitioned 2 small businesses into it (freelancers). Technically, is it inferior to MS Office... well yes, but only at the 70% tile+ of high end capabilities (e.g. MS Office's vector drawing in Powerpoint is far superior to LO Impress). BUT, I was able to adapt my operations to work within its constraints and now I have complete privacy and true cross platform portability, at no cost. LibreOffice + Ubuntu/Mint/PopOS is a true replacement for Windows / MacOS for most people. Even though I can get M$ Office for $10, I'll not go back. Now if there were only open source software to let me create SCORM modules with LibreOffice Impress...................
I wrote my thesis with Libre Office. I used Writer for the text document, I did my calculations using Calc, and did the presentation with Impress. I also did some light "DTP" with Writer ( imported pictures, diagrams, calculation tables etc on the document ). It did the job just fine, and I continue to use it professionally in my work laptop.
If you are doing any type of documentation that you would need to keep for a potentially long period of time (such as a master copy of a final draft of a book, quarterly/yearly spreadsheets for expenses and/or taxes, presentations for corporate training, etc.), then you should consider saving the “master” copies in ODF (Open Document Format) and make sure that they are the ones backed up instead of saving in some proprietary, binary-blobbed MS Office document format (especially avoid saving in OOXML, Microsoft’s Office Open XML format). This will ensure you data will be able to be read by any future FOSS office app that supports ODF.
You are on point 👉 100% agreed. Good job 👏
I appreciate your points, which are all quite sensible. There is an element that is holding back a nice slice of potential users in academia, and that's the integration with reference managers such as Endnote or others. If libreoffice made integration with cite-while-you-write databases or made an open source reference manager system on their on, I think a lot of the windows based academia would flock to linux. I know I would for my work laptop.
It is possible integrate Zotero in libre office, just in case it helps.
Whoever makes those reference managers should definitely be more open about supporting other things, that's terrible.
Thank you for this video. I use LibreOffice all the time for years and it's an awesome piece of software. It's so cool to see that other people have a great experience with LibreOffice as I do =)
Glad it was helpful!
I love Libre Office, And I agree with everything you said. I even run it on my Mac, Pop, Mint
Awesome!
Very good video, Jay. I'm running a Kubuntu Focus laptop from Tuxedo Computers and as a developer, I use LibreOffice daily for my source code documentation. I have not had any issues with LibreOffice.
How's the Kubuntu Focus working out for you? I haven't had a chance to try that yet.
@@LearnLinuxTV I have the M2 Gen 4 Kubuntu Focus laptop with 64G RAM, 4TB Storage (2 2TB M.2's), onboard graphics and a NVIDIA RTX 3070 graphics card, a 15.5 inch 1440p 165Hz panel, I7 12th gen Processor . It can drive 4 4k external monitors but at the moment, it's driving 2 4k monitors and a 1080p front camera for my daily stand-ups. I figure that since I'm still working remotely, I would "Go big or go home"! I've added dual boot capability to it so I'm running both Kubuntu (daily driver) and Windows 11. I really like it and it fits my current needs. Plus, it's pretty much future-proof....at least for a good while anyway. :-)
While LibreOffice is the default for me as well, there is a feature with PowerPoint that my colleagues tend to use that simply doesn't exist in LibreOffice Impress and it's the SmartArt feature.
Sure, Impress will correctly render the SmartArt graphic, but if you need to go in and add or remove elements, the "Smart"/functional capabilities found in PowerPoint are not present in Impress. Other than that, everything else works just fine for me with LibreOffice.
In fact, I completed a Cybersecurity certification with an online university recently and the instructors used MSOffice. I not only was able to open their coursework, but I created ALL of my assignments using LibreOffice (I just saved them in Office format) and not ONE instructor noticed anything wrong.
Have you checked to see if supporting properly is on their road map? If not, it might be worth a suggestion. I've never used that feature personally.
@@LearnLinuxTV Oh. Others have requested it already. I've seen postings online about it also. The LibreOffice crew is aware of this.
Good points Jay. However there is one more reason I think people face this issue, even with latest versions. That is, Microsoft bundles a lot of fonts by default with Microsoft Office, and these fonts are proprietary. No one notices since many use MS Office and these fonts are there for them. Now if you open these in LibreOffice or any other open-source office suite, they'll have the font replaced with a default font, and that messes up the proportions. Things like replaced font can be too big or too small compared to MS fonts happen. If the document is using table layouts, good luck since this makes the doc look pretty bad. We can't have these fonts legally shipped with LibreOffice.
