In all honesty, initially, LibreOffice is quite intimidating, and appears to be of lower quality in comparison to Microsoft Office and Google suites. In fact, opening the LibreOffice Writer for the first time will present you with a layout like this below
However, LibreOffice provides the option to change this view format to something more intuitive and familiar to the millions of users of office, where you can choose between “tabbed” or “compact tabbed” format. This in turn, will be saved as a setting for every time you open any new instances of LibreOffice. First, we’ll look at LibreOffice Writer.
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LibreOffice Writer
When using LibreOffice writer, once switching to the tabbed or compact tabbed position, things instantly become a lot easier to use and more recognizable, like how you see things in Microsoft Word and Google Docs. With this, writer, at least on Ubuntu/Linux, is unbelievably fast at loading documents with an SSD. My 66 page dissertation for my masters degree took just 4 seconds to fully load, which compared to Google Docs, and past, but not recent experience of Microsoft Word, is miles faster, this served as a surprise.
Despite being faster, there are a few issues which do pop-up in terms of initial usage. First, formatting text, images, and other items is not as intuitive as other competitors, and therefore require that you take a little bit of time to learn how to use such features. However, once you get the hang of simply right clicking and looking for the feature, this becomes a trivial issue, and things can be easily found in an instance to modify text and other items which are not displayed as a default setting (which in itself can be modified to have such settings in the bar above).
Large documents load relatively well and fast. Scrolling is mostly smooth, and editing is also mostly smooth. However, as I will discuss in the compatibility issue section, there are small instances where you do notice a drop in performance with LibreOffice. Overall, LibreOffice Writer is quite stable, and probably has the most shallow learning curve when first being used out of the three main applications under LibreOffice suite.
LibreOffice Impress
LibreOffice Impress is the PowerPoint/Google Slides equivalent. Impress, in my opinion, is the application which has the steepest learning curve when using compared to the other two. First, with Impress, using guidelines is not straightforward, and the alignment of objects, text, images, graphs and other items are not straightforward with respect to Google Slides and PowerPoint. This initially prompted me to give up on LibreOffice Impress, but I decided to give it another go.
After giving it a second chance, I’ve noticed that using Impress is actually rather easy, although somewhat different compared to the competition. It’s maybe another word like procedure/strategy of using a snap movement basis for objects makes sense, especially if you turn on the view of the grid, and that in some ways makes more sense than actually having measurement guides between objects, as what feels like almost free movement of objects and other items feels quite natural, and in some ways, artistic to create a presentation.
LibreOffice Impress is, in fact, the smoothest out of all of the LibreOffice office suites. I’ve yet to have a major hiccup from LibreOffice Impress.
LibreOffice Calc
As a massive excel and spreadsheet user and creator, this was a particularly important piece of software. In some ways, it was a make-or-break decision regarding LibreOffice. Initially, like how all the other suites in LibreOffice suffers from the same issue, the non-tabbed bar above with the settings to change formats, text size, and other items was intimidating. Additional to this, when writing formulas, the formula text itself does not look well polished and seems rather low quality in terms of graphics design.
However, once getting past these issues, using LibreOffice Calc was really good, and better than Excel and Google Spreadsheets! Calc actually came handy for one particular issue that I had during my dissertation: a rather large excel sheet. The total amount of participants (from the BRFSS dataset) in my dissertation was approximately, 430,000 individuals. Initially, I used R studio to filter and select the variables that were most need for my dissertation.
Excel had struggled to open the large file and remain running consistently, with multiple crashes along the way. However, with LibreOffice, although occasionally freezing, the program did not crash.
One thing which was a struggle (that is actually common across the LibreOffice suites) is the ability to make and change graphs. Making graphs was initially clunky and the default graphs looked horrendous. However, after a little bit of time learning how to create, modify, and polish up graphs in LibreOffice, graphs look nearly identical to ones that I make on Google Suites and previously, office. The example below is when I amateurishly measured G forces when driving a vehicle on the streets (which, once normalizing the data for potential measurement errors, actually falls in line with research and insurance company measurements)
This downside, of course, is the only one I can think of in terms of using LibreOffice across all the applications offered.
Overall, LibreOffice suites are actually quite stable, usable, and with some patience in the initial usage, are actually quite nice to use, it is potentially even more preferable than alternatives like Microsoft Office. Documents, PowerPoints, and Excel sheets can be made just like in other Office Suites with the same quality after maybe two or three weeks of usage to get used to some of the differences of the office suites.