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I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting. In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice

I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting. In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users. I'm sure the situation is different in other parts of the world, where saving on license cost is more important. It's a bit of a shame that eg governments aren't switching en masse. But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.

taylodl 6y ago
Yes - LibreOffice Draw. Microsoft has made quite a mess of Visio and Draw is much, much easier to use. My organization is an MS Office shop but that really just means we use Word, Excel, and Power Point. Us techies? We use LibreOffice Draw. Now that GDocs has become more popular and so people more and more are distributing presentations as PDFs I've also seen more people starting to use Impress. It's usage isn't widespread, but it's trending up. Word and Excel? I don't see their dominance fading in my organization anytime in the foreseeable future.
- ta988 6y ago
  I have switched almost fully to diagrams.net, using a local version. I found it much more practical than Draw.
  - franga2000 6y ago
    That's Draw.io, for those that haven't heard of their new name, and I definitely agree that it's brilliant piece of software. Pretty much the one and only web-based productivity software I enjoy using.
    - throwawaybutwhy 6y ago
      Web-based? It's also available in VS Code as a plugin. Integrated workflow at its finest, IMO.
      - sngz 6y ago
        i use the electron desktop app for it too
      - franga2000 6y ago
        Well yes, and what is VSCode but a web app, hosted locally? :) I was thinking about the online version when I wrote my comment, as that is what I usually use. My point is that even the browser version is basically perfect, which is rare to see in web apps (including "electronized" ones).
indymike 6y ago
In 2007 my company (a digital agency) had it's last bad Microsoft day. We had a bad Windows update that caused every employee 4-5 hours of downtime. So, that afternoon I asked everyone Mac or Linux. The next day we switched. It worked out largely because OpenOffice (and then LibreOffice) were good enough to let us interop with our customers and vendors.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  While I don't love Microsoft, 4-5 hours of downtime due to a bad OS update isn't anything to write home about and is by no mean restricted to Windows, especially in 2007. Same thing can happen on Mac (Catalina bricking MacBooks via bad EFI update) or Linux (where do I start). Basically, you have to pick your poison and a sysadmin that withholds updates until all SW apps and packages are tested thoroughly on the company devices before green-lighting the rollout. Clicking Update each time you get a notification, has the risk of ending badly for your business no matter what OS you choose.
  - m45t3r 6y ago
    > Linux (where do I start) Not true, there are tons of ways in Linux where you can completely recover from a bad update. Either manual backups (even using tar works), BTRFS or ZFS, or something more fancy like NixOS (that I use).
    - trinix912 6y ago
      This still doesn't mean there's absolutely no downtime, especially in an enterprise setting where it's usually easier to perform generic rollbacks on Windows than Linux.
      - MayeulC 6y ago
        Not sure about that last point. In my uni, the computers booted over PXE and were often re-imaged, while mounting user files over the network. I imagine it is a rather common setup? Anyway, since they had groups of similar hardware, software was thouroughly tested before any update was deployed to a given group. This was the case for Linux, and probably for windows as well. This was a smallish university, with an IT staff of 3-4, mind you, so that's probably not too complex to deploy. There's probably turnkey solutions out there (Red Hat likely has something like this). Linux makes sense in a company setting IMO, as companies can generally pick the machines their employees will use, so they can vet compatibility and software updates in advance. Of course, more moving parts (different HW/SW combinations) means more difficult testing.
domano 6y ago
Our company used Libreoffice for many years but we switched to Google a few years back and i could not be happier. We are a development consultancy, the sales people mostly used MS Office before the switch to Google.
FriedrichN 6y ago
