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Neil Brown
Neil Brown
@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is LibreOffice, the amazing free office suit (document editor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, etc).

I know that I've included this in previous #FreeSoftwareAdvent toots, but I use LibreOffice, particularly Writer, every day.

Better still, this one isn't just for Linux users, so if you are thinking about moving away from your Microsoft or Apple office suite, you can give LibreOffice a try, for free, alongside whatever you use currently, and give it a good go before you made a decision.

#LibreOffice

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Different Drummer
Different Drummer
@DifferentDrummer@syzito.xyz replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@neil As a Windoesn't user I use Libre Office regularly.

It seems a fine analogue for the MS Office suite, which is now shite.

What shifted me to LibreOffice, some time back, was when the Office Suite disc I had BOUGHT refused to load on a new computer unless I paid for the software AGAIN.

The retroactive application of "licensing" to EXISTING customers was for me the final straw with Gates's greed.

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Linuxer
Linuxer
@letbedone@techhub.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@neil but i prefer onlyoffice, because the UI is similar to Microsoft office

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Neil Brown
Neil Brown
@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

A question I sometimes get about LibreOffice Writer is "But can you exchange documents with people using Windows / Office?".

Yes! I do it all the time.

Multiple times a day, most days.

Often quite long documents, with complex formatting, numbering, tracked changes, comments etc.

And I just get on and do it.

YMMV, of course, but that has been my experience over many years.

#LibreOffice

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petur 😶🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼
petur 😶🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼
@peturdainn@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@neil even on my work laptop where I have an Office 365 license, I installed LibreOffice and use that, and Thunderbird for mail. Can't stand the MS interface

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tautology
tautology
@tautology@infosec.exchange replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@neil I mean ODF (which is the default document format in LibreOffice) is *the* offical ISO standard (ISO 26300) and is well defined and can be read and written to by all major office suites, including msoffice.

The fact that msoffice's OOXML is a competing (but badly designed, ambiguous and inconsistent amongst versions of msoffice) ISO (ISO 29500) standard says more about what happens when a company throws its toys out of the pram and spends a fortune on persuading country ISO representatives to vote for it, even though there was no logical reason.

If ISO ever grew a spine, the first thing it should do is deprecate ISO 29500 as it literally serves no purpose.

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penguin42
penguin42
@penguin42@mastodon.org.uk replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@neil I find export to MS formats is generally more touchy than import these days; but you still get some oddities in either direction. LO has quite a test suite, but it's tricky to test for - the specs for the MS documents are just crazy (often including in a single document if/else blocks with different formats so that older versions of MS can read it). Still, I'd be interested to hear of incompatibilities.

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Roger BW 😷
Roger BW 😷
@RogerBW@discordian.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@neil Best interoperability with MS-Word I've seen; I use it any time a publisher wants an MS-Word manuscript, and I've had no complaints. Except one: little fiddly grid format details won't come out quite right… but in my experience they don't come out quite right on other copies of MS-Word either, and it's really not the right tool for the job.

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