Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

114 pointsgtf21160 comments

We're a ~40 person startup, about to scale post-series A. We have been using Google Suite since the beginning in 2015, and honestly it's just terrible software and feels like it has had zero updates in 7 years. One of the biggest problems for me with Gsuite is that there is no real offline support (I know there is supposed to be, but it has never worked for me, plus the drive isn't available offline). I work a lot on trains crossing Europe, or sometimes on flights. I just want to have my files accessible.

I use LibreOffice personally, and I'm thinking about moving the team to it before we seriously grow.

Has anyone tried this in their companies? Was it successful? I'm especially interested in companies of a similar size (or larger) than ours, and those where not everyone is super technical / a software engineer.

My big concerns are support and training, I think there are companies who offer this which would make it a lot easier.

(Edit: to be clear, our CFO will probably continue to use Excel, as will some of the team who build very complicated modelling sheets as that is what they're used to, but I'm thinking for the rest of us who mostly need decent spreadsheets, and good word-processing and presentation tools).

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I have. Been using OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice since 2005, started business in 2007, never ever had a copy of MS office.

I LAUGH at silly FUD like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", "You can't read documents ", "format compatibility problems!!", because that all is just FUD.

If I ever (rarely, maybe 4 times total) receive a price file or spec that is unreadable by LibreOffice, I just ask to resend it to me in some open format cause I lack the software to open their proprietary file. And I did received it in a PDF or .odt every single time I asked.

That said, I liked the software more in their OOo days. When it became LibreOffice it became somehow more buggy and ugly. OOo with the right icon pack was very neat and had a superior interface to MSOffice. LibreOffice icons got uglified and are no longer pleasant to look at, and combined all looks... Worse.

Their online efforts are also disastrously bad. LibreOffice Online is based on a flawed idea to run LO on a server and deliver rendered images to a user. It works super shitty bad. They should have just made a web-first editor for OpenDocument file format, with concurrent editing. (Maybe when I'm finally done with the XMPP I'll look for funding to make just this. ... )

"When it became LibreOffice it became somehow more buggy and ugly."

Matter of taste - I quite like the current interface. I've just fired up Writer and it actually reminds me of Word 2 with a much higher resolution and a lot of polish. There's just enough functionality exposed via buttons and no more. There are menus with loads of functions and they are sensibly laid out.

LO is being developed at a remarkable pace. The codebase they forked from Apache that came from SO was pretty wank and had some fairly odd things going on. It's a massive job and I really like their direction.

The end result has just worked for me for at least five years now with no friction.

> I LAUGH at silly FUD like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", "You can't read documents ", "format compatibility problems!!", because that all is just FUD.

Not really a FUD if you're dealing with Excel spreadsheets from other companies, especially those that uses integrations with Excel. However PowerPoint/Present compat is a hit-or-miss bother but not world-shuttering like with Excel though, and Word compatibility is actually okay except when dealing with weirder documents that is also fragile with different Word versions.

When I used to work on publishing government reports we used to run into strange formatting issues if we didn’t stick with the Windows version of Office 365. Could we have worked around them with multiple versions or LibreOffice etc? Sure, but it would take time and at at $150-$350 and hour per contractor its not worth it. Just provision the licenses and be done with it.

If there are excel integrations with third party SW you arguably have additional issues, even with M$ Excel

I find that some of the models I get sent by the team won't open properly in LibreOffice Calc, so definitely agree with this. I very rarely get Writer / Impress compatibility issues, however.

If you are disproving wide claims like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", even one contrary example is enough to make the claim invalid. Of course, I can imagine some scenarios where compatibility with a proprietary format world impede business processes, but I think that for a vast majority of businessess it is a non-issue.

Regarding the presentation format, the One True Format is PDF.

> If you are disproving wide claims like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", even one contrary example is enough to make the claim invalid.

That's not how rhetoric works. That is how logic works, but this is not a logical argument. One counterexample does not disprove the rhetorical claim that businesses do not run without Microsoft Office, because rhetorical claims are not hard logical claims. They are exemplar claims. They are to be backed up for most cases, and caveats will exist.

Rhetorically, most businesses do processing through Excell files. You will receive them from B2B partners. You will be required to send them to businesses and governments. They will have weird advanced features and logic embedded, and if you do not make use of all of the features and send something back to the other side that works perfectly, partners will drop you like a hot potato.

Logically, it is possible to run a business that has no interaction with B2B partners, one that chooses partners carefully to never interact with Microsoft customers, etc. Rhetorically, this limits the possibilities for your business vastly. Rhetorically, the solution space you limit yourself to with that one constraint is infinitesimal compared to the standard problem space with standard constraints.

All arguments are rhetorical. Some arguments are logical in form but without an absolute truth evaluation engine (which is logically but not rhetorically impossible) you cannot hope to evaluate them, since you'll be starting from some axioms. We cannot prove axioms, even within the pure spaces of logic and mathematics there are still axioms; you cannot prove a system using itself. This is the oft-cited and almost as oft misused (Rhetorically: always misused) incompleteness theorem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompletenes...

Unrelated to the argument, but related to your arguing: you might enjoy "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"

I found their comment more interesting and valuable than yours. Just a data point.

You might also enjoy the book if you enjoy conversation about rhetoric.

Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point, I wouldn't recommend it. Spending 10 USD per user/month on Microsoft 365 is a small investment but it gives most users instant familiarity with the tools and provides you with tools for collaboration (drafting contracts for instance). I don't think you can save money if you look at training effort alone. In the worst case you will be seen as hard to integrate (and hence buy) as a company because of a weird office stack.

The maximum weirdness I have seen:

"I think your tabstops are inconsistent."

Granted, I don't do complex spreadsheet formatting.

Yeah, I am curious why the OP is wanting to avoid Microsoft here. It is one thing if you just want to use open source and maintain that ethos, but if the reason is to save money it makes no sense. Spending $400 a month for a 40 person startup is going to be a negligible cost. If it adds even a few hours a month of extra effort across your entire team, the cost savings are already gone.