In that case, I think the best course of action is to ensure that we don't create any new documents that use those fonts. If they're causing a compatibility issue, time to purge them.
It is common to have function-alike Free fonts with identical metrics to proprietary ones. This should stop unwanted reformatting, at any rate.
But this can happen even with Microsoft 365† on its own, just moving between different installations on different machines.
†Yes, Microsoft is getting rid of the “Office” part of the name.
Outstanding concepts you presented here. I especially liked the lots of Linux users in a room and giving their opinions of LibreOffice. IMHO, you were spot on with that one. Keep up the good work!
Thank you!
Wrote my postgraduate thesis in Libreoffice.
I love this software.
"Shotcut" is a fantastic open-source video editor. I can't attest to whether it has the features you need or not, that's beyond my abilities. But it is worth a look.
Would be awesome if you could do an equivalent video about Gimp as well because it is normally written off as well in comparison to photoshop. Think it's very underrated as well
Libre office felt a little off, but it's practical. I switched to Only Office briefly after seeing people shilling for it. It looked good. Then I copied an entire txt document. Instances of the apostrophe was replaced with weird symbols. Documents containing comments didn't show up unless I clicked onto each line. Libre office is miles ahead.
When it comes to compatability with MS office docs, I'll still use wps writer, but Libre Office will always be installed as a great backup.
But for my older 32 bit computers, nothing beats the snappiness of abiword.
Debian has libre office 7.0 in the main repo, but 7.4 in the backports (which you'd use if you wanted the latest stuff). It's not any major version behind and the latest is easily available.
Also having written a book in libre office doesn't really prove that it's not inferior to ms office. You can still write a book with inferior software.
What's the item plugged into the USB-C port on the dev-one? some sort of magnetic cable port?
Appreciate you Jay.. 👍 👌
TY!!
I think if the publisher, or yourself, finds the right template to base the document on, you can pretty-much do anything and publish any document Microsoft Office can do. LibreOffice got me through a University Masters course here in Australia and I had to provide all my documents as DOCX, as well as provide those documents to an online system that had to read and check them for the teachers/lecturers and there was NEVER an issue.
Agree. I ditched MS Office aproximately. ten years ago and I begun to use LibreOffice instead even on Windows PCs since then. I am updating regularly, and never had a single problem, neither with early docx conversions.
Same here
So. If you see a program in xcel, will it work in Libre office Calc. Thanks
I did not enjoy the gui experience on windows (scrolling up/down was a nightmare). But there’s also the frustration of learning a new software. I feel like people often forget how much learning to took to get familiar with Microsoft office. But with the subscription model of office, an alternative is pretty much required. Or just do everything at work.
You can change layout to look like ms office. It is almost 1:1 copy of ms office if layout is tabbed
Distributions should simply rely on the Flatpak version of LibreOffice, and the Document Foundation should officially declare that the preferred installation method for Linux, instead of anyone maintaining stuff separately. There are good reasons for distributions to want to control packages when it comes to various aspects of the system. But none of these reasons would apply to office productivity applications, where standardization is really important!
Maybe if you get more complicated word is better, but for day-to-day stuff, like making a résumé, I find libre office a lot more intuitive
LibreOffice is great, but I never really got the hang of using it until I changed the User Interface to Tabbed. It makes it look more like Microsoft Office and makes the transition easier.
I find most people dont adopt free software due to the way they look and feel, even if the functionality is there. Having a familiar, clean interface goes a long way.
The great thing about LibreOffice is that you don't have to use that horrible tabbed/ribbon interface that takes up so much room and makes things harder to find. Honestly nothing beats the old toolbars where you can drag/drop customize each toolbar. It's so much more efficient for people who do work. I know some people like the ribbon, but it's nice that LibreOffice can do both.
The only reason I use Microsoft office is because work forces me to
Same reason why i installed MsOffice inside VM Win10 on Linux.
@@ar_prichan Yes!
They both work well. I use Libre at home and Ms at work.
The only pain I have is for example to remenber to use alt+return in excel and shift+return in Calc for a linebreak. But this is minor.
Regarding writer and impress, i didn't face any issue submitting my postgraduate thesis. The problems began when i was trying to run excel documents full of micros, controlling rs232 to usb controllers for their data manipulation. There was no way to come across to a solution even if i installed libreoffice on windows environment.
