My annual subscription €99 – for MS Office / Microsoft 365 is coming up for renewal soon.
Given that sometime next year I intend to ditch Windows for some flavour of Android, what are my best options for replacing MS365 – Libre Office, Open Office or something else?
Compatibility with Excel pivot tables would be a bonus, but not absolutely essential.
On Android, hopefully not on a phone, but a tablet - you should give Collabora Office a try. Not sure whether it can handle pivot tables though on Android yet.
Otherwise, the usual suspects : WPS Office
If you want something massive, you could always try : AndrOpenOffice - YMMV
And of course, the inevitable Google Sheets.
I used to use Open Office but have recently transferred to Libre Office and prefer it.
Seen a spate of good comments about Libre Office not many years back. Not sure if it’s still as good but people did like it.
I buy all my software outright and don’t use Microsoft 365. Subscriptions strike me as onerous. If you look around there are various places licences can be obtained or you may qualify for a discount.
I have been trying Google’s version of office recently - it’s not bad, different from Office but not bad (I am a very big fan and big user of Excel).
No, Mac and Windows
Just remember Mat, Google is mining all your data.
LibreOffice is very good considering that it doesn’t cost a kopek to the end user.
Donations to the project are entirely voluntary, and in some cases, tax deductible. It is available for free from the LibreOffice website download page.
If you want to install LibreOffice on macOS via the Apple Store, a company called Collabora offer both LibreOffice Vanilla for a paltry amount with regular updates, or alternatively, their own branded “enterprise ready” version for a slightly higher cost, called Collabora Office. Whether or not these commercial versions can be truly considered to be “enterprise ready” is up for debate. They don’t include any Java support for example, which is a fairly significant limitation if you are interested in using databases for creating reports, or using any of the many Java-based extensions that can be installed separately for LibreOffice.
There is even a version for iOS. I honestly don’t know how capable the iOS version is, as I don’t have an iPad or iPhone.
@Nigel-at-BUF-House originally indicated that he was looking at an Android solution. There is a version of LibreOffice for Android, which is currently made available by Collabora through the Google Play store. Obviously, it is not identical to the LibreOffice that one can install on Win/Lin/Mac, and has a more limited range of functionality compared to the full blown PC/Mac versions .
Full Disclosure : I do not work for any of the above-mentioned companies, but I am one of many volunteers in the LibreOffice project, my particular areas of interest being in bug hunting/triaging and database usage.
I have a traditional copy of office on disks, will that be effected by the changes? I know the functions I use are not high end so have never felt the need to fork out for a monthly plan for something I would never own unlike the discs I do own.
Oh good on you RicePudding!!!
We are huge fans of open source software (even my phone has an open source version of Android - no spying from google!) and have used Libre Office for years and years (and open office before that). We run it on Linux. The only thing I found tricky going between MS was at uni when doing power points - the slides never looked quite the same! However that was years ago. I use excel sheets at work and do my work in LO and I know the others use MS and it is seamless.
Free, easy to use, open source. What’s not to like?!
Wow Tory, please tell us more.
Libre Office for me & used Open Office before that. Does everything I need & hoodles more that I will probably never need. I do donate a few euros now and again , but entirely voluntary.
I’ve got old small 8"Samsung tablet using Android, and want a new bigger one and have to decide whether to replace with similar 10" or go for a Microsoft Surface Pro 2, on the basis that I use Outlook, Office Excel, Teams et al. But I only really use the tablet for the web, occasional short emails,…and SF!
So do I also dump office etc…I too have a subscription due in 6 months and get a none W10 on the basis I should move from Microsoft? Any reccomentatons on options of what to buy.
I thought that I’d give Libre Office a go.
I have the portable version V7.1.5.2 running under Windows 10.
One immediate problem: there seems to be no facility to save documents as PDFs.
Use the Export to > PDF or directly to PDF from the File menu in Writer, or else there should be a PDF icon in the main toolbar. To be fair, I haven’t used the Portable version of LibreOffice, so I may be missing something in my reply.
The difference between the two PDF export options is one of choice in the kind of PDF export you want, i.e. the direct option chooses the most common options for you, whereas the Export to PDF allows you to set a range of parameters for your destination PDF file.
As I understand it, on-disk copies of MSOffice are unaffected by the change, but you can be pretty certain that you will get constant reminders from MS about the “benefits” of moving to the subscription model.
At work, we have both LibreOffice and and a few Office365 subscriptions, which replaced on-disk copies of older MSOffice versions for Mac. In all honesty, we could probably do without the Office365 subscriptions, but for the small number of workstations involved it isn’t really a huge issue.
LibreOffice is, and has been, the main office work tool since the LibreOffice project came into existence after Oracle pulled the plug on OpenOffice.org. Before that, we were using OpenOffice.org, and before that StarOffice.
I’ve been involved with LibreOffice since it broke away from OpenOffice, and before that was an active member in the OpenOffice community, mostly writing database usage documentation, and again, bug hunting and triaging. Next year will be 20 years spent working with, on and around, this open source office suite. It has come a long way in that time. Sure, it isn’t perfect, but it does pretty much most things that most people would want in an office suite.
I’ve forgotten what it is called, I’ll go and ask the man shape.
Totally agree!
It was Cyanagan mod (sp?), perhpas of interest if you have an old phone) and is now lineageOS - hubby said if you click the download it will give you a list of the phones that it works with. If you are in the market for a new phone the one all the developers are raving about is the shiamimi (??) POCO 3. For more information there is lots on FDA Developers. There is even an open source version of Play store!