Use the thing everyone knows.

Unfortunately Office is no longer "the thing everyone knows." It has become a hideously dysfunctional mess, primarily because of UI-design defects.

Style management stands as a particular example. Now you must wade through dozens of unwanted canned styles to find the ones you've set up... if I remember correctly.

For the style mess and other UI regressions that I haven't taken the time to catalog, I switched to LibreOffice. Granted, I don't exchange Office documents with coworkers much. We use (also crappy) Confluence for most documentation; and if I just want to send a document to someone, I export to PDF.

I used to love Word. I used WordBasic to automate not only technical-documentation production, but also to parse and rewrite thousands of SQL routines on a DEC VAX system and save my company weeks of engineering time.

I hate Word now because Microsoft ruined its UI. Oh, and I detest the continual hounding to log into your "Microsoft account." Nobody wants your goddamned account, Microsoft. We all have PLENTY of accounts by now.

Personally, I’ve found the new UI in Word to be a massive improvement. The ribbon is way easier for me to navigate and find functionality.

Then again, I’m using the macOS version. It still has a menubar for less common functionality.

I use Office on a Mac as well, i have zero issues with the UI and UX on the recent versions.

I think it depends on what kind of user you are. If you're doing ad-hoc formatting all the time, maybe the ribbon is OK. But if you are used to managing styles and religiously applying them and using templates, I found that the new UI sucks (on both Windows and Mac).

The "ribbon" was widely mocked when it came out; I'm curious as to what you find easier about it.

I wasn't a big Word user prior to the ribbon so I can't compare before and after, however I've found applying styles about as easy as it can be (select text, click the style in the ribbon). Were they in a more convenient location before?

If Word had styles prior to the ribbon, I didn’t know about it.

I imagine very few people knew they existed.

There was always a style drop-down in the toolbar. My experience goes back to Word for Windows (named thusly to differentiate it from the DOS version). Check it out: https://www.idgcdn.com.au/article/images/750x750/dimg/m_img_...

It's the management and use of styles that I find has regressed drastically. When I press the Style drop-down, I want to see only MY styles. I don't want to scroll through a shitload of canned styles that Microsoft has laden the application with, featuring every variety of color and thickness of underline. The last time I tried Word (not that long ago), there was no way to get rid of this huge pile of crap.

Word peaked at version 6, I think. Is there anything important missing from this toolbar? https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/applications/microsoft-...

I've been fortunate enough that the canned styles have worked for my requirements but I can definitely see how they won't work for every case.

The review ribbon has been very convenient. I use it constantly as an author.

Flipping between landscape and portrait and changing margins isn’t buried in an obscure dialog box. (I do this often to make signs.)

OK, I could see how review controls would be useful. Could they not be added to the toolbar before?

With due respect to your opinion, I don't think sign-making is a major use case for a word processor. I would think that a vector-art program would be far better suited to that, even a free one like Inkscape.

The ribbon interface is more than just buttons on a toolbar. It adds discoverability to many features I didn’t even know existed and I’ve used Word since Office 95. I find the differing visual layout to be a lot easier to read than a lot of similarly sized buttons.

Any place where people work will end up having signs. I’ve seen Word (and Google docs) used to make simple text signs and more complex ones using clip art. What I don’t see is a lot of signs being made. Not nearly enough to justify learning Inkscape.

The thing that everyone knows these days is Google Docs, not Office.

Only in a very small, insular bubble.

I don't know, I've worked with tiny startups and bigger companies like Red Hat, and huge banks, and GSuite is very widely used. The biggest corps don't seem to use it, but I definitely don't think it's only used in a small insular bubble

According to my Google Research Google Workspace has 19.2% marketshare and Office 365 65%.

I wouldn't call 20% "a small insular bubble".

As the the children using it in schools grow up the percentage will probably change in Googles favour. Cheap Chromebooks and G-suite for schools was the entry to try breaking Microsoft monopoly on an Office suite we will find out if they succeeded in the next decade.

> we will find out if they succeeded in the next decade.

I'm worried that Google ADHD strikes Workspace, to be honest the reason many still stick up with Microsoft is that they understand the proposition of enterprise software, but assuming Google didn't touch Workspace like it did for its messaging and payment solutions it could be a 50/50 split.

Most other startups I know use GSuite.

I don't know a single person in the company I work for that use MS Office or has done the last three or so years.

Supposedly you can get a license if you need it, but I don't know anyone who need it or even complain about it.

Everything goes in Confluence (or.md files in repos) or something similar these days, doesn't it?

The fresh-off-the-line uni grads I talk to are still doing Office training as a first year course.

I have never heard of a college course about Microsoft Office at a university in the US. And I went to college in early to mid 2000s.

Colleges offer entire degree programs in using Microsoft Office software. You can get an Associate's degree just in that alone.

I've never been to a college that didn't require one Office course for all graduates.

I think maybe people are talking at cross purposes here and using the word 'college' differently, because I (in the USA) never even heard of a college that offers such a course, much less requires it.

I am also in the US. I'd have to dig up details on the "Office class" I had to take, but for example, here's a two-year college in my area's Office program: https://cod.edu/academics/programs/ofti/index.aspx

FWIW, I'm Australian, and I'm talking about our local Universities. Doing a BSc myself, Msft Office training wasn't a requirement for my course, but many of the Bachelor of IT courses did have it as a requirement. Talking to my colleagues, they also had it as a requirement.

FWIW, I'm Australian, and have never heard of such a requirement.

Swinburne seems to offer such courses, but they're not credited, and not compulsary, and they're one day things designed for students who have never even turned on a computer before. They're definitely not part of a Bachelor of IT.

MelbUni, VicUni and FedUni don't even offer anything like that, at all.

I guess I’m talking about 4 year liberal arts colleges when I say or think “college”.

Depends on the field. I think the main sticking point is Excel, a large number of businesses still rely on Excel-specific features.

I wouldn't want to have anyone on my team who couldn't pick up either in a few days. An average user isn't expected to run some complex analysis or create complex dashboards.

