I've been trying to use #LibreOffice as a replacement for #MSOffice but it's really not the same, lots of small things that do not work in the same way or that do not exist at all, whether in word/ writer or PowerPoint/ pages.
Is there another MSOffice-equivalent out there that is more similar to Office but non-profit?
Like... the Zorin OS of MSOffice?
Never lost a document with LibreOffice, but I only use it to open and edit admin documents that arrive in docx, pptx or xlsx formats. Has both autosave and recovery from crash.
For writing, just about anything else is a better text editor. In this sense MS Word is as bad.
For slides, LibreOffice Impress isn't great but what it does, it does well and reliably. I edit slides as SVG documents in Inkscape and then merely drag-and-drop them into Impress. Or when no videos, I use Inkscape in multi-page mode. It's so much more sane, and powerful.
@elduvelle @GWeindel @UlrikeHahn
In principle inkscape can have animations that are then exported to a webpage or even a PDF file. In practice, I use LibreOffice Impress for that.
I had a hard time at first when switching to #LibreOffice, but now I don't miss anything. It took me a while to figure out where everything is, and then to discover that there are tiny bits that I really, really like!
So don't give up, and indeed, this is the closest you can get to MS Office without giving Microsoft money, in my opinion.
@elduvelle @WiseWoman I feel like it took me about six months to feel at home, and I still sometimes bump up against something that feels harder than I remember in Office. But there are also things that work better — like a lot of FOSS, it tilts towards “yes, this is more configurable even if it’s less usable”. Which is a mixed bag but nice when I want to configure That One Thing.
Honestly the thing that really helped was starting to use LLMs to give me more focused instructions than the help. The main problem there is the interface has changed often so it takes some re-asking to get the right answer, but it’s a better translation from “it was called this in office, how’s it done here” than the official docs.
I just spent the past weeks working on 140 slides in Impress for a 3 hour class. The only thing I got really annoyed at is at one point my notes pane got detached from the window and I still haven’t gotten it back. 😂
@elduvelle only office comes to mind 😊
@chartgerink yeah, unfortunately it seems Only Office has ties to Russia.. Let me find the links
Edit: link:
@[email protected] yeah, OnlyOffice is *officially* based in Latvia but that seems to be a front? See e.g. https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/232-onlyoffice-concerns-vendor-makes-shady-moves
Libre Office is by far the most solid project. Maybe some cloud-based offerings are progressing also? I think you'll be stuck with making LO work ? I use it happily enough, but probably use it less and other software more than some would (text editors, python, R, LaTeX...)
"do not work in the same way"
LibreOffice can be configured to have Office-like ribbon menus instead of the default drop-down menus. This UI change might help the transition.
@elduvelle For me Libreoffice sometimes freezes and locks up when I want to change the automatic line breaking of a whole column in a spreadsheet. Or locks up and freezes when I use a spreadsheet that contains Khmer characters. So I have to spend several minutes with killing it, have a data loss and restart the slow to start program. I cannot predict in advance which spreadsheet work will be sabotaged.
Those are IMO serious usability problems and I think this is one of the reasons Linux has according to what I read only about 4% desktop penetration despite being free as beer and free as speech.
El Duvelle
Ulrike Hahn
Albert Cardona
Gabriel Weindel
Debora Weber-Wulff
Jonobie
Chris Hartgerink (they/them)
Boris Barbour
Gary Fisk
Karel 'Clock' K.
Otter-Matic
effika
Oliver Brendel