> But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic. I find Calc to be quite complete and quite compatible with Excel files. I deal with way more Excel sheets than I would like to, but I can't remember the last time I ran into a problem with them. Google Docs on the other hand is quite slow and lacks a lot of features and has the disadvantage of being browser based and a Google product.
- acomjean 6y ago
  Calc also seems to handle comma separated (or tab) files much better. Especially when saving.
  - gizzlon 6y ago
    Also when importing :) Spent a few hours with Calc today because I could not get Google Sheets to import and handle my csv correctly. Much better experience than I expected, TBH. Will use it again, and probably default to LibreOffice Calc for single-user sheets.
  - franga2000 6y ago
    YES! This 1000 times! I keep LibreOffice installed on my Windows install solely because of that. In general, Calc has got to be the best in the suite and perhaps the only one that actually has any advantage over MS (besides Draw's PDF editing, but that has no direct MS counterpart).
    - andrewshadura 6y ago
      Well, Writer offers sane menus, toolbars and sidebars, unlike Word. Word's are a complete mess, each time I have to use it I'm lost and can't do basic things.
    - davidgerard 6y ago
      Writer is as good or better than Word.
zinekeller 6y ago
> I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting. Here, also nope. There are GDocs users, and then MS Office users (there is a tendency that GDocs users here are using the office suite for its relative ease of use while MS Office users do tend to use the bits that are relevant to their needs (for example, Excel automation and advanced formatting found in Word which is good enough to not justify spending more in InDesign and similar applications). We have trialled LibreOffice before, but the results were dismal: even though LibreOffice (to its advantage) approaches Microsoft compatibility, we still experienced some minor bugs (were reported and subsequently fixed) and missing features (in the sense that PowerBI and others were providing, plus real-time collaboration which Microsoft has a decent solution) means that even considering and removing training costs from the computation, it would not justify changing from Microsoft Office (or even GDocs) to LibreOffice for us. Google has eaten the basics and Microsoft has eaten the advanced users (and R/Py/Julia for even more advanced users), so to speak.
pmontra 6y ago
A customer of mine has both Office and LibreOffice on their Macs. They tend to use Word and Excel (not much) but can open odt and ods. However most of their documents are created and stored on several online platforms. Word and Office are not as important as they used to be.
- dang 6y ago
  Hi, sorry for complete offtopicness, but would you mind emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite for a good submission and we don't have any other way to contact you!
tyingq 6y ago
O365 is probably the final nail for any broad deployment of LibreOffice in a largish company. Especially with so many working remote from their own PC's. That's despite the fact that online Word is probably less compatible with regular Word than LibreOffice is :)
- easton 6y ago
  At least it can render the document correctly in Word Online, last time I gave LibreOffice something complex the fonts and formatting were messy (same goes for Apple’s built in Word previewer, which I’m pretty sure hasn’t been updated since iPhone OS 1.0).
  - tyingq 6y ago
    "At least it can render the document correctly in Word Online" Sometimes. Online Word chokes on many things, and misses simple stuff like center aligned columns.
    - kiwijamo 6y ago
      It's almost never the same layout as in proper Word even for simple documents. It's only really useful for shared documents you don't need to print etc.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    > the fonts and formatting were messy Did you have these fonts installed, or LO was forced to use substitutes with slightly different metric? Just having identical fonts available is 99% of solving the layout problems.
  - davidgerard 6y ago
    I'm inclined to think this is, almost entirely, a fake objection - just something people feel they have to claim about LO. Google Docs is absolutely bloody useless at DOCX reading in every way, and messes up quite simple documents, but nobody ever raises this objection. LO is really fantastically good at reading the fake standard called DOCX. In my experience, it handles it more consistently than MS Word - which is notoriously incompatible with other versions of itself. Put it this way: I believe this class of objection when the objector links the LO bug, with a test document.