To be clear (as many people seem to think this is about money): this isn't about money. If we switched to LibreOffice we'd donate to the contributors and pay for support. This is about migrating tools before I have double the number of people to migrate.

Why do I want to look at LO?

- GSuite: it's just terrible, the entire suite misses basic functionality (custom styles, anyone?) and it only works online for me, and there are no files I can access. When Google went down for a day no-one could access a single document or presentation, which is just untenable.

- MS Office: better than GSuite, but the latter has better collaboration tools IMO. I like Office just fine, but it's not OpenSource, and I'm on Linux which means there are no offline apps I can use.

- LibreOffice: it's open-source, with an open document format. If we don't start using (and paying for) open-source projects as business they'll never become sufficiently competitive, and I prefer an open ecosystem to a closed one.

> Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point

I don't believe your conclusion follows the premise -- I'm not planning my business around an exit strategy, and we're gunning for being a large, private company not just a quick money spinner.

As I've said elsewhere, it's also not about cost, but about open tools and an open ecosystem. I use LibreOffice myself (I run Linux, as do about a quarter of my engineering team) and find it fine (except for complex models and spreadsheets).

I get your point about Open Source, no problem.

In your intro you mentioned a series A funding and so I imagined the typical start-up which goes maybe to 50-500 employees before exit (or bust). If you are gunning to be a next RedHat or strongly driven by a Open Source strategy, I get why you would strategically invest in being a pure Open Source shop. If Linux drives your business then it is fine to go this way. Otherwise: The office stack is not a core part of your business so go with the thing that causes the least amount of friction in your company for a modest price.

Well, this is probably smaller than the companies you're thinking of, but my wife's retail store (two owners, just her and her business partner, 0 employees) use LibreOffice. They aren't trying to do any fancy graphing. For basic word processing and spreadsheet calculations, it works fine. It can produce some graphs, but I think in this area it is not as good as Excel (although I haven't used Excel in a while). Not too much of a training load, if they've used other office suites.

I don't really think there's anything I know of (that a normal small company would use especially) in which LibreOffice will not be as good or better than Google Suite, so if that's what your current office suite is then the transition should not be too painful. Googling for the answer works for most questions.

There are a few IT people and Managed Service Providers I deal with that have become pretty adept at cutting over small and midsize businesses from G Suite to Microsoft 365.

The office suite is better, the email client configurability is significantly better (from what they claim, I'm a Thunderbird on Linux person), and you get single sign on too.

My firm uses our own mailserver (with DKIM and SPF), LibreOffice for doing our cost comparisons for clients and other document generation needs, and has been pretty happy with that. We are split across Windows, Linux and MacOS, the sole tether for about half of our Windows users is a dependence on iTunes backup (since apparently they don't trust iCloud, ugh...) for their iPhones, preventing a migration to Linux.

> the email client configurability is significantly better

I'm gonna have to disagree on this one. Outlook 365 is ass-tastic. It doesn't even have feature parity with the web app, and is full of weird bugs and limitations. Just off the top of my head:

- Moving old messages between folders in the native app requires downloading the full message then uploading it again

- Calendar subscriptions sync from web client to native app, but not the other way around

- Calendar colors on the native app are limited to a preset pallete of 8, while the web app allows custom colors

- The new mail notification icon sticks on if another client reads the new message

- Cannot sync certain types of rules with the exchange server

- Warns you about "dangerous attachments" if you open an attachment that _you_ just added to an unsent email

- No way to block specific addresses / domains besides a local-only(!) rule to always put them in junk

The Microsoft E-mail client is an absolute shitshow. It's another huge regression in the Office suite.

I got new computers for my parents and made the mistake of getting them Windows machines because that's what they're familiar with. I set up Office, but Outlook is so defective that it was literally unusable. The final straw was that it defies Windows's own system-wide font-size setting. I needed to make the font bigger so my mom could read it, but Outlook ignored it... leaving her In box totally illegible to her (and barely legible period).

I was pleasantly surprised when I installed Thunderbird (after not trying it for 20 years) and everything worked well. It even handled the 15,000+ messages in her AOL In-box (yep, AOL).

Beyond the E-mail issue, Outlook 365 continually stopped working and badgered both my parents for MY account credentials, so I shitcanned it and replaced it with LibreOffice... on my systems as well. I find it less reprehensible than Office.

Thinking about just giving everyone Macbooks instead of O-365? Think again. The Mac client is similarly limited vs the classic Windows fat client. Microsoft is balancing on a knife edge because if the non-Windows fat clients and O-365 had feature parity, there would be no compelling reason for many to run Windows. Unfortunately the user community is caught in the middle.

Even so to address the original question - it's been my personal experience that moving docs between MS users and LibreOffice also exposes lots of funny formatting issues, particularly in Word docs. If you're not exchanging docs with others that's one thing, but IMHO you don't want to submit your resume or any equally important document written in LibreOffice format even in compatibility mode. Better to print to PDF.

Honestly, I don’t think that’s true anymore. Microsoft runs so many different release channels between Windows. Office, Office 365 and Mac wtf knows when new features arrive.

Not sure which part you don't think is true any more? So I'm switching from a Windows virtual desktop to a Macbook and the experience I'm talking about is as of the last few weeks. Hopefully MS will eventually catch up and gain feature parity everywhere, but as stated above, there's at least one disincentive for doing so; namely it'll impact Windows revenue.

I don’t think MacOS is really a second class citizen anymore. Excel lags a bit but is greatly improved from a few years ago. I’d argue Mac Outlook is a better product.

Microsoft’s revenue is driven by subscriptions and business users. Commercial customers have to pay Microsoft for Windows even if they run Macs. For individuals, losing the $60 in Windows revenue and getting a Office subscription on Mac is a win - Mac users spend more.

It depends on the user and how they use Outlook. Microsoft’s tools for managing email are hot garbage for folks who get alot of mail.