I have found that with the Draw program, sometimes the text will extend past the page. not sure what would cause this.
I paused this briefly. I am not a seasoned or even veteran Linux user. I think I've tried maybe 4 distros and currently use none. I do like it, but unless you really have a grasp, it's hard to figure out workarounds to the hardware that only favors Windows. Or at least I'm not good at it. I too enjoy Libre Office and have been using it to write my first fiction novel. I'm curious if there is a particular item in the Libre Office suite that you use or just the main base version? Additionally, I've used Grammarly to help watch out for bloopers as I write. I guess we'll say I'm in a few months writers block right this moment because I didn't utilize a story board of any sort. I did make notes on characters, but didn't outline any character development, so I have to kind of make it up as I go along. This is kind of a TEOTWAWKI book, kinda. That's the closest genre I can niche it.
That was quite a rant!
Latex would be a much better choice for a book imo. Looks way more professional.
Many publishers require you to submit manuscripts in Word format (as their designers do the layout in any case), and editors will collaborate with you through the "Track Changes" features of an MS-Word-compatible word processor.
@@drlukewhite yeah, but i don't think this is Jay's case.
Do people not use LaTeX for technical documents anymore?
The problem with LibreOffice and Gimp are the same: User interface and user experience, that's something Microsoft and Google are masters of. Not even Mac can make such interfaces as MS and Material Google. If there was a new design in these programs,they would explode in popularity.
I don't agree, personally. There's nothing wrong with the UI in LibreOffice and Gimp. If people don't like the UI, then that falls into my point about people hating change. They hate the UI just because it's not the app they are accustomed to.
UI fads come and go. For example, have you seen the new Microsoft 365 branding? Seems that is reintroducing gradients and shadows and the whole faux-3D thing. So will the actual look-and-feel of the software leave its “flat” look behind to follow suit? Or will there be this disconnect between the offscreen and the onscreen product experience?
Microsoft’s Ribbon was already looking pretty dated, but this design churn will just add to the mess.
Good thing that we have Krita because i really don't like the UI of Gimp (it hasn't change in ages) even though its quite a powerful image editing software - I never used Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
I've been using Libreoffice for over a decade at this point. It was a little rough at the beginning. But its gotten to the point where there really isn't any reason to shell out the money for MS office if you have any choice on it. The only thing I can see being an issue is maybe relearning navigating the menus and formatting documents. Some of the gui is a tad different from MS office.
In years of using FOSS software for documents two things stand out as the most common causes of "incompatable" issues. They all center on a page not displaying the same. Doing a deeper dive:
1) I've seen lack of the same fonts on the FOSS installation. MS Truetype is directly downloadable / installable which fixes a LOT of complaints. Queue lecture to use common fonts as much as possible/always!
2) A minor on I've seen only a few times is printer margins been too small. How does this change things? Two different printers and the author crowding the margins. When printed the document gets mushed L-R on the PC having the narrower margins. Easy fix is always use margins over a half inch and preferably 3/4 inch.
3) Rarest of rare (2022) is a Windows power user typing to leverage a feature present in Office 2013 or newer that Libre Office hasn't made a compatibility fix. Queue lecture of least common denominator for these folks. Like you said this complaint was much more prevalent LONG ago (2010) but *it needs to die.* It's so old it has grey whiskers!
I completely agree. That's why o use a rolling release. Libre office is just great.
I love Libreoffice, I just installed it for a friend. One of the things that I love is its compatibility with Microsoft office and that I can export documents in PDF and protect it with a password, in the past I had to buy Adobe to be able to do it, now no more!
What about using *comments?* LibreOffice has an unfixed bug pertaining to floating objects (like images and comment bubles) that will make the document lag and stutter like mad (when scrolling) once you have more than 2 or 3 of those in the document
We used comments heavily during the writing process, 30+ comments per document (at least). It never stuttered for me.
I used LibreOffice since 2017 and its AWESOME!!!
I know this is a little off topic but if you know of a good Linux based form and document builder, I would love a video or recommendation.
I started my book in Libre Office and uploaded it in Microsoft just like you did. My document was corrupted, just after updating Libre Office.
I've written books through Packt - and I know that Packt supplies authors with prebaked template chapters that were designed for Microsoft Word. Packt knows that many/most of their authors are open source geeks and accommodate Libre Office use.
FWIW I've also written books on my own using an open source toolchain that I designed myself.
