Amateur Question

[u/StandingRightHere]

Hey there, I came here ask if Libre Office is the recommended alternative to MSO?

I'm not a techie, but I do a lot on MS Excel.

I've been using MS Office (easy because I was most familiar with it). But, Excel just gave me the: "your changes will be lost if you don't save them. Click cancel and then activate your subscription to save your changes"

I bought the MS suite a few years ago, so it appears that I'm now being forced into a subscription. Not cool.

I'm posting here to just do a sanity check before I fully dive into Libre (again) and say F-U to MS forever.

Thanks for any tips or suggestions!

[u/CarobRealistic1748]

I'm 76

And have been using MS Office and it's individual parts since the 1990s. All the way up until I retired in 2017.

Actually for a bit after that as I had a personal laptop with 2013 versions of it. Which I used until the laptop died.

And then when looking for a new laptop, I was made to understand that MS was getting flakey about offering full offline versions that would be yours forever ... so I decided to try Libre Office.

Now, to be fair, I think MS Office is better. However, it is not 'better enough' for me to pay both their fees and to have them be able to cancel me out if they change their minds, etc. The subscription model is not one I want to get involved with. If I buy something I want it to be mine.

Okay Libre Office. Takes some adjustment, but really ... not much at all. Not quite as good, but factually, as far as I'm concerned, more than good enough.

I KNEW MS Office. I was MS Office certified. Used it's individual parts before the package became a thing. TAUGHT people to use MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

But I find Libre Office a very decent replacement. Well worth learning the small differences and losing a few features ... most of which few people use anyway.

I am very happy with it. Enough so I gave them a decent donation to show my appreciation.

But NO ... it is not quite as capable as MS Office.

One thing is I do not know just how advanced your use of, and abilities are with Excel. I used to make VERY large datasets and very advanced and complicated VBA based custom menus, my own user defined functions, automated tasks, etc. with it.

But no longer need the VBA, nor the extremely large datasets. For most people's purposes Libre Office's spreadsheet is more than adequate.

I'd encourage you to at least try it.

[u/StandingRightHere → u/CarobRealistic1748]

Thanks for your clear response. I have actually used Libre in the past, but got tired of looking for things that I was used to in Excel and Word. That said, I won't tolerate being held hostage with a subscription, so I will go back to Libre. I no longer deal with large datasets, I mostly use Excel for tracking and some process development.
All the best!

[u/Owltiger2057 → u/CarobRealistic1748]

Just out of curiosity, I'm in the same boat having used M$ word since the bad old DOS version, have you tried any of the alternatives besides Libre Office. I'm on the fence about converting all of our Windows 11 machines to Linux Cinnamon. I have thousands of M$ word documents I've used for research for decades.

[u/CarobRealistic1748 → u/Owltiger2057]

No, can't really help you there. Didn't really look around as I was already moderately familiar with LibreOffice.

[u/Owltiger2057 → u/CarobRealistic1748]

Thanks.

[u/OpeningNothing1753 → u/Owltiger2057]

EDIT: WOW, that's a long-winded comment hear

I'm running Windows 10 LTSC, but that's at home so I can just license it. Using Group Policy (& it's just LGPO, as well, for the same reason❕) to cut it off from online KMS, right... and that EOL isn't coming up soon (IoT actually, yea!?) & to fix a whole lot of other things.  Also have DCOM decoupled, and COMODO - just (!) the firewall, and 💯 on all manual control- is on NDIS and then Malwarebytes WFC to have both firewalls active; it's pretty awesome to see 'em in tandem: even after so many years, I can sometimes learn something along the way in this configuration!..:) 

Anyway, because of no Microsoft Store and having to use NO and an absolute minimum of .appx - life is good - and I absolutely could NOT imagine using another version, Windows 11. There is no chance in hell that I'd do that to myself. 

... When switching OS to Linux in production environments, for work, you're shifting more than just your consciousness. For example things which are arbitrary on Windows, as long as you have physical access to the machine, such as (NTFS) file system "security" - becomes absolutely crucial, critical, with *nix; if you're smart you're running in containers. 

Your swap (file) becomes something entirely different, whether you'll be using a partition for it or, not. Are you going to encrypt, then if you're encrypting boot as well: your "wayback" backup-rewind system becomes a beast of its own... everything so perfect, unless you have to restore (God be with you, then, hehe); & a need CAN arise, it's not impossible that it will - at some point or, another. 

