LibreOffice - a solid, low cost replacement for MS Office

HarryN

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Hi, I have a small business, and like many others, the cost of software can be a significant part of the costs.

For historical reasons, some of our computers were Win 7 Pro and others were Macs, mostly because my wife likes Mac and would not change.

We were spending a fair amount of money each year to support the MS Office habit, and liking how it worked less and less. Three years ago, I started to explore Open Office, a spin out of the old Sun Computer initiatives. Ultimately, this had some issues, and my daughter convinced me to try LibreOffice instead.

While I don't use every feature that these Office software platforms can provide, I am a fairly heavy user, especially of spreadsheets. I also trade word / excel / ppt files with a number of companies, and the comparability is extremely high.

If you are getting tired of spending money on your software addiction, seriously consider to try LibreOffice. It is free (but they do accept donations) and it really works. You can put it on as many computers as you like, either private or corporate.

This year, I took the savings and bought an SSD for my laptop, and am in the middle of buying a very nice anniversary gift for my wife. That is a lot better ROI than sending the money to Redmond.

In case you are wondering, I have no affiliation with MS, LibreOffice, etc. I am just a very happy user.
 

blah9

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I'm glad it's working out well for you and that you got to save some money! The open source community has some really nice stuff out there these days. I don't use much software at all that I have to specifically pay for anymore due to all the nice free software that's available.
 

NoNotAgain

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For those looking at switching from MS Office to any of the open office type products, take a look at pay4keys before you make the switch.

[h=1]Office Professional Plus 2016[/h] goes for under $50 for the key and download link, The same goes for operating systems.

They're legitimate resellers of a lot of different software. I'll never got back to paying full price for software again.
 

gadget_lover

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For those looking at switching from MS Office to any of the open office type products, take a look at pay4keys before you make the switch.

I'd rather use Libreoffice, since it works equally well on different opertaing systems. There is a lot of value when you have multiple OSes in the house or business. Libre Office works on linux variants, Microsoft and Mac too.

Why pay $50 for a questionable license for similar software?

Dan
 

Pellidon

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We use Libre Office whenever we can at work. I have a couple of users that swear it wrecks their documents. They are old, written in a long forgotten version of MS Office and used inconsistently applied formatting features (header1, body1 and the like). The only bug I find is sometimes it defaults to a strange font selection if the original document font is not on the recipient's computer. Plus there is no monthly subscription, obsolescence in reading the default document format (docx), and other MS tricks.

Can you tell I am an Open Source fanboy? :nana:
 

HarryN

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Jan 22, 2004
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We use Libre Office whenever we can at work. I have a couple of users that swear it wrecks their documents. They are old, written in a long forgotten version of MS Office and used inconsistently applied formatting features (header1, body1 and the like). The only bug I find is sometimes it defaults to a strange font selection if the original document font is not on the recipient's computer. Plus there is no monthly subscription, obsolescence in reading the default document format (docx), and other MS tricks.

Can you tell I am an Open Source fanboy? :nana:

Version 4 did have some bugs, but version 5 seemed to solve the ones you are referring to.
 
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