buovjaga 6y ago
Here is a list of deployments in the public and private sector: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations Feel free to add any missing ones :)
genezeta 6y ago
Last couple of jobs I did, they used LibreOffice. The thing is they were administration (Army, Home Office) and in the last decade a lot of the administration here dropped MS in favour of Libre for economic/political reasons. And then, just a couple of months ago they dropped Libre and switched to mmm... OnlyOffice. There hasn't been much talk about it -compared to when switching to Libre- but it seems it was decided because they wanted a suite that was available via web but didn't want to go back to MS with O365 or use Google.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  Microsoft is just amazing at 'helping' companies chose software. If you're already on a microsoft stack at work, maybe running some in house servers, exchange, some other things, and you're partially in the cloud as well, it's a no brainer to get office as well with it, and teams, and whatever else. Microsoft has an entire ecosystem that works fairly well. It doesn't make much sense to just use libreoffice when Office just works and comes with the the rest of the pie you are eating.
  - franga2000 6y ago
    I'd add a small asterisk here, since MS stuff doesn't actually integrate well. It integrates barely sufficiently while making third-party integration near impossible, so you really don't have much of a choice.
    - calvinmorrison 6y ago
      I have been a linux user since about 2006. I didn't really even know anything about the MS stack when I started at LargeCorp a few years ago. I was actually pleasantly surprised how well most things just worked. Teams was a bit shakey at the start, but the office online integraiton was nice, we were able to collaborate, exchange worked out of the box nicely, the phones in the office were even tied into whatever system we had so I could have my number even if i was sitting at a different desk for a week. I understood why when teams came out they said "okay stop using slack because we now get teams for free". They already have MS every-other-product and now they got another one at no extra cost.
justin66 6y ago
> I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting. > In my experience, everyone uses MS Office, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users. At one job, I recommended OpenOffice for handling some very old files that were in a Lotus format Microsoft Office didn't support. I wouldn't call it gaining traction, but they installed at least one copy.
blackhaz 6y ago
I'm transitioning our small telecom business to LibreOffice. Not sure if that is representative at all. MS Office subscription model makes little sense for us. LibreOffice works well, and I am happy to see predominantly ODTs and ODSs now in the internal circulation. Files in external correspondence still have to be MS Office. Having a full stable office suite like LibreOffice was probably the final reason I've switched to FreeBSD on my desktop, and haven't looked back.
- freeopinion 6y ago
  #isp-oss:matrix.org
littlestymaar 6y ago
> But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, This sounds really paradoxical to me: granted Calc isn't Excel, but it has maybe 50% of the features when Google Doc has, I don't know, maybe 3% … When doing basic things, you are almost always good with Calc, meanwhile Google Doc is like the most minimal spreadsheet you can get.
- franga2000 6y ago
  Keep in mind that the author already states they rarely need an office suite, so needing spreadsheets is an ever rarer occasion. For those kinds of users, Google Sheets is perfectly fine and even has some convenience features that the competition doesn't (for me, those are mainly great checkbox and dropdown support, some fancy "online" formulas that can do things like currency conversion, and linking spreadsheet ranges into Docs).
  - ricc 6y ago
    But then he said this: > Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel Which sounds really BS when compared to Google Sheets, as the post that you replied already mentioned.
    - franga2000 6y ago
      Both are true, though, if you consider a non-power-user's perspective. Calc is behind Excel and Sheets in usability, but ahed of Sheets (and behind Excel) in "power". You can do more with Calc out of the box, but it's much more annoying to use than Sheets and if you don't need that power, Sheets is the better choice (ignoring philosophical issues).
      - ricc 6y ago
