A reader has a question about two excellent, free Office Suites?
“Can you please advise whether Libre Office or Open Office is better? Which is your favorite?”
Actually, my favorite office suite is Microsoft Office and I have the receipts for my Microsoft 365 subscription to prove it. But I’m the first to admit it’s really just a matter of preference. I’ve used Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, and even Google Docs. I happen to like Microsoft Office best but all of these office suites were functional and let me complete the tasks that needed to get done.
My preference for Microsoft’s suite is more tied to its connectivity to my preferred cloud storage provider, OneDrive.
Between LibreOffice and OpenOffice, I probably like LibreOffice best. Though I’m not sure I can tell you exactly why. The great thing about both office suites being free is that you can download them both to test drive with no expense and no risk. See which interface you prefer.
I will put it out as a question to our readers, though. Between LibreOffice and OpenOffice which is your favorite and why? Let us know in the comments.
I started with OpenOffice (OO) as a replacement for MS Office (MSO) many years ago. I switched to LibreOffice (LO because…I’m not sure why. I have a vague recollection that there were complaints about changes of policy in OO that made some folk break away and start LO, but I don’t have any real data on that. I’m quite happy with LO; as I recall, I was quite happy with OO, and with MSO when I was using it. I think user guides for MSO are better than those for OO and LO, but I use DuckDuckGo to search for suggestions about what I want to do, and that always works well. All of that says pretty much what you said, Cyn!. Only difference is age; I’m ninety. Actually, I started with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3….
I got the free Libre Office several years ago because I had several files on my external hard drive that I set up years ago in Adobe’s Pagemaker that I wanted to open and convert over to a newer format. Pagemaker had died while I wasn’t watching! Couldn’t find a way to do that until someone (maybe it was you, Cyn!) suggested using Libre Office. It worked! So now I keep an updated version of Libre Office for all of my letter-writing and various office-type files. It’s perfect! And best of all, it’s free!