Ten Good Reasons to Use LibreOffice

 It's hard to believe I've been using LibreOffice and its parent application, OpenOffice, for more than two decades. And you know what? The more I use it, the more I find to like about it. Even though my employer supplies me with M$ Office for free, I still keep LibreOffice on all my computers and use it by default for most of my personal projects. Below are ten reasons (in no particular order) why I use it over M$ Office:

10. It's free—You just can't argue with that price. Why shell out for M$ Office when LibreOffice doesn't cost you a cent?

9. It's a single application—Having a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, drawing application, database, and equation editor in a single application makes for a more streamlined workflow than the M$ approach of several separate, yet loosely linked applications. As a single application with integrated modules for its various main functions, LibreOffice takes up less disk space without redundant code in each application. It is also less hungry for RAM and processor cycles.

8. Its interface is customizable—Users have far more latitude to make LibreOffice their own than they have with M$ Office. A number of different icon sets are available, as are various color schemes. You can even apply themes designed for the Firefox Web browser. Best of all, one can choose between a traditional interface with drop-down menus and a tabbed interface, reminiscent of recent versions of M$ Office. For what it's worth, I prefer the drop-down menus.

7. It's under active development—LibreOffice has version updates coming out on a regular basis and it has continued to evolve beyond its parent application, OpenOffice, which has not seen a major update since 2014. 

6. It's free and open source—The source code for LibreOffice is readily available to all comers and anyone with the requisite programming skills can modify it and create their own version of the software, just as LibreOffice's developers did with OpenOffice, when they forked the project more than a decade ago. Due to differences in licensing, LibreOffice can incorporate any features from OpenOffice, and has done so, but OpenOffice cannot do the same with LibreOffice.

5. Development is done by volunteers—Those who maintain and develop LibreOffice are all volunteers, whose sole motivation is to create the best possible software they can, not to make a profit. If you know how to code, you are free to join in the fun.

4. It opens and saves M$ Office files—You can work in LibreOffice, save your files in the appropriate M$ Office file format, share it with a M$ Office user and they'll be none the wiser. Its filters are that accurate. As a bonus, it also fixes broken files. I have many times tried to open an M$ Office file that Word or Excel or PowerPoint  thinks is corrupt, only to have LibreOffice open it accurately and with ease. After saving the file in LibreOffice, I can open it in the appropriate M$ Office app with equal ease.

3. It's the default office productivity suite in Linux—Major Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Linux Mint were quick to drop OpenOffice for LibreOffice as their included office suite, once it made its debut, and it remains as ubiquitous in the Linux world as M$ Office is on Windows.

2. It's cross-platform compatible—LibreOffice is supported on Windows, Mac OS, and most major Linux distributions. M$ Office is available only on Windows and Mac OS. Android and iOS users can use Collabora Office, which is based on LibreOffice. Chromebook users can also run LibreOffice under the Crostini Linux environment, or run Collabora Office as an Android app, so everybody can play.

1. It's not from Microsoft—Microsoft not only takes your money but also your data. LibreOffice is just one more way to keep more control over both.

What's in the Box?

 I've always loved CD boxed sets. They're a great way to take a deep dive into an artist's or band's catalog—more than one would get from a 'greatest hits' CD—without having to buy every album. Most also come with a booklet that goes much more in depth than an album's liner notes, along with other occasional bits of memorabilia. Some box sets, such as the Who's Thirty Years of Maximum R&B, provide a mix of singles, album tracks and rarities, while others like Citizen Steely Dan, comprise the entire contents of all their studio albums. 

I recently acquired a nine-disc boxed set from Pink Floyd called Shine On that presents repackaged and remastered versions of their popular albums—A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), Meddle (1972), The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979), and A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1988), along with a bonus disc of early singles, a collection of postcards of the album cover graphics, and a 112-page hardback book.

I remember when this set arrived in record stores in 1992. It was frightfully expensive at around $200. I paid less than a third of that for my copy and felt like I got a good value for the money, considering I only had two of those titles already in my CD collection. The titles included in Shine On bring together Pink Floyd's most commercially successful albums, offering a solid collection of 'must-haves'. 

For some buyers, it might well represent just about everything by Pink Floyd they're familiar with, but there's more Floyd to be experienced, especially their early material, which is given somewhat short shrift in this collection, especially the contributions of founding member Syd Barrett. His work is most heavily represented in their first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), which is not part of the set. Barrett's presence in Shine on is limited to a couple of tracks on A Saucerful of Secrets and the bonus disc.

Shine On omits most of Pink Floyd's output from the 1969 through 1972, including More (1969), Ummagumma (1969), Atom Heart Mother (1970), and Obscured by Clouds (1972). The next few albums after Saucerful are considered by many to represent an extended transition period from the Syd Barrett period to their classic progressive/stadium rock era. More and Obscured by Clouds are both movie soundtracks, created to fit the themes of their respective films, while Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother are both interesting experimental efforts, but for whatever reason, they were not well liked by the band's members. Also, Ummagumma is part studio album and part live album (one disc of each), The live portion revisits Barrett-era material, while the studio portion is essentially a collection of solo efforts by the four principal members. This combined dynamic may have technically disqualified it from consideration as a studio album.

The other conundrum is the omission of The Final Cut (1983). A follow-up and thematic extension to The Wall, it was bassist/vocalist Roger Waters' final album with Pink Floyd and the band's only album without keyboardist/vocalist/arranger Richard Wright, who had left the band after The Wall tour, but would return for its later projects, initially as a session player, but eventually as a full member. Wright and the remaining band members, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, may have concluded The Final Cut was essentially more of a Roger Waters solo album and thus disqualified it on those grounds.

All that said, the inclusion of A Momentary Lapse of Reason might seem as an odd a choice as the exclusion of its predecessor, being as as it is the sole representation of the post-Waters Pink Floyd. Then again, it was their only post-Waters studio album at the time. Although Waters was angered that his former band mates chose to continue Pink Floyd without him, instead of ceasing as a band as he would have preferred them do, Gilmour, Mason, and eventually Wright, saw it as a continuation of what had come before, just as the band had continued without Wright on The Final Cut. 

What also has continued is box sets. After Shine On, Pink Floyd put out two additional box sets, both consisting of all 14 remastered studio albums, called Oh, By the Way (2007) and Discovery (2011). But having Shine on in my collection, I don't feel the need to own either of those larger sets; instead, I may just grab a copy of Atom Heart Mother at some point down the road and call it a day. 

UPDATE--As it turned out, I ended up acquiring all of the remaining Pink Floyd albums I was missing, and now have the complete Pink Floyd discography in my collection.