LibreOffice is a free, open-source office suite developed by TDF, based in Germany.

So... we supposed to be rooting for Homelander now?

No it's just saying libre office kills babies
- Is that how it loads so fast?
- *eats
For real. I really hate how all the internet has just decided to meme with homelander like he is a good guy. Any meme I see with him I just assume some sort of malevolence behind it because he is so fucking evil.
It's not like Solider Boy is great either lol.
- No, certainly not. I'm just pointing out that with context this meme template means something very different to what it says on the surface.
  
  Unless OP's point is that LibreOffice is more functional but much, much worse for society while there are better options just off-screen, in which case fair enough and well played.

Libreoffice is amazing. I had dismissed it ages ago back when I had no reason to boycott the US, but now I tried it again after switching to Linux and it works amazingly good.

There’s no need for MS Office for personal use, though unfortunately for my large corporate employer it probably isn’t going to realistically be considered.

I just wish it wasnt so ugly.

I prefer LibreOffice's ugliness to Microsoft's strange menus. Anyway they're also available in LibreOffice, in the view menu.

For the rest of the interface you could look into GTK themes, I think LO's looks depend a lot of the theme you use. The interface is pretty customizable, I think.
I think the look depends a lot on the icon set in use, which can be changed in the settings. Personally I use the Elementary SVG version on my Plasma Desktops, I find those icons to be clearer and neater than the ones in the Breeze pack. Also the default Font Liberation Sans, while a fine font, has a certain look that looks slightly dated somehow. If you change the default style for all documents to some other font, it looks a lot fresher :-)

Good marketing point: LibreOffice has NO ENSHITTIFICATION! Great!

No issues with Libre Office, but isn't the point of this scene that homelander really is a downgrade?

Yeah nah. I maybe for light weight every day use yeah. But MS Office is a beast for pros.

And they have excel. Nothing beats excel.

I'm not a pro but all the people I know that use it say excel is the best by far

MS Office is scriptable with basic. LibreOffice, on the other hand, supports basic, python, js, beanshell.

Both software have there advantages. Scientific research is often done on Linux, and they use LibreOffice. In University, we also used it, because they said it has better functions for our use-case.
- Universities use it because it's free
Yep LibreOffice has felt like a beta for the last 10 years. Whoever makes this suggestion might as well use Notepad, because that's all the functions they seem to need and it's probably more stable than Writer anyways.

libreoffice is great! onlyoffice is good too if you like more compatability with office and docx, but it's more geared toward online services and subscriptions.

There's also OnlyOffice from Latvia.

LO is good software.

It replaced MSOffice Word for me (and I had been using Word since the early 90s). It also has a few extensions one may want to consider adding. Stuff like extra dictionaries for example, or better (than the default provided) ePub/HTML export tools.

https://extensions.libreoffice.org/

I haven't used LibreOffice in quite some time in favor of OnlyOffice because of how it handles MS Office formatting. Is the formatting situation better for LibreOffice now?

Personally I've had an issue with LibreOffice mainly in that it tends to be more unstable and clunky. It oftentimes goes unresponsive on me and has crashed a time or two when loading larger files, but that may be because I'm running it in Windows so I dunno

I'm never quite sure if a document will translate 100% to Word or Excel, but otherwise I've been very happy.

To ensure better compatibility, do a fresh save-as to another format if possible on MS side (docx-doc, doc-docx, -docm, whatever). It forces Office to rebuild the file, i believe, and usually it fixes some display mistakes coming from excessive formatting, trashes the leftovers of previous edits, etc, and the file itself becomes lighter. Some other tricks:

Have strict formatting rules and only select amount of styles. If you see them mutating, choose to select everything with a style-bastard applied, and then reapply their parent to all affected paragraphs (after what it should disappear);

Don't use rare fonts as long as possible, and if you do, on different machines too, copy them from Windows fonts folder in advance;

Overwhelmingly long and complex tables in Word usually break. The most dire offender is how you unite cells and move separate cells' borders, because it breaks their structure. Google has workarounds iand limitations on that in their products. To ensure your table translates right, copy it into Excel and then back after setting all cells in Excel to text data, as it likes to reformat e.g. 18.03.2025 into date format and such.

Some of these problems occured to me between different installations of MS products themselves, and with LO I had it the other way: Excel had a bugged file that wasn't adjustable in how to print it. One column wasn't fitting on the page one, but once I move the guideline over that column, Excel cuts this table into 70+ pages, one cell on each. The only thing that helped is opening this exact file in LO Calc where this problem just can't be reproduced. Since that I use Calc first, and then Google Sheets as I haven't found a fitting online sharing solution for myself and get invited tonedit it by others, and Excel is not an option at all anymore.
- Thank you for the tips; I'll try them.

Any accountants use LibreOffice Calc? Is it a good excel replacement? I just downloaded it this week but haven't tested it yet.

It works great. Not much difference.

The only thing I really miss from office is Power Query.

For somebody like me with no formal programming knowledge but self taught, it's graphical interface and feature are really hard to replace.

I only use this. It got to a point where it is superior to MS Word.

Now if they could do the same for Gimp. What a UX mess.

Isn't Krita considered the better open source image editor now? I keep meaning to learn it.
- Its more for drawing than editing images, so not a complete gimp replacement
- As of now, there is only Gimp. And it's very bad.

How does it stack to Open Office? Got that years ago & it's been treating me well.

LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and most developers went to work on LibreOffice instead. You should consider switching to LibreOffice.
OpenOffice is not recommended, I hope you mean OnlyOffice, they get confused sometimes.
- Nope! I do believe it's OpenOffice, an older version, idk I downloaded a popular FOSS version a few years back. Pretty insane that Microsoft actually thinks people should pay a subscription to rent this stuff, lol

Does it do macros, and does it save in .dotx and DOCX formats?

Yes and yes
- Nice

I find Softmaker FreeOffice easier to use, especially if you want a similar UI to MS office, german company but not opensource. Now, I only use it occasionally, I don't know which one is better for heavy users, they have a paid version too.

For some reason I don't fully understand, LibreOffice hides the option to switch the UI in View > User Interface. The option Tabbed seems to resemble MS ribbon-like style.

They should possibly consider to make that a default question on first start-up, like: 'What interface layout feels familiar?'
- They do that

America and Germany are fascist, open source is the only.plus here