I wish LibreOffice provided a means of altering the default settings for line spacing and widow and orphan control.
any review about Only office vs Libreoffice?
Libre Office is cool, but has a lot to improve. Working with tables is easier in OnlyOfficce than Libre Office. One of the worst problem is working with a background image in a page. For compatibility by using the document in other program, the best way is insert the image in the header section, and locate the image on the bottom. When you do this way, the image background is portable to different document types, and recognized by MS Word or Only Office, but Libre Office try to select the image everytime you click with the mouse in a place of the page without text. This behaviour is anoying and makes you waste too much time.
No software is perfect, that's for sure.
@@LearnLinuxTV Sure, there is no perfect software, but a sutable software for everyone. You can always still writting in wordstar like JRR Martins if you feel confortable with.
I wrote my Bachelors Paper in LibreOffice 💪😎
We may not live to see the day, but I think FOSS software will reign supreme in the end
I usually uninstall libre office from my distros and install the flatpak. I do that for all apps that have flatpaks
I have been using Libre office on-and-off in between Microsoft office versions since 2007 and I have encountered all the issues you address. I even had the same opinion about it not being very usable, but Libre office has come a loooooong way since I used it the last time.
The only grieve I have at the moment is that Libre Write has too many features hidden away in the drop menus in stead of being in the interactive "ribbon" interface. Maybe i'm just too accustomed to Office365 at the moment, but it took way too long to figure out how to change the size of a textbox in centimeters and insert text columns.
The only app I miss is a OneNote alternative in Libre Office. That would be cool.
Why not use another notes app. alongside it? Obsidian is brilliant though not strictly speaking open source, or there is also Legseq, which is open source. Other people like Joplin, too.
@@drlukewhite i use onenote
There's Search Command in Help menu if you want to try. It similar with HUD in Ubuntu Unity, or Tellme in MS Office
I had a hell of a time trying to print a number 10 envelope in lo. It never did print right.
I had a friend who don't like change, he been using the same browser for years, and he always used wonder why he had so many problems using the software until I told him to update. I put it down to old age. 😊
To be fair, I've come across younger people that hate change too. It all depends on the person and what's important to them. This is especially difficult to navigate if the individual sees technology as a means to an end, and nothing more.
I'm using libre office since day 1 and I 100% agree with you. I used to create a lot of large network diagrams and I remember reaching a scale where only the last version of libre office draw could handle it. As it was at work, windows actually allowed me to install the last version but my own kubuntu at home wouldn't have that ! Even worst, if you search hard enough you can install the last version of libre office using their repo as a source for it...Why debian-ubuntu can't have the last version of a software like windows does by default ? Why a simple office suite can affect the stability of your OS ? This debian-ubuntu oudated software habbit combined with their popularity, is a big problem for linux.
I've just started watching but this might be my foray back to Libre Office. Not because it was bad, but my partner is a lawyer and uses office ALL THE TIME, and the formatting would often get stuffed up when saving as a DOCX for consumption by others that do use MS.
Interesting. I recently needed to make sure I had MSOffice compatability. After some searching, it seemed the consensus was to scrap LibreOffice and use OpenOffice. That's what I ended up doing, but I would have much preferred to stay in LibreOffice.
its very good it just doesnt hold a 1:1 conversion usable system. i used to go to school and run linux, i used the documents created my ms office and it always ended up in a unusable mess because libre office didnt support formatting parts.
As I mentioned in the video, my publisher and the editors that I've worked with use MS Office. When sending a document back and forth (and there were quite a few files) we never had a single issue, not even formatting. So the only conclusion I can come to is that you must be using an outdated version (or something else is causing your issue).
What about the Ebook ?
As a masochist and version control fan I of course use (XeLa)TeX for most of my sophisticated documentation.
And always hold hope for some successor that's less flaky and more reliable while keeping all the features I need (markdown is great but including stuff other than plaintext in it, like formulas, pictures, technical graphics, footnotes or bibliographies quickly gets unportable.
In the meantime, tectonic - TeX engine/distro- is at least is a nice improvement over miktex and texlive.
On the upside - with stuff like TeX the open source solution is the norm and measuring stick, so you're not tempted.
I was using LibreOffice back when it was OpenOffice (pre-fork) and StarOffice before it. I always found it to be an excellent product which has only gotten better in time. Does it have some problems? Sure. Are they deal breakers? Not on your life.
