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.
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