Who is LibreOffice for? What can we take away from this?

By | October 14, 2021

In the end, who is LibreOffice for? I would go as far as saying that Medium end enterprises and organizations who do not use or require high-powered Microsoft Office features can possibly use LibreOffice. Students and individuals should highly consider using LibreOffice for personal use, as the need for expensive licensed office suites is not needed (where individuals would pay nearly 70 to 90 USD a year for Microsoft Office licenses). Alternatively, if users are not ready to embrace LibreOffice, then Google Suites is another alternative which is reliable and initially easier to use out of the box, but is not as powerful per se as LibreOffice.

My recommendation is that it would make sense to use LibreOffice for individual projects in small to medium size businesses and among private users, while G Suites should also be added and used as collaborative efforts when making documents. Why this combination? LibreOffice is light and works nearly effortlessly, while G Suites is by far more mature than Office 365, as office 365 itself does not even work with Office products that are installed offline. Office 365 online still suffers from poor performance this year, as per my last attempted use. Furthermore, G Suite tools, both for private and commercial use,are by far more mature and easier to use than online and offline-based Microsoft Office products.

In this regard, we can say that for almost 90%+ of users of Microsoft Office, both using the online and offline version, LibreOffice (and G Suites) are perfect substitutes, where G Suites are perfect for collaborative efforts, and LibreOffice for offline efforts. The only issue stemming from LibreOffice is that some initial effort is needed to understand how some of the tools work. However, once done, LibreOffice is quite easy to use, with little amount of bugs appearing during use.

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We should take a moment to appreciate that an open-source, free software from a Non-profit organization has managed to at least replicate and provide the tools which are found in Microsoft Office that “non-power” users need. This in itself is an amazing achievement, and Microsoft should take a look at how it develops its products, as competition from Google, Apple, and others are slowly replacing the aging and fractured services and products provided by Microsoft. This is evident by broken update system management found in Windows 10, online cloud-based office suites by Microsoft are half-backed solutions. In an age of free and open-source software such as LibreOffice or Google Suites, it makes little sense for users to pay 70 to 100 USD per year for software which is on-par to the competition at best, and at worst with the large host of issues which windows 10 and Microsoft Office presents, sub-par towards the competition.

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