        I would agree that "Calc" has worse usability if you're talking about OpenOffice. I find LibreOffice's Calc to be as usable as Excel because it reminds me of Excel 2003 (and older). Additional anecdata: I asked my wife who hates using Excel and she said that LibreOffice Calc was no different.
swiley 6y ago
My understanding is that it's popular among EU users.
908B64B197 6y ago
At some point I recall Munich tried to switch to Libre/OpenOffice. After spending a fortune they ended up going back to Microsoft Office because it just worked.
- teddyh 6y ago
  You mean, after Microsoft spent a fortune “convincing” them? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LiMux&oldid=992562902#History https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LiMux&oldid=99256... Also, it seems that they have now switched back to Linux again: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    When they switched back they still had something like 40% of workstations running Windows. I assume they'll make the same discovery as last time: It's not free as in free beer; they'll have to develop the missing pieces themselves if they want it to work.
    - tlamponi 6y ago
      Yeah, because the efforts to switch all over was constantly messed with, from Balmer cancelling his vacation for a immediate visit with the Mayor, to people complaining that their random exe cannot be installed (which was mainly due to newer stricter policy and every admin can tell you that this is a general complaint). Oh and did you actually read the links? FYI: They are switching to Linux again. https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
      - 908B64B197 6y ago
        > to people complaining that their random exe cannot be installed When it's critical software that's required to get work done it's a legitimate complain. And that's why they were still running Windows in parallels years after "switching"
Closi 6y ago
Additionally both Google Docs and Libre fall down if you are doing more comprehensive data analysis. Google Docs is functionally pretty close to most of excel, but has significantly more restrictions in terms of row count. Libre office misses key functionality available in the latest office releases last time I checked. Things like unique(), filter(), let() and more recently lamda() really do change the game.
- franga2000 6y ago
  Out of curiosty, what kinds of things would actually hit the row limit? It's hard for me to imagine a situation where you have enough data points to reach it, but don't have any specialised software to analyze it.
  - galacticdessert 6y ago
    Don't know about the comment author, but in consulting huge excels are quite the normal. Especially when dealing with data driven domains such as energy
    - Closi 6y ago
      Yep I’m in consulting, good guess! (Supply chain & logistics)
  - Closi 6y ago
    I work in logistics consulting - it’s pretty common to receive orderline data that is a few hundred thousand rows and excel is great at analysing it (eg to build a material flow). Excel for this is significantly faster and more flexible than any other tool I’ve used. Also transport data and models can often use many columns. Google Docs limit is actually the active cells used so this then reduces the row limit further. If we receive data that is a few million rows on bigger formats, we will still use excel, just with PowerQuery / PowerPivot and using measures which works pretty well up to 10 million records or so. Bigger than that and we will use PowerBI.
agumonkey 6y ago
Slight remark: it's easy to forget, but even for document edition.. legacy can strike hard. My last bout at a court room they were using WordPerfect 12, due to coupling with its template system with the legal doc generator.
chrisseaton 6y ago
I think they have a lot of users in Africa, Eastern Europe, places like that. If you look at their blogs they also have contributors there and focus some outreach there I think.
ChrisRR 6y ago
I used to use LibreOffice all the time because it was free, but then Google Docs overtook that for me Nowadays I don't even have an office suite installed because of Google Docs
tlamponi 6y ago
The defence ministry of Italy does, as well as other Italian government bodies. https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-microsoft-to-libreoffice-how-italys-military-is-starting-its-march-to-open-source/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-microsoft-to-libreoffice-... Well and my company does, but naturally biased as we're European (meaning, sending over lots of data to Microsoft is a bit more frowned upon) and produce open source software ourself.
ACS_Solver 6y ago