What I find the case with so many of these critics is that it becomes trendy to hate on certain things without any real foundation. I know people who have complained about LibreOffice. When I ask them how long they spent using it, the answer typically goes some thing like, "Oh I opened it up and looked at the program and it just does not compare to Microsoft." Really? You opened it and had a look around? Even learning the intricacies of Microsoft will require more than a test drive and yet the decision that Libre is awful is made by people who have never even tried it (in most cases). I am not prejudiced against those who may actually give Libre a fair try and still have reservations. But I rarely see anyone condemning Libre who has spent more than a few minutes lurking about in it.
Please do make tutorial to use libreoffice base bro.
Hi, I agree with you about LibreOffice, I used Libre back in a day when I was Windows user, because I dont want to pay for MS Office , so everything is possible if you want , thank you
Me too. My thesis of Master. 444 pages. Many images, table, graphics, maps, etc.
I am a primary school teacher in a village school. We have an old pc with Windows 8.1 and an older version of Ms office. And I download materials for children from a website teachers share their worksheet. And I think they use newer versions of Ms office and almost all the documents are broken on our pc. So I don't even open the word files but PDFs. I definitely must try libre office. Already I use libre office on my own laptop but I don't need office indeed. I use it very rare. So I didn't notice that libre office compatibility increased.
I almost always try to avoid using an office suite. I prefer using Markdown or Latex, in both you just add a few additional characters to add some formatting. It makes me much faster because in a office suite i tend to spend way more time fiddling around to get the formatting right. And it can be added to source control and be compared with any diff viewer, that fits me way more as a developer.
And to me LibreOffice's interface looks outdated, a ribbon interface looks just so much better.
It's my understanding that the UI can be changed to use a ribbon type UI. There's even a tool tip that pops up telling you about the UI options
Yes, it can. I haven't enabled the ribbon interface because I don't really care either way, but it's there for those that want it.
Microsoft’s Ribbon was designed before modern widescreen monitors became popular. Note that most text documents are in a portrait orientation, so their visible portion along their long side is limited by the height of the monitor. Which Microsoft wastes by using so much of it to hold the Ribbon.
This is why the LibreOffice Sidebar is more efficient, since by taking up space along the long dimension of your monitor, it leaves more room for you to see your actual document.
Markdown is too simple to be useful for anything but trivial formatting. Latex is better but a royal pain without a GUI. I've been using Latex since the 90s with Unix platforms in academia. It universally sucks compared to office products with GUIs. If LibreOffice adopted something like HTML style markup it would make manual editing easier. I do agree the GUI sometimes gets in the simply because it's buggy. For example, select a single line, change it to Heading 1 and the whole document goes to Heading 1.
Yeah, I like to draft papers in markdown, but usually have to get them out into Word format for publishers, who in the arts/humanities often accept nothing else. What would be brilliant would be if LibreOffice has a markdown import function to make this easier without fiddling with pandoc on the command line. Where a word processor really shines (I think) is in much longer documents (like a book) and in managing footnotes, etc. - as well as the kind of process of editing/correction that change-tracking offers.
While I truly want to use libreoffice, only thing that stops me using is Calc vs excel. Coz I don't see anyone doing dashboard level work using calc and can't rely for things like financial modeling.
You left out one point. Some people feel better when they pay for software. They feel as though they have gotten something for their money. "Free" doesn't fulfill that need. Reminds me of the early 2000s when companies bought IBM mainframes. Buying blue meant not making a bad decision.
There are some inherent differences between MS Office and LibreOffice, namely in the macro languages. But here, few people use that capability no matter which software they are using. I particularly enjoy using Draw. There is no equivalent in the MS suite. I'm a visual person and it is a quick way for me to put together an illustration or montage.
Mac pages crashed on me and glitches. Sucks, cause i got used to it and comfortable, then BOOM stuck without a paddle.
I use Libre office. Nextcloud and truechart have LO.
hi jay is it possible to get job using libreoffice even with everyone else using microsoft? If so is there any resources you can direct me to?
That depends on a few factors, such as whether or not the company you work for even allows you a choice of software to use in the first place. Some are more progressive than others.
Tell them to standardize their document format on ISO 26300, which is a properly-specified, easily-understood standard with a diverse ecosystem, instead of that supposedly-open-but-still-proprietary complicated mess that Microsoft has been pushing.
Well to be more clear do you know people who use libre office to do work for a living?
