Is LibreOffice better than Microsoft Office?



It has been three months since I decided to go full Open Document. The purpose of this switch was to find out whether or not LibreOffice is a real Microsoft Office replacement or just another lame office suite. I have being doing presentations, letters, reports, and charts using only LibreOffice for the past three months. I was reluctant to made this switch, mainly because LibreOffice still requires Java for its database application instead of a more lightweight alternative such as SQLite. However, I took the bullet and I uninstalled every copy of Microsoft Office and made the total switch to LibreOffice. This is what I found...


Speed

LibreOffice is fast, not blazing fast but it is getting there. I remember the days when OpenOffice took almost a minute to load (and almost a minute to load the Spanish dictionary). Those days are over, and you can instantly open Writer, Impress and Calc at the same time. Daily tasks such as save a copy, export as PDF, insert images, insert tables, etc,  are performed at an amazing speed. Even when I was working in a document with 30 images (a tutorial guide), Writer performed flawlessly. 


User Interface

Excellent interface. Menus are where they are supposed to be. Buttons are placed where you can find them. Luckily, LibreOffice hasn't followed the “ribbon style” menu, which I find annoying and confusing  for beginners.  What I really like is that “Tables” has its own menu, and believe me, this is a must, specially for new LibreOffice users. 

Nevertheless, LibreOffice needs a graphic designer to improve the buttons and icons. I know “shiny things” don't help to make things faster, but it wouldn't hurt to have better graphics.

Stability

It was surprising to see the stability of LibreOffice, in both Windows and Linux. When I used LibreOffice for the first time, it kept crashing or it failed to save a document properly. Now, I've been working on several presentations for the LibreOffice training for teachers that I am implementing in my school, and I didn't face issues. Even when the teachers practice creating documents with LibreOffice Writer, it has been remarkably stable. No crashes, no unexpected errors. The experience has been delightful. 

I faced issues with LibreOffice Base. Sometimes it crashed or didn't save the data. Also the “recovery screen” can be a little bit annoying. Sometimes I opened LibreOffice Writer and it offered to recover some Calc or Impress documents. I mean, if I open Writer I should be offered to recover Writer documents only.

Also, what if Writer, Impress and Calc were independent applications? I know the way LibreOffice works doesn't hurt performance nor stability, but I think more features could be integrated into LibreOffice if it were treated that way. Why is soffice.exe and swriter.exe running at the same time? That doesn't make sense. Look at Calligra Office Suite, each application works independently and you can even choose to install just one application.

Format Support

This is a bit tricky. I can open Excel Spreadsheets without problems, however I had several formatting issues with .docx files. It wasn't  a deal breaker for me. In my humble opinion, I think the Open Document Foundation is doing a lot of progress in this particular area. As for me and my school, we adopted ODF format and we are happy with it.

Overall, using LibreOffice has been a wonderful experience. I must accept that at first I didn't want to use LibreOffice because I was a Microsoft office user for quite some time. After three months I'm glad I made the switch. Go ahead, give LibreOffice a try, you will like it!

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