I've started switching back to LibreOffice because the situation with MS Office nagging me to save my files to the cloud, or to use "connected" AI experiences, keeps getting worse.
(The connected experiences, including Copilot, can be disabled with a dialog hidden deep in Office's Trust Center, but even that's confusingly worded. It's unclear from the wording and the structure of the dialog what the combination of checking "all connected experiences" but unchecking "experiences that analyze your content" should actually do, for example.)
MS Office is certainly the more polished product, especially Excel. There are some spreadsheets I can't feasibly convert to LibreOffice Calc without equivalents to Excel's lambdas and tables.
But LibreOffice does the job in most cases. I'm really excited to see this new work—especially CRDT-based sync between desktop app instances over a network file server, which would turn LibreOffice into a significantly better experience than MS Office for my purposes.
It is based on the formerly proprietary StarWriter, from a German company. Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open sourced.
There is another commercial German competitor from this time, SoftMaker. I used to buy the suite for Linux, just recently switched to LibreOffice. I never liked the clunky Libreoffice but since SoftMaker refuses to support LanguageTool....
There is actually a third German text processor from this time, Papyrus. Born on Atari ST.
My mother-in-law couldn't get her old Word docs to format correctly on her new laptop (Win11 + MS Office365). Rather than fiddle around trying various settings I installed LibreOffice and with it her docs rendered correctly. Made her happy. Libre Writer reminds me of Word2000, which means I don't waste time learning new ways to perform mundane writing tasks.
Although I don't use it frequently, I love that LibreOffice exits. I was wondering if there are any online resources that summarizes some of the cool tricks and features of LibreOffice for an occasional user like me?
My favorite thing about LibreOffice is that it can open CSVs without breaking them. Pretty much everything else about it is a slow, unintuitive mess, but this one killer feature makes me always install it and something that somehow Excel does not have.
I have tried to use LibreOffice Base to connect to the database... It needs some love.
The workflow to import CSV was to actually copy cell data from a spreadsheet and paste it... It was a weird experience. I went with DBeaver which is clunky too but more capable.
I have also tried to use the javascript API for LO Calc but I couldn't find any documentation even though I have read it was possible in some places... was it unmaintained and taken away ?
I tried to do things with Draw quite some time ago, it was a clunky clunky. I hope it got better.
Writer is just fine though imho, pretty much does what you expect from rich text editor
Someday in the unimaginable future, Microsoft will be a memory, Word will be lostech available only via running a cracked binary inside fifteen nested VMs, and a working copy of the LibreOffice source will still be kicking around on an FTP server somewhere and developed by users communicating over IRC.
I think the project is great, but for me it is connected now to an empiric rule of big complex projects with a large user base: An issue will be fixed more or less quickly if it affects millions/thousands of users, otherwise it will live forever in an eternal priority queue. There's an issue I noticed in LibreOffice, found the corresponding tracker post, confirmed it with a test, and now it is only visited by a robot checking whether stall issues are worth deleting. Another example is Chromium, where I posted an issue about wrong rendering of some elements with rare sets of attributes. The post is more alive than the LibreOffice one, but nevertheless, never fixed since it requires precious developers time but too niche to gain much attention
Libreoffice features prominently in the "eurostack" initiative/proposal that was launched today. If there will be ever mainstream self-sovereign compute, it will almost certainly include this incredible project.
The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).
Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.
LO has helped me in the past with some projects that would crash MSFT Word (they were *.docx files, the irony...). But I wish it had a better, more modern UI (icons too small and outdated).
I have said this before, but I still don't understand there isn't a supported version of LibreOffice that I can pay for. I'm mostly happy with Google's online tools, but I want a Linux-compatible offline spreadsheet and word processor often enough that I wouldn't blink at $600/year and I would seriously consider a larger amount.
I wish they improved more on macro developer experience. I recently tried to add basic fetching of Jira tickets information. I tried Basic, Python (various APIs). I gave up because any kind of simple automatization becomes nightmare in there.