After try many various softwares, all have same output the differences is just feature
People have been writing books on Linux and Unix for decades. Latex was literally designed for book publishing on the platform.
libre-office gives less issue with conversion to ms-office than ms-office to different version ms-office
I use Libreoffice Calc everyday and it's great. I also like to use dark themes but Libreoffice Calc looks absolutely terrible in dark mode no matter what icon I use. It forces me to use a light theme.
I'm using LibreOffice to write a book as well
I'm being nick-picking: one can still argue that if you had used MS word, you could have your book done a lot sooner.
But I do agree with what you said. LibreOffice is a lot better now. I recently made a pptx using Office 365 online and represented it in my laptop using LibreOffice Impress, no issue at all.
No one ever say libreoffice is incompetent(at least I don’t think that), it is just MS office being way more popular, and a lot more accessible with its web version. Also more companies use Windows and MS office so it is a standard.
For me the major thing is file formats. It is not 100% compatible. Format is always off there and here, it is never perfect and annoying. WPS office is not bad. I use that sometimes.
I think you are being too hard on Linux distro. Many distro are maintained by one of two persons. It may be hard for them to keep testing the latest and greatest version of libreoffice. So I understand they have to seek stability in their Distro.
I keep a Windows machine for three applications: iTunes, Photoshop, and games. Linux is great, I have it on my four laptops, but I NEED iTunes, Photoshop and I play games. GIMP just is not ready. LibreOffice is on all my machines, Linux, Windows, and Mac. Just wonderful in the new versions.
Itunes works via wine depending on the version and how you set it up.
Gimp can do everything Photoshop can do. It isn't that gimp isn't ready..it's just that so far you have no been patient enough to try learning how the work flow in GIMP works.
And unless the ONLY games you play are Microsoft store or E.A.C tech required games..chances are they will work one way or another in Linux.
Itunes seems designed to _prevent_ you from doing things, instead of _enabling_ you to do them.
For example, many years ago, when my mother had an Ipod, I put a bunch of stuff on it that my nephew had asked her to ask me for. The Free software I had available let me freely move audio and video clips between my Linux PC and the Ipod (at least that earlier model, anyway).
But when she went back home, there was no way Itunes would let him get those songs off the Ipod onto his Windows machine, so he had to lose them when it did a sync.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104
" Itunes seems designed to prevent you from doing things, instead of enabling you to do them "
I couldn't agree more. That's why I stopped using it over a decade ago, but because my baby boomer mother is hellbent on continue using it, It's up to me to figure out many ways to fix it or keep it working.
But for kicks..I figured out how to get it working in Linux on my test rig.
Foobar2000 lets you transfer itunes music back and forth..not just one way ;)
On my arch install, loading pdfs took minutes, even smaller ones. I remember not having very many issues with it the last time I used it, but wps-pdf worked wayyyyyy better specifically for pdfs. Have not tried regular word documents with libre office, but at least for pdfs on my arch install it was not worth using
That's interesting, are you loading PDFs and converting them to editable documents?
i dont have issues with writer, it is equally as terrible as ms word (trying to move around text frames and images is not fun.)
calc is pretty bad. the spreadsheet app in gdrive is better than that.
base is fine until you start attempting to format reports.
the presentation app similarly does its thing until you attempt to move beyond the starter template.
Some good points made, but the whole video would have been half as long if you didn't keep repeating the same point in slightly different wording. For myself, I always found the MS user interface easier to find things in than Libre Office. I've used Libre Office for many years but I often find myself having to google to find where a particular command is accessed, while Office seems to place commands more logically.
Totally agree. Certain software just have to be bleeding edge. Stability is too often just a poor excuse for laziness.
Remember "Painter" back in the 90's? ... well take a look at "Krita". If you like Gimp I think you might like Krita as well
Krita is amazing
NGL, I thought this was a video on using LibreOffice to create epub ebooks. I know I can just export to epub, but I really wanted to see the process from a writer's POV.
Now that this video has been published, that type of video is definitely a reasonable request.
LibreOffice needs to FEEL faster with smooth scrolling and smoother animations. Truly it's not functionalities that are missing.
That's odd, it's scrolling fine for me so I can't reproduce that myself.
You’re not running it on Windows, are you?
I've been pronoucing it wrong all these years. You learn something new every day.
Spanish for "free" (libre) Office.
The book should have been called “Mastering LibreOffice”