Anecdotally, I'm "the Linux person" at my company, so I have LibreOffice on my machine. Everyone else is on Office 365. I rarely need an office suite, and LO does the job for me, but with the online MS Office apps, seems like LibreOffice is further from professional adoption than ever before. The online collaboration aspect seems to be the killer feature. If I load Excel Online in a browser to edit a file together with someone else, that just works, and it handles simple use cases very well. I suppose the web version of Excel wouldn't deal with complex spreadsheets well, but complex MS Office files are also prone to fail in LibreOffice. I continue to run LibreOffice because it does what I need, but seems like cloud office suites are now expected to be an option, and the FOSS options there seem to be way behind.
- davidgerard 6y ago
  Collabora Office is the online collaboration version of LO, and it works well enough that Collabora sell it to companies as a service.
e40 6y ago
I tried for a while, but gave up. Using anything but MS Office is swimming upstream. It's just not worth the hassle. I have been impressed with Google's in-browser compatibility, but it isn't a replacement. It's just nice not to have to fire up Word or Excel and get a quick glance, if that's what I need.
Apofis 6y ago
Doubtful, everything is going web app these days. Web Assembly will help bridge the performance gap between native apps and webapps, which is really the last pain point.
augustk 6y ago
> In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users. Of which quite a few in the latter group think that proprietary software is for suckers. https://www.tedxgeneva.net/talks/richard-stallman-free-software-free-society/ https://www.tedxgeneva.net/talks/richard-stallman-free-softw...
physicsguy 6y ago
It’s used in Universities by academics using Linux that need to open word documents sent to them by admin staff in my exprrience, but that’s about it.
blablabla123 6y ago
I work as Software Engineer but LibreOffice is my first-choice for any Office related task, both at work and at home. The CSV import/export is far better than that of MS Office - and Docs for that matter. Which is exactly what I need, Spreadsheet is the most common tool I need at work. But I also use the other tools, not that often though. Most notable IMHO is the well-working PDF export in Writer that predates any built-in PDF export in Office or Windows by years. But yes, some "normal" tasks take a few clicks more than in MS Office when you're not used to it. The look&feel is really different and the UI still make this 90s-OSS-hardly-works impression - which is unjustified. On the other hand it is far more powerful than Google Docs and I can check in the files in git which is not an option for Google Docs. FWIW I think there's an online version of it as well now.
ksec 6y ago
>MS Office or Google Docs I see these two as very different need and usage. Google Docs is for some basic cross department collaboration usage. Which is replaceable only by Office 365 online but not traditional Office itself. With Office, 2007, 2010, 2013+ ( Anything beyond 2013 is far to new for most Enterprise upgrade and usage ). These group of user aren't going to be switching to anything. I am willing to bet money there are Trillion dollar revenue today relying on Good old Excel SpreadSheet. From Small family business to large Investment firms using Excel to its limit. Which is working perfectly fine, DONT FUCKING TOUCH IT. Even if LibreOffice promise 99.99% of Excel compatibility, are business and Enterprise willing to risk 0.01% of failure? For What? Ideology to not use anything from Microsoft? Or Supporting Open Source? I have stated this before, the biggest lock-in Microsoft has might not be Windows, but Excel. Companies are more than willing to switch over to Mac as long as Microsoft Excel is on the platform. ( Which is also one reason why I see a slim possibilities of Microsoft one day open sourcing Windows Kernel )
zxspectrum1982 6y ago
As a long-time Linux user, I cannot remember when it was the last time I used LibreOffice. I have been using the free-but-not-opensource WPS Office for years, and it's great. Lightweight, featureful, works a lot better with Microsoft formats... no reason for me to ever touch LO again. https://linux.wps.com/ https://linux.wps.com/
wrp 6y ago
I have promoted Open/LibreOffice among humanities and social sciences colleagues for around 20 years and have seen zero uptake. The problems are 1) they just accept whatever IT puts on their office machines, and 2) their primary user concern is compatibility. They not only need to stay on Word, but they generally need to be all using the same version. I use only LibreOffice and it does cause problems when exchanging documents.