But… many folks don’t understand how to use GMail effectively with things like labels, and Google lacks alot of the things that users rely on. (Drag and drop of messages into messages, folder structure, lack of message view, etc)

Unless you have a know how to be a good Gmail user, you’re gonna miss messsages.

In the long run, Outlook is in the middle of a long re-engineering process and will probably be better for it. Google definitely underinvests in their products… perhaps the webifying of Outlook will drive change there.

We're a ~40 person wholesale distribution company and I moved our company to LibreOffice. We also use Google Suite.

The issues I face with my company are usually accountants/bookkeepers are used to using Excel. LibreOffice usually can handle anything they are wanting to do. It just means a little extra time googling/playing around with it to work the same way. I try to keep everything on Google Sheets however.

That said, if we were scaling post Series A (we are not), I'd look to see whether there are teams that need advanced modeling or feel comfortable with Excel. Everyone whose job is not spreadsheet wrangling can go with LibreOffice and Google Sheets.

>LibreOffice usually can handle anything they are wanting to do. It just means a little extra time googling/playing around with it to work the same way.

Have you done a cost analysis of what the sum of that "little extra time googling" adds up to? If it's >$10 a month, then youre company is flat-out worse-off. Especially when LibreOffice / Google Sheets just doesn't even come close to the ease of use or power that Excel provides.

It's like giving a brick to a carpenter that has used a hammer for many years. Sure, the brick is okay at smashing nails in, but it flat out can't pull nails out, it creates ugly work, has no "user experience guard-rails", and is less efficient.

You're completely ignoring the risks of locking into a proprietary software. It's not guaranteed that it's going to cost $10 a month forever.

True, but Office is well and truly entrenched in the business world without much movement in cost since the move to cloud based many years ago. If things changed in the future, you could reevaluate then.

Did you let the accountants choose which software you use?

Never had success with it, being 97% as good as Microsoft Office isn't the same as being Microsoft Office. Formatting issues when sharing documents, tables that get blown out, looks kind of amateur sending those messed up documents to others unfortunately.

Not my experience. I generally find MS sourced docs to be as crap as any others. I did used to teach word processing and DTP back in the day so there is that.

I still have a pretty nightmareish template of styles that started off life in Word 9x and still going strong. It was for ISO9001 docs and includes three layers of table styles alone. Our ISO9000/27000 systems are all on Mediawiki these days but that template still works fine.

There are some jolly exciting bugs in all software but I suspect you are not an actual LO user.

I was a Libre Office user, explaining to you why I am no longer one. Clients would have problems with my documents and it made their lives hard so it became my problem. I'm a fan now of just using what works, stuck using Google for now, fortunately not needing to write serious documents with it.

Fair enough: that's your experience. You mentioned tables blowing up - what happened there?

You can always dump docs to pdf with LO - I think it was first with things like "Convert to pdf and email".

Yeah, whenever dealing with someone who uses O365 you are going to run into issues with everything from formatting to formulas to error messages.

Not worth it imo.

the funny thing is I get formatting issues and errors just going between O365 browser apps and the MS Office desktop Apps, using all latest versions.

While I don't think that it happens any more, you used to be able to do that using the same version of desktop Office apps, but a different default printer (not in print preview, just regular editing with a different default printer set.)

The company my wife works for is using LibreOffice entirely. Said company is a national retail service, focused on books and school related consumables, with around 40 stores opened throughout the entire country. And is using this since at least 2017, the year my wife went to work for them, possible since their beginnings in early 2000's, but I'm not sure since I haven't asked.

When she started to work for she asked me if we have LibreOffice on our computers because she had to edit some documents she took from work. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they relied on LibreOffice for document management. Nowadays LibreOffice is installed on all our home computers alongside Microsoft Office as well. She can switch to whatever she finds easier and I taught her to always convert her documents to .RTF to be sure she has no problem switching between home and work.

Have a look at the plans of Schleswig-Holstein, a federal state of Germany. The want to switch 25.000 PCs to LibreOffice and Linux from Windows/MS Office. Details here: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-s...

How will they do without document review and collaborative editing features?

LibreOffice is working on them: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Collaborative_Editing

I think you can already do this with LibreOffice Online/CODE?

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/

Hopefully they'll have better luck than Munich: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e...

That was a political decision and a farce, and they're already going back to Limux:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

What kind of startup are you? Where do you want to use office? Who creates most of the content?

I have worked at a company that started with Googledocs and ended with Markdown (paper / design docs) and reveal.js for presentations. And that is something I can take recommend. Why? Because it is simple text that can be stored in a repository and you gain the ability to compare versions. It is easy to change and you can convert it to almost anything. The most important target is obviously pdf to communicate with customers. Nobody wants odt, docx or other strange formats that require more than a browser.

Convincing the technical people was not necessary or done quick. Non coder like the CEO did like the suggestion least, but it was a revolution from the base and people who code where mostly creating content or talking at conferences.

What did they use instead of spreadsheets? Especially the non-technical staff.

I think Excel is still used. If people work for years with a tool it makes no sense to take it from them. This is like forcing my vim setup on another senior who uses for years vs code. It will not save enough to compensate for the decrease in productivity and mood.

It only makes sense of you can convince people.

There was thrift in my hometown, that was using excel to decide on the max credit for individuals. The document was copied and forked and the outcome was more random than anything. At least they could be convinced to introduce a database and a well written and maintained application, that does reliable work and provides the same output when given the same input.

"My big concerns are support and training"

If you find an awkward corner case in any piece of software then you will find support rather lacking from the vendor. I use LO myself: I'm a business owner and can use what I damn well like! I don't force anyone else to use LO but we are a MS tin partner or something so get our tricks err drugs err software a bit cheaper.

Training: I was a trainer back in the day and it's all about concepts and not the implementation. I've used Word from v1 to date and 2.0 was a sweet spot in terms of functionality and performance (2 floppies worth of code but could do quite a lot of decent WP and rudimentary DTP stuff eg hanging indents, decimal tabstops and text/image frames with text flow. Modern LO Writer has a turtle implementation in it, coz reasons. Nowadays I struggle a bit to find things in the ribbons. Super Calc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel and LO Calc all do the same thing in the end to a greater or lesser extent. I wrote a Finite Capacity Planner (yes: Finite) in Excel for a factory around 1995. I'd have to rewrite my functions in Python or whatever but it would run in LO quite happily.

