LibreOffice

[jwboyd]

Anyone out there using LibreOffice? I have been to their website and I am impressed.

I use MS Office 2008 and MS keeps bugging me to upgrade. I need only one copy, and I am not keen on their subscription model. I use Word and Excel extensively, but none of the other MS Office applications other than occasionally reading a PowerPoint presentation.

My concerns:
1. What is the learning curve? I am 88 years old and have used MS Office for over 30 years.
2. Do LibreOffice documents have a similar "look and feel" to those created with MS Office?
3. How easy is it to convert my MS documents to LibreOffice?
4. Does LibreOffice allow for embedding charts into spreadsheets?
5. Can MS Office users import my LibreOffice documents?
6. Are there other office suites as good or better than LibreOffice?

Any and all responses are welcome. Please help. Thanks!

Joe

[Highmac]

Libre office is free to download, so it will cost you nothing to give it a try. I've got it installed as a result of receiving .docx documents and I didn't have and did not want any MS software.

I've had no problem with opening the documents in Libre Office; there is also Ask Libre Office where you should get any help you need.

I've certainly heard good things from other folk, and I'm sure you'll hear more from people here...

[Paddy]

I find it easy to use. I mostly use it when dealing with things like Word Perfect documents (which I occasionally encounter) or various other things that Word can't open.

While I've never done it in LibreOffice, it does appear that inserting charts in spreadsheets can be done:

https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Inserting_Charts

As to the other questions:

1. Pretty minimal
2. Yes
3. Open them in LibreOffice. No "conversion" necessary. And you can still save documents as .doc or .docx if you need to send to Word-only users.
4. See above
5. Yes - see #3. Can also save in other formats - Word will also open .odt for instance.
6. Not that I'm aware of - certainly not for free! Apple's Pages of course is another alternative to Word, but I've never found Numbers as good as Excel. Keynote is a nice alternative to Powerpoint - I've used that a bit.

[gunug]

I've used LibreOffice in most cases for a number of years; it interacts very well with the Microsoft and Google Doc's that I have from work.  I'm happy enough with it that I'm not thinking of using anything else.