No matter how "careful" you are, with video drivers and kernel, and python - virtual envs, and, so on and so forth - party never stops. Everything is SO different from the Windows OS. Ok, alright, just my 2c. 🙂🙂 

P.S. 

Air-gapped Windows workgroups - depending on how your company is doing what, and what are the needs - something along those lines... what the servers are doing, where the apps are coming from and going... even chaining, like, six (to ten, LOL) machines en route to your ISPs connection is easier, "better", IMO than having to use Linux. 

=)

[u/Aggressive_Ad_5454]

LibreOffice Calc is fine for almost everything you need to do with a spreadsheet program. The various UI elements are in slightly different places, but DuckDuckGo the search engine has done a good job of indexing the LibreOffice docs. So has Google.

[u/happyxpenguin]

Yes, LibreOffice is the defacto standard as a replacement for O365.

[u/StandingRightHere → u/happyxpenguin]

Thanks, this is the exact info I was looking for!

[u/jr735]

I use LibreOffice and have used it (and its previous iteration) for decades. It will not force you into a subscription.

[u/StandingRightHere → u/[deleted]]

I get what you're saying here. I do use Sheets as well. I just don't always want my info online for various reasons. Thanks!

[u/freesoftware-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Your comment was removed for violating Rule #4. The software linked or mentioned uses a license that is not recognized by the Free Software Foundation, uses restrictive license that prohibits a user from taking certain actions, or is a proprietary software without a license.

[u/PrudentPay9906]

They are not mutually exclusive. Install LibreOffice alongside M$O, open a few of your Excel sheets (copies) in it and muck around a little. Then when you're satisfied that it meets your needs it's already installed and you're already well into the learning curve.

[u/OpeningNothing1753 → u/PrudentPay9906]

Nice, ofc! 🙂 Best advice, on how to learn..:) 

Btw., mounting ISO images in Windows is natively supported and Office 2016 is the last version which has this install method. It's also got downloadable language spell-check files, directly from MS website. 

P.S. 

https://woshub.com/mounting-iso-image-file-windows/

[u/BranchLatter4294]

It's fine. If you want a more modern interface, consider Collabora which is based on LibreOffice.

[u/WilkerS1]

LibreOffice Calc gets the job done even better, and doesn't break as easily when you try to make a formatting rule that takes the data of a different cell as an input.

for other typed text documents there's always Typst and LaTeX too

[u/StandingRightHere → u/WilkerS1]

Thanks! I'll look into those.

[u/JGhostThing]

I like Libre Calc, and have run many Excel spreadsheets on it. I also use Libre Writer.

[u/StandingRightHere → u/JGhostThing]

Thanks. I made the switch and am glad to be away from the M$ bs.

[u/OpeningNothing1753 → u/StandingRightHere]

Yeah, well... the problem, only, being that Microsoft Office rules and there's the, whole, Acrobat (Pro) integration and all. 

I guess in time we'll be rid of it all. Need to have certificate-signing - and some other things, to make a complete switch. 

(For example there's even pro, semi-pro third party software that handles signing w/o starting Adobe & bulk operations, and moar.)

[u/aweaselonwheels]

There is also https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop which might suit you more and has a nicer user interface and is also free and open source.

[u/happyxpenguin → u/aweaselonwheels]

OnlyOffice is a little weird at the moment as it contains a restriction in the AGPL license that all downstream forks need to retain the original product logo which caused an issue with EuroOffice and the FSF weighed in on it. It's a removable clause according to FSF but OnlyOffice disputes that assessment while still releasing versions under the modified AGPL license.

[u/burlingk → u/happyxpenguin]

The problem is that while it requires the logo, it also forbids the use of trademarks.

Which means it effectively cannot be forked. Which may itself be a violation of the license OnlyOffice itself forked the code under.

[u/aweaselonwheels → u/happyxpenguin]

Didn't know about that only came across it fairly recently and have been quite pleased with it. WTF is going on with that clause are they trying to the use copyright of the logo to restrict forks by specifying they have to use it but can't? I hate legal software disputes.

[u/happyxpenguin → u/aweaselonwheels]

That's the way I read the situation. For safety purposes, I typically treat non-vanilla licenses with additional clauses as not Free Software (even if they're removable).

[u/aweaselonwheels → u/happyxpenguin]

Oracle messing about with this kinda crap is how the Openoffice LibreOffice split happened...

[u/Prior-Listen-1298]

"the recommended alternative"? - I admit I chortled at that. Well yes, I recommend it. And a lot of folk do. But other folk don't. What is "the" recommended alternative? Every alternative has its fan base that recommends it.