Another anecdote: My wife is not IT minded in any way as such and has worked as a classroom assistant in schools catering for special needs and adult support services etc for several decades. She has had various IT offerings foisted on her from Acorn Axxx machines to PCs running Win 9x etc. At home she used to have Windows on her laptop but I eventually had enough at Win 7 when yet another graphics "driver" update needed a good six hours on the operating table to fix. She now runs Arch (actually!) and doesn't care. It just has to work. She also uses LO, which seems to work OK and isn't the oddest office suite she's been forced to use.

Don't overthink it. LO Writer and Calc are extremely capable apps and Base looks like a pretty good effort too when I've used it and you get all the rest of it but I tend to avoid Presentation type apps (such as "Poor Point")

If you are capable of running a start up then LO will work fine. If some of your staff are incapable of any flexibility - I'd start to reconsider my choice of staff. A startup is all about being flexible and seeing opportunity and so on. If any modern IT user is "incapable" of getting on with LO then I'd question their ability to work in a startup environment.

I'm less worried about their flexibility in adopting new tools (everyone has started using Notion just fine), but more that I would get people to move off Google, setup a whole new infrastructure, only to run into some usability issues that cause a huge amount of frustration. I'm a little scarred from the experience of doing something similar with moving my family's business to Thunderbird from Outlook because I thought it was better (I was 17, they probably should not have let a 17-year-old dictate IT policy, but that's a different question); fourteen years later and they're still using Outlook.

I very much suspect that LO will be fine until one day it isn't, and you wont realize until you are knee deep in pain that you are paying the price there and then. How much runway you have depends on the nature of the office work that you do. if you are trading complex documents with investors and their counsel for example then you may run into this immediately: docusign is gnarly, document review comments are gnarly, etc. All fixable, but at a time cost you might not have. Conversely if you are writing for consumption and not collaboration, LO might work for years.

The issue isnt whether LO is good (it is) but whether the LO team can compete with a trillion dollar corp that considers 365 as a central pillar of their business, invests in it accordingly, and whose changes to the software become the defacto standard overnight.

I think you are vastly underestimating the mess Microsoft changes to UI has made on their product lines. I was MCSE certified at one point in time, now I can’t even find the control panel nor does it have the options I knew about, not to mention the registry…

Microsoft consistently shoots themselves and their customers in the legs in desperate efforts to ape the young cool kid hipster companies.

I think the real question is: how long can a company trust a sinking ship, that, while it still has plenty of money, is bent on destroying everything they built so far?

Abandon ship! The captains have gone mad.

I feel like the biggest blocker to modern adoption of LibreOffice is the inability to collaborate in ways that Google Docs enables.

Are there open-source implementation of Docs, even poor ones?

Maybe this: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/

Or to run on MacOS without crashing.

Huh? I use LibreOffice frequently on macOS without any crashing at all. Is this a common issue?

Not macOS here but I've crashed LibreOffice products (usually Writer) countless times on Debian by doing such things as moving/resizing line drawings, attempting to add basic charts, attempting to adjust wrap settings for images, replacing images with other images, and setting tab stops when there are things other than pure text in the flow. I can live with most of these, although they are annoying. I just wish I had a more consistent experience so that I could contribute to fixing these issues, but it doesn't seem consistent at all; once I restart the software and try the task again, it usually works relatively fine (exporting to pdf/docx for my colleagues' benefit making a mess of it notwithstanding). I've since settled on doing the bulk of the work in LibreWriter, exporting to docx, then opening in Word on a separate system to massage the appearance.

And before anyone chimes in, no, LaTeX (or Markdown, etc.) would not be appropriate for these projects due to the mental overhead I'd have myself. I'm a visual person, I need to see what it looks like as I work and adjust with immediate visual feedback, and that visual aspect is often critical to the final product.

Word is phenomenal even with the missteps and lacking bits, and I pray (ineffectually) that Microsoft will eventually makes a properly compatible version for me that isn't plagued with the issues and feature disparities the SPA web versions are.

Do you run Wayland, by any chance? Last I tried Wayland, Libreoffice simply crashed on startup.

I don't think I do, no. I'm really a fairly novice user, since I've only used Ubuntu here and there since 12.04 (I think) and not committing until 18.04, then switching to Debian Jesse with... I think it's GNOME. So basically the same thing as Ubuntu? I do wish I understood more about the underlying tech and window managers and such, because I know I could get more out of it all, but I really just follow poorly written blog tutorials for settings things up until it's "good enough". I am scared to play around much more for fear of everything becoming unusable, since that's been my experience in the past with the ALSA/Jack/PulseAudio mess and with video card drivers.

You probably do run Wayland then, since it became the default in Debian 10 (buster).

“To use the X11 backend by default, uncomment the WaylandEnable=false line in the /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf file.”

— https://wiki.debian.org/Wayland

Sandstorm.io is Docs-like in it's collaboration features. But the OP specifically discussed offline operation as an important functionality, so cloud-based collaboration tools without a local application may not fly.

> Are there open-source implementation of Docs

Yes: https://cryptpad.fr/

So I'm not sure if it's because of problems from the host of the CryptPad instance or because of CryptPad itself, but I've been using CryptPad for a collaborative spreadsheet for a weeks now, and it's been absolutely awful

- Lost modifications, a lot of times ("something went wrong, please reload" and then the last 15 minutes of changes are just GONE)

- Very frequent "synchronizing... please wait" screens that block you from doing anything for a few seconds

- Undo/redo not possible in "live editing mode"

- In "non-live editing mode", if you don't hit save manually and the TCP connection resets, you will lose all your changes

- Pivot tables do very weird things with formatting

And that's the experience of a solo user, there wasn't anyone joined in on the document at the time. I can only imagine how it would have been if were multiple persons working on that spreadsheet.

