In a world where corporate entities predominantly use Microsoft Office, the name LibreOffice may not be in the dictionary of many of these entities. “Libre what?” might one ask. For others, LibreOffice might be linked with unprofessional, underdeveloped, and lower quality end-product compared to Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office is, after all, the gold standard of Office Suites, so why on earth would anyone want to use something entirely differently?
This article will answer the following questions. Firstly, what is LibreOffice? How is it like to use (it’s pros and cons)? How is compatibility like with other office suites? And Lastly, who, if anyone, is LibreOffice good for?
Before we dive into this, a little background story is needed on why I personally, use LibreOffice with Google Suites online. Sometime back in 2017, I was absolutely frustrated with Microsoft Office and Windows 10 is “bugginess”, slow, and just simply frustrating end performance. This lead to the demise of Windows on my brand new HP Envy during my final year of university, where I installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (while backing up all my documents and files). Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is an open and free operating system supported, developed, and distributed by Canonical. Below is a snapshot of the latest Ubuntu 20.04 (For those who know what Linux OS’s and Desktop environments are, I no longer use GNOME given that it can be unstable from time to time and have migrated towards Kubuntu with KDE Plasma installed, although Ubuntu does have some elements of “bugginess and instability”, by far, it is more stable than Windows 10 in many ways)
With this, using Ubuntu as my daily driver for three years has been fruitful, and apps such as spotify, Firefox, Google Chrome and others that you find on Windows 10 are also readily available on Ubuntu. Of course, Ubuntu is not an “error-free” piece of OS, but, relative towards Windows 10, the OS is by far quicker, more stable, and in some ways, more intuitive to use. Throughout the three years, I primarily used Google Suites (Docs, Slides, and Spreadsheet) as my main Office Suite to get things done (with the occasional use of Microsoft Office on University computers, and thus, have not lost touch towards what it is actually like to use office).
Until recently, approximately four weeks ago, I’ve been trying to find an offline supplementary Office Suite to work on in collaboration with Google Suites when online cloud-based collaboration is needed,This was especially important to me since, at Bahrain Research Group, we use a whole list of Google apps (such as meets, calendar, Gmail and others), and would sometimes use the Office suites to collaborate with each other. Reasons for looking for an offline and non-web app based office suite follows as:
- Using online Office suites, while useful especially for backing up data, uses a lot of system resources, especially the CPU and to some extent RAM. As a result, opening many documents is not feasible.
- In general, longer and larger documents become more unstable when using online office suites like G Suites, given that there’s only so much web-based software can do compared to offline support, some files which I do work on are rather large compared to the average consumer or office worker’s files.
Although hesitant given the stigma which LibreOffice has, I decided to give it a go as my co-daily Office Suite driver for the past four weeks, given that LibreOffice by default is installed on Ubuntu and other Linux derivatives.