LibreOffice: How good are we compared to Microsoft Office?

PowerPoint has perhaps the worst user interface I can imagine for creating presentations. When I attempted to switch to Linux full-time I discovered that LibreOffice Impress defied the extents of my imagination and was some how much, much worse.

I gave up on my Linux transition due to two primary factors. 1) constant rough edges and half-broken basic things like Windows losing focus after resizing them. 2) lack of access to a presentation tool that wasn't an active assault on my workflow & creative process.

The word processor and spreadsheet app worked well enough for me though, so that's a plus.

If you are competing with Microsoft Office network effects, "Compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats" is the #1 feature. Everything else is a distant #2.

By definition, Microsoft Office scores 100%. What % less than 100% would be acceptable for Libre Office? If only 90% of the documents I produce render correctly in Microsoft Office, do any of the other features matter? It would be very interesting to have an objective test suite that calculates how close Libre Office is.

The other path is Google Docs which solves scenarios that are underserved by Microsoft. Like collaborative editing.

Real fanboy comparison.

Cherry picked features and yellow/green coloring is mostly LibreOffice friendly.

Real life comparison is much different

Interesting how LO can import MS Visio files (2000-2013) but MS Office cannot.

One thing that irks me about libre office is its hacky VBA support. I would think that they would try to support it where I could open an excel file and have the VBA code run the same in both platforms. But a lot of the time it crashes even with that VBA support tag at the top.

If they could provide full support for that I could see a lot of my customers switching to Libre Office for their reports and business tools which in turn would let me switch to it as well.

My dream spreadsheet software: Lightweight (remember this is a dream) Full support for VBA Scripting alternative in Python SANE scripting API Open source Cross platform Modern UI