I do have a flaky Internet connection, but Google Docs handle it fine, and emacs-crdt works very well too.

I'm now refactoring the whole spreadsheet into a bunch of .csv files stored in Git, and a Python script that outputs a pivot table, because I've lost more types due to CryptPad bugs than the time it would take me to write that script.

> but Google Docs handle it fine

As opposed to files that consist of a '1' in them [1], or .ds_store files [2]. Not to mention the risk of Google just decided to lock your account for no clear reason and you losing access to all of your files, like the hundreds of horror stories out there.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-drive-...

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-drive-...

This is one of the major blockers for us, and why I chose GSuite in the first place. We really need good collaborative tools.

What OSes do you use? What field are you in? Do you share documents outside the company? How much do you use comments, especially @tagged comments? Do you need versioning? Fo you need collaborative editing? What file storage do you use? How much do you all author documents, presentations, spreadsheets? Do your users use laptops directly or do they use keyboards and mice?

But really, probably none of that matters. If you think Google Workplace is too clunky, you’ll never be happy with LibreOffice. Just get O365 and get back to work. It’s not worth saving ~$5k annually.

For the last 4 years, I’ve been CIO and VP Eng of a now-series B company. We’re at about 70 FTE. We use Google Workspace and O365. We tried to move everyone to Google, but we couldn’t do it. As you noted, there’s just too much missing from it.

I think I was probably not clear in my original post, because you're not the only person to mention this, but it's really not about cost for me (I will happily pay for LibreOffice support, fixes, and donations) -- I'm on Linux, we're a construction tech startup, and yes we share _lots_ of documents, do a _lot_ of collaborative editing, and I would quite like to have versioning but we don't actually use that very much.

Sadly O365 seems no-go on Linux :(

My company hasn't used anything but Open/Libre Office since its inception. No problems.

The only slightly related issue has been the one client who continues to send email attachments from Outlook as winmail.dat.

How big is the company?

> I work a lot on trains crossing Europe, or sometimes on flights. I just want to have my files accessible.

I have a similar use case (plus add in cafes where I'd rather not be on their wifi or my own mobile data). It amazes me how many company IT people I've spoken with over the years who just don't comprehend some people work without being connected to the internet 100% of the time.

Dropbox remains my solution there. I'm also MS Office - too much interaction of documents with my clients to try anything else.

I feel it's best to let folks use what they prefer. While having a standard way of sharing information. Fighting with tools you're unfamiliar while trying to get work done with is a hidden cost on productivity.

Example, at our office we have a standard way of sharing info (Slack), and store shared information in Notion. But some folks use Google Docs/Sheet, some prefer Excel, or Markdown files for their on work uses

The problem is "having a standard way of sharing information". Google Drive/Suite is ... terrible for this.

speaking as a mechanic, hell yeah we depend on it every day for old and weird formats at work.

-the report generated by our laser alignment machine is in a 1993 ms write format. o365 says its no bueno.

-the diagnostic tool we use on some truck engines for valve calibration, advance and timing spits out an interactive doc in some esoteric ibm format I think? we edit the output in libre, feed it back into the tool, and it makes our adjustments.

-our shop floor uses libre because we don't have enough internet to run o365 without huge delays. we switched four years ago.

-our ancient jit parts order system will gladly handle lotus dif files, so libre does too

Libre Office corresponds with M$ Office nearly 1-to-1 feature-wise.

I’ve never seen a single person react to it’s apps as being unfamiliar or different, especially considering the variety of UI shifts M$ Office has displayed since Office 2k. If you were referring to some specific API and integration with Sharepojnt or something I might understand your trepidation, but as your question stands, I have to say that I can’t think of a specific downside to it.

I suppose that deciding upon an output format that you will send out to clients or suppliers will be your main concern, as you will essentially choosing which version of M$ Office you are pretending to be. I find that the older pre-xml format is more universally supported but YMMV

I am using both for my business. Libre Office has excellent Draw program, I like it more than Visio.

But LO Calc is bad, or at least was when I was trying it last time. It has been creating broken tables especially where filters / conditional formatting is involved and was endlessly crashing on attempt to create graph from 2 channel scope (cca 2*2000 X-Y values). OTOH in Excel I can have table with more than 30k lines with filters, sorting calculations and everything works swiftly. No, I am not going to fool around with a database.

In Word vs Writer scenario is not anything really appealing to me as I don't use them too much. So I am neutral on those.

I gave it a shot about 10 years ago but quickly gave up. Libreoffice was way too limited. Exchanging word / powerpoint with others was basically impossible, importing from ms office mostly messed up layouts. Just too much hassle. You got to focus on the business, not fighting with your office suite.

Recently, frustrated again with some excel shenanigans, I looked around and I discovered softmaker office. I immediately got a license and experimented a little. It seems very compatible with ms office. It still costs money, but less then ms. So in the near future I might try that route, along with thunderbird to replace outlook.

So I used to be a huge MS Office file format geek because of my work with Apache POI (https://poi.apache.org/). I spent some time playing around with LibreOffice API's to try to use them for file format conversion.

I feel like LibreOffice/OpenOffice file compatibility with MS Office peaked in the early 2000's. The last time I tried to load a Word doc in LibreOffice a few years ago, it looked very janky. About the same as it did in 2004.

Sadly, I still receive 2 or 3 Office attachments a week. So MS Office compatibility is still very relevant.

I've never had a problem using LibreOffice or OpenOffice to replace Word/GSuite. I've had some compatibility issues to open PowerPoint files, but that was usually limited to editing them. Creating presentations in LibreOffice or OpenOffice was harder than GSuite or PowerPoint as well, precisely because the latter two treated me more like I was an idiot and I'm not good at designing slides.

To be clear, as your edit says, your CFO and other modellers are probably going to have to use Excel. There are just things that work in Excel and nowhere else.

