Ditching Microsoft Office

Introduction

So over the years I have always live many been a devoted user of Microsoft Office. But recently the product is going in a direction that makes it an un-desirable product for me.

Up until recently I had been using Microsoft 365 as a business user and I do still use it for my work. But as a freelancer, it is not cost effective to use. Without having a 365 business subscription, the only option is to pay £70 per year a personal subscription to 365. This is still very good value for money. But for me, I do not use my office suite every day, so it would be a little over the top to subscribe to 365. For me, its a bit like having a cable TV subscription without using your TV. Also as a personal preference, if I am paying for software. I want to own it, not pay for it as a service.

Other options

There are many other options out there. Some of them come as part of a cloud subscription such as Google GSuite. But the open-source community has quite a few options. I came across a few while reading my monthly copy of Linux Format. The main two that stick out at LibreOffice and OpenOffice. To let you into a little secret. LibreOffice started out as the a fork from OpenOffice. This is why I love the open-sourced community.

My Selection

I went with LibreOffice, as this seems to be the most popular open-sourced office suite. But I did explore CODE and OpenOffice. LibreOffice seems to be the easiest to use and provides a similar experience to Microsoft Office. Saying that, Microsoft Office from 10 years ago.

Experience

Compatibility is also maintained as good as can be between LibreOffice and the other productivity suites. Bringing my documents from Microsoft Office was almost completely painless. Opening the docx and xlsx files from Microsoft worked like a charm apart from a few formatting problems here and there. These can easily be corrected within a few minutes. However all new documents are stored in the open formats of odt and odf. These formats always (to my experience) translate beautifully between different suites and the only platform that can get a little fussy when documents in the open formats are uploaded to SharePoint or OneDrive.

The user interface is dated and easily workable and changing to the tabbed user interface can make you feel more at home with the UI, while coming from Microsoft Office. But overall. I very rarely struggle to find what I am looking for and a very quick google search can help me find what I am looking for.

Updating is an area I think could be improved. The suite has a built in update utility but (at least for macOS), all it does upon detecting a new update. Is take you to the website to download it. I think there could be a little more streamlining to be done here. However I think this is a common problem with shared codebases on macOS. Apple of course want you to use their Swift UI language.

Conclusion

I think there is grounds for any user to migrate to LibreOffice as the Microsoft Office suite is becoming so tightly integrated with Microsoft 365. Unless you subscribe you are likely loosing out on the full experience anyway. LibreOffice is feature rich and powerful enough, while maintaining a light install with no bloat. I only have 256GB in my MacBook Pro and Microsoft Office 2019 was sucking up over 5GB of space for itself. LibreOffice provides the same or similar experience for me while only sucking up 700mb of space. The only thing I am missing is Outlook. I used to use Outlook for all my mail. But recently I have switched to the built in Apple Mail and I am getting a much more tightly integrated experience as macOS can use this in Siri shortcuts or providing enhanced notifications.

Libre, LibreOffice, microsoft, office, open, open-sourced, sourced

Software, Tech

January 8, 2022