Oracle (Sun) never released LibreOffice, despite what this article says.
LibreOffice continues to be a fascinating C++ codebase. If you want to work on a large scale C++ legacy product, then I'd say this is the best codebase to work on.
Every once in a while I'll try LibreOffice out but I can never get past the UI. I've also never seen it in use at a company which begs the question: who is using it?
Is there a tl;dr on the crdt/collaboration feature? How does one get the share up and running, do you get a special link that you can send to someone? How smooth can it get? I'm guessing it's hard to do without some sort of relay system (like syncthing) or servers for hosting links (like https://file.pizza )
I can't remember why, but I gave up attempting to use LibreOffice.
If I remember correctly, the PowerPoint program didn't have text size as a front page icon. Instead you had to click a few buttons or something... I didn't really care to learn what symbols meant what, or the workflow.
LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab
(theregister.com)554 points by LinuxBender 13 February 2025 | 231 comments
Comments
(The connected experiences, including Copilot, can be disabled with a dialog hidden deep in Office's Trust Center, but even that's confusingly worded. It's unclear from the wording and the structure of the dialog what the combination of checking "all connected experiences" but unchecking "experiences that analyze your content" should actually do, for example.)
MS Office is certainly the more polished product, especially Excel. There are some spreadsheets I can't feasibly convert to LibreOffice Calc without equivalents to Excel's lambdas and tables.
But LibreOffice does the job in most cases. I'm really excited to see this new work—especially CRDT-based sync between desktop app instances over a network file server, which would turn LibreOffice into a significantly better experience than MS Office for my purposes.
There is another commercial German competitor from this time, SoftMaker. I used to buy the suite for Linux, just recently switched to LibreOffice. I never liked the clunky Libreoffice but since SoftMaker refuses to support LanguageTool....
There is actually a third German text processor from this time, Papyrus. Born on Atari ST.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Division
[2] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office
[3] https://papyrus.de/
[4] https://papyrusauthor.com/
English new version of Papyrus seems to be released in a few days.
I wonder how much StarOffice code still remains in the repo.
I have also tried to use the javascript API for LO Calc but I couldn't find any documentation even though I have read it was possible in some places... was it unmaintained and taken away ?
I tried to do things with Draw quite some time ago, it was a clunky clunky. I hope it got better.
Writer is just fine though imho, pretty much does what you expect from rich text editor
The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).
Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.
- desktop / local first
- cross-platform and first-class wasm build
- optional online/collab capabilities
- low bloat and fast compile time
- highly extensible and reusable libraries, practically a GUI toolkit for building office-like applications
- first class scripting e.g. creating/editing docs with python, as well as API for GUI / LLM control
- Prefer to innovate completely new doc/spreadsheet formats rather than adhering to past baggage
- Spreadsheet cells more like a shell/repl/notebook interface
- first class touch & ink support
Actually the history goes back way further. If anyone's curious:
- First release of StarOffice was 1985. It was a closed source commercial word processor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
- Sun, now Oracle, bought StarOffice in 1999 and released it as OpenOffice the following year
- Oracle bought Sun in 2010, and the community fragmented because nobody trusts Oracle
- In 2011 LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice
- Later that year Oracle gave up on OpenOffice and gave it to Apache, but that version (Apache OpenOffice) is an orphan that nobody maintains anymore.
So yeah, there's probably still LibreOffice code that dates back to 1985 in some form!
[1]: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/History
It's been a month, so far it's great, I hope I will be able to stick to it.
(I am an occasional user of Office, I used to be a heavy one.)
Am I that unusual?
I only wish it auto-updated on Windows...
OnlyOffice is leaps and bounds better.
LibreOffice continues to be a fascinating C++ codebase. If you want to work on a large scale C++ legacy product, then I'd say this is the best codebase to work on.
If I remember correctly, the PowerPoint program didn't have text size as a front page icon. Instead you had to click a few buttons or something... I didn't really care to learn what symbols meant what, or the workflow.
I switched to Google Slides and moved on.