We (3-person dev/design shop) never even went to LibreOffice; we've used OpenOffice for years. To be fair, we really only use it for accounting and producing occasional contracts and outlines. Neither program runs very well under Rosetta-2 on M1 macs, so as of this year we've mostly migrated over to Apple's Numbers and Pages. For email we still use Thunderbird with a private IMAP server. Never had a need for Microsoft Office. Open/Libre is fine for working with Excel spreadsheets sent by customers.

I have used LibreOffice Writer with some success, and Calc with more limited success, but in the latter case, perhaps just because I am limited with spreadsheets.

Writer is a problem in that it is a straight rip-off of Word, which supports the same file formats, but which is not fully compatible with Word.

Word and Writer handle styles differently: glyphs change, despite availability of the same fonts; alignment changes; tab stops are all over the place.

They handle images and floating things differently, sometimes placing things on different pages or behind other objects or text. Word online makes this even worse, because it doesn't handle image captions properly, and converts the image and the caption to a second image.

I get all sorts of weird problems with Writer and Word - no particular blame attached - and unfortunately the answer is always the same: do your work in native Word on Windows, unless all your work is going to be in LibreOffice.

I think that the basic premises behind modern word processing are just wrong, and it's because Word is so ubiquitous that everything else has to follow it. I think there is a space for a new style of WP which takes nothing from Word, or Writer, and which lies somewhere between that point and professional typesetting wares like LaTeX or InDesign; something which does less more professionally.

But it's just a dream, and it doesn't really take into account Excel, which is Microsoft's killer app and probably the keystone of the company's entire business.

Definitely. I used it, LibreOffice of course, exclsively in many businesses, including rolled it out to a business with 150 staff migrated from ms office to LO. No issues at all.

Did you have to do much collaborative editing?

Never, this was in 2006.

MS Office is going in the same direction as GSuite as far as I can tell (despite no clear need to do that). It's becoming an increasingly online system that's steadily more hostile to offline work. Using a document creation suite that works like that, or in the case of GSuite outright refuses to work offline, strikes me as a recipe for disaster in some kind of business or connectivity SHTF scenario.

Then of course there's the whole parasitic, prying surveillance and snooping in the name of "helpful" user experience enhancement, telemetry and other bullshit corporate-speak for shamelessly sucking up your data. Another awful-smelling infection spreading among all the big corporate software players and making MS Office in its latest versions much more like the abomination that is GSuite (or anything by Google really). Do you really want most of the documentation being created by your business to be subject to perpetual viewing by these companies? I'd hope not.

Libre Office isn't perfect, but at least it has much less of all the above while still keeping most of what makes an office suite simply work across the board.

My wife has used LibreOffice for years in her solo law practice. This may not have worked if she had to exchange documents with other lawyers with change tracking but either never came up or was not an issue for her.

She recently got a job and has to use Office but her LibreOffice experience hasn't set her back.

Don't let the naysayers stop you.

I use LibreOffice in my engineering practice. Even when exchanging documents with lawyers and other clients, containing extensive change tracking and comments, none of us had difficulties on any side of the exchange. At one point I had to update to a more recent version to access the "resolve comment" feature, but that was about it.

(Random additional comment: One thing I especially like about LibreOffice Calc over Excel is its process for importing CSV files).

I’m just glad to hear that the legal world has finally moved on to something besides WordPerfect.

>to be clear, our CFO will probably continue to use Excel, as will some of the team who build very complicated modelling sheets

Hiring someone to translate those "complicated" sheets in to a combination of python and basic CLI tools like grep to work with CSVs might be worth it in the long term, but for word processing and presentations, if you can export to PDF rather than be passing things in and out of the organization, OpenOffice should work well.

Your issue will be that ultimately, if you're not exporting to PDF or ODT but trying to export to Microsoft's proprietary format you'll always end up chasing some obscure bug on a deadline that will make the entire endeavor not worth whatever costs were present up until that point.

In general "Office" applications are a bad solution to any problem, so not using them at all is best.

For text, Markdown with inline semantic HTML if necessary and CSS stylesheets if needed is better, since it properly separates style and presentation unlike word processors.

For modelling, Jupyter-like notebooks are much better than spreadsheets since they properly label objects, don't make everything a 2D grid, and use a proper programming language.

For data, databases are better than spreadsheets.

Presentations are just documents, so there is no reason to use separate software.

For drawing you can use Inkscape and Gimp.

For collaboration you can use normal distributed version control like Git (with solutions like self-hosted Gitlab).

None of these solutions with work with non-programmers.

Except maybe Gimp? Most people in offices don’t do image editing…

Like some other posters, this is a great dream, but just like I'm not going to teach all my sales, ops, etc. people to write docs in LaTeX and do version control with git, I'm not going to take them off "Office" suites without incurring an enormous productivity burden for zero gain.

No, it was years ago that I tried in a small startup and it just wouldn't scale as much as MS stuff. It's mostly Excel that needs to be top notch or you waste time massaging data to make the libre office Calc thing accept it.

I like Google a little bit for its ability to remote code the spreadsheet and the sharing feature, but now in a large financial institution, Excel works perfectly fine.

I suppose the Word and PowerPoint alternatives are not as bad in LibreOffice, so if that's your main tools, go for it.

I work on very large (>300 pages) and very complex Word documents containing graphics, table of contents, index, footnotes, end notes, bibliographies, etc. I also have to work on Excel and PowerPoint files. I have tested LO with these multiple times as each new release appears and have always run into format compatibility problems. To be fair, these problems are slowly getting fewer but they’re still enough to make LO impossible for my work. This doesn’t mean that MS Office is perfect. After all these years, Microsoft still can’t make search and replace the same for Word, Excel and PowerPoint and the spelling checker in Word is brain dead (“replace all” doesn’t, for example). If the compatibility problems go away, I’ll probably switch to LO but until then I’ll continue with MS Office because that’s what my clients use.

Have been solely using OnlyOffice (https://www.onlyoffice.com/) for 6 months now. Seems fine.

What is LibreOffice's collaboration tools like? GSuite was awesome for multiple people editing at the same time and it allows for great synergy in that regard.

This is the big problem for us -- we do a lot of collaborative editing. I know there's something called Collabora I think but I haven't tried it.

We use Google Workspace (fka Google Suite) at work. We also use LibreOffice for the occasional offline work, but just minimal.

And the CFO uses Google Workspace as well.

I've used LibreOffice for years. However, I've had many issues when editing a document alternatively in Excel and Libre. The alternate document editing works for some time, but Libre eventually always does something to the documents that they stopped being properly editable in one way or another.

I always use the same software that the C-suite uses for those files we transfer between us.

I would argue that the office suite is less relevant than the data.

Any suite only exists for it's output. If you use a generic format then you can convert to specialised ones as required. If you save in a proprietary format, be prepared for vendor lockin.

Say HTML5 for docs, some form of CSV/YAML for spreadsheets etc you get the idea.

Keep your data, then your suite decisions flow from that.

Yeah that's a nice dream and if I had my way everyone would write docs in LaTeX but I have sales people and ops people who need to be productive, and don't really care to learn to store things in HTML or CSV/YAML (the latter doesn't support the complicated models we run in Excel anyway).

I am not advocating a particular format - I agree with you that it is mostly a dream.

But consciously choose the file format first. Then the suite. The file format is where your info will be stored.

My town's entire core infrastructure runs FOSS only. Schools, accounting, administration etc. We spend a lot of time training and answering queries, especially for non-technical people but it somehow works. The key is to have skilled people available to help out and good internal documentation

Rarely. Almost all done directly with TeX. (Yep, I'm strange)

I used Abiword and a lot of Gnumeric in the past. Now everything written in emacs, and then directly glued to postgresql, R or Perl. I hadn't opened an excel since... one decade maybe.

If you want to, you can probably pull it off. Personally I would choose an office suite that has better UX, live collaborative editing and a native integration to cloud storage. But if you want to run LO it’s most probably possible.

I try to convert the company I work to use Nextcloud with thé collaborativ solutions.

The total cost of having Office 365 from everyone in the business will probably be less than 10K a year. There are 20 times more features than Libre Office or any other would offer+ things work fairly smoothly.

What are those features?

Also, what makes you think LibreOffice doesn't give users smooth experience?

Which features, for example? I've used both and never found LibreOffice particularly lacking for features (at least those I might use).

This isn't about cost, but as I said elsewhere:

> I have no aversion to paying (we pay Google, for example) but I like open source, would like to contribute (financially) to LibreOffice or whoever is relevant if we do go down that path, and think that the only way this stuff gets mainstreamed is if companies, y'know, mainstream it.

A bit related: with a bit of tinkering, nexcloud can edit office documents online. Pretty useful but your nextcloud server must have sufficient ram to run LibreOffice headless in the background.

If you primarily use macOS, Apple's Pages and Keynote work fine for most use cases.

I agree that for finance employees, Excel is way better than anything else available.

Within latest 5 year I have been using Libre Office, I also got found Office 2003 disk last year to set it to honnor place in the working room.

To those who are using LibreOffice:

Are you donating towards the cost of maintenance and development?

If not, what changes could they make to convince you to do that?

If we go down this path we would donate as a company (and probably pay for support / fixes). I have no aversion to paying for good software, I'm just worried about switching an entire business over to bad software (I barely use office tools as I prefer plaintext formats and programming directly).

The great thing about LibreOffice is that you can try it before you like it and contribute with either company developer time or with company funds, depending on what you want fixed or if you just want to keep the project going.

Gsuite - TONS of updates. Subscribe to the Gsuite blog

Offline - works fantastic tbh. Tons of experience on long haul flights

there's FreeOffice - https://www.freeoffice.com/en/ . not exactly open source, but it's free :)

No, I have considered rolling it out but ms365 winds up being the better option. E3 or E5 is worth every cent for its security and device management that is included.

I use it every day.

Use it all the time. Of course, my "business" consists of me and my wife and maybe a couple of kids hehe

Given how precious and valuable time is I don't really get the aversion to using Microsoft or something similar. Pricing has come down so much that it's less than people spend on coffee. If you are working on something worthwhile it doesn't seem worth the effort to avoid using mainstream, productive and cheaply available commercial software.

Downloading and using LibreOffice is the quickest way to start working. It is literally a one click download no outlook.com email creation required or payment or license to review.

For majority of users the features office provides is a waste of their time.

It is not about price.

The usage experience on MSOffice is unpleasant enough to motivate seeking an alternative.

I think this is purely subjective. I never hear regular users (read: the non-technical user) complain about office. They tend to complain when something doesn’t work like office does.

Folks in tech tend to be more worried about UI and UX and frankly tend to be nit picky when something doesn’t look or work like they would have designed it.

In other words, the more ignorant someone is, the better they like it. That is not exactly a glowing endorsement.

But…are they ignorant? I’d argue that your UI/UX is successful if your lowest common denominator user likes it and finds it comfortable to use.

I have seen a lot of software products fail over my career that was designed by developers who created UI that they liked and thought was the pinnacle of interface design. Users hated it. Most devs don’t think like regular users.

I, also, have seen plenty of failed UIs designed by ignorant, inexperienced devs.

Complaining that something is wrong because it differs from MS demonstrates just such ignorance. Users not understanding that something could be different from MS and therefore better is how we got here.

Ultimately adoption is all that matters. If your new and better interface isn't an obvious game changer to the lowest common denominator user of your product to get them to see the value and not long for their comfort zone, it’s not really new and better.

Ultimately a UI and UX needs the “U”

We all know that ignorance and inertia carry markets. That is not the topic.

If you rarely use a hammer, but change the way a hammer operates, claim it’s better, but the folks who use hammers everyday all day disagree, it’s not the hammer users who are ignorant.

I don't mind M$ Office, but a small proportion of the team (including me) use Linux. I have no aversion to paying (we pay Google, for example) but I like open source, would like to contribute (financially) to LibreOffice or whoever is relevant if we do go down that path, and think that the only way this stuff gets mainstreamed is if companies, y'know, mainstream it.

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