taylodl 6y ago

Yes - LibreOffice Draw. Microsoft has made quite a mess of Visio and Draw is much, much easier to use. My organization is an MS Office shop but that really just means we use Word, Excel, and Power Point. Us techies? We use LibreOffice Draw. Now that GDocs has become more popular and so people more and more are distributing presentations as PDFs I've also seen more people starting to use Impress. It's usage isn't widespread, but it's trending up. Word and Excel? I don't see their dominance fading in my organization anytime in the foreseeable future.

ta988 6y ago
I have switched almost fully to diagrams.net, using a local version. I found it much more practical than Draw.
- franga2000 6y ago
  That's Draw.io, for those that haven't heard of their new name, and I definitely agree that it's brilliant piece of software. Pretty much the one and only web-based productivity software I enjoy using.
  - throwawaybutwhy 6y ago
    Web-based? It's also available in VS Code as a plugin. Integrated workflow at its finest, IMO.
    - sngz 6y ago
      i use the electron desktop app for it too
    - franga2000 6y ago
      Well yes, and what is VSCode but a web app, hosted locally? :) I was thinking about the online version when I wrote my comment, as that is what I usually use. My point is that even the browser version is basically perfect, which is rare to see in web apps (including "electronized" ones).

indymike 6y ago

In 2007 my company (a digital agency) had it's last bad Microsoft day. We had a bad Windows update that caused every employee 4-5 hours of downtime. So, that afternoon I asked everyone Mac or Linux. The next day we switched. It worked out largely because OpenOffice (and then LibreOffice) were good enough to let us interop with our customers and vendors.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
While I don't love Microsoft, 4-5 hours of downtime due to a bad OS update isn't anything to write home about and is by no mean restricted to Windows, especially in 2007. Same thing can happen on Mac (Catalina bricking MacBooks via bad EFI update) or Linux (where do I start). Basically, you have to pick your poison and a sysadmin that withholds updates until all SW apps and packages are tested thoroughly on the company devices before green-lighting the rollout. Clicking Update each time you get a notification, has the risk of ending badly for your business no matter what OS you choose.
- m45t3r 6y ago
  > Linux (where do I start) Not true, there are tons of ways in Linux where you can completely recover from a bad update. Either manual backups (even using tar works), BTRFS or ZFS, or something more fancy like NixOS (that I use).
  - trinix912 6y ago
    This still doesn't mean there's absolutely no downtime, especially in an enterprise setting where it's usually easier to perform generic rollbacks on Windows than Linux.
    - MayeulC 6y ago
      Not sure about that last point. In my uni, the computers booted over PXE and were often re-imaged, while mounting user files over the network. I imagine it is a rather common setup? Anyway, since they had groups of similar hardware, software was thouroughly tested before any update was deployed to a given group. This was the case for Linux, and probably for windows as well. This was a smallish university, with an IT staff of 3-4, mind you, so that's probably not too complex to deploy. There's probably turnkey solutions out there (Red Hat likely has something like this). Linux makes sense in a company setting IMO, as companies can generally pick the machines their employees will use, so they can vet compatibility and software updates in advance. Of course, more moving parts (different HW/SW combinations) means more difficult testing.

domano 6y ago

Our company used Libreoffice for many years but we switched to Google a few years back and i could not be happier. We are a development consultancy, the sales people mostly used MS Office before the switch to Google.

FriedrichN 6y ago

> But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic. I find Calc to be quite complete and quite compatible with Excel files. I deal with way more Excel sheets than I would like to, but I can't remember the last time I ran into a problem with them. Google Docs on the other hand is quite slow and lacks a lot of features and has the disadvantage of being browser based and a Google product.

acomjean 6y ago
Calc also seems to handle comma separated (or tab) files much better. Especially when saving.
- gizzlon 6y ago
  Also when importing :) Spent a few hours with Calc today because I could not get Google Sheets to import and handle my csv correctly. Much better experience than I expected, TBH. Will use it again, and probably default to LibreOffice Calc for single-user sheets.
- franga2000 6y ago
  YES! This 1000 times! I keep LibreOffice installed on my Windows install solely because of that. In general, Calc has got to be the best in the suite and perhaps the only one that actually has any advantage over MS (besides Draw's PDF editing, but that has no direct MS counterpart).
  - andrewshadura 6y ago
    Well, Writer offers sane menus, toolbars and sidebars, unlike Word. Word's are a complete mess, each time I have to use it I'm lost and can't do basic things.
  - davidgerard 6y ago
    Writer is as good or better than Word.

zinekeller 6y ago

> I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting. Here, also nope. There are GDocs users, and then MS Office users (there is a tendency that GDocs users here are using the office suite for its relative ease of use while MS Office users do tend to use the bits that are relevant to their needs (for example, Excel automation and advanced formatting found in Word which is good enough to not justify spending more in InDesign and similar applications). We have trialled LibreOffice before, but the results were dismal: even though LibreOffice (to its advantage) approaches Microsoft compatibility, we still experienced some minor bugs (were reported and subsequently fixed) and missing features (in the sense that PowerBI and others were providing, plus real-time collaboration which Microsoft has a decent solution) means that even considering and removing training costs from the computation, it would not justify changing from Microsoft Office (or even GDocs) to LibreOffice for us. Google has eaten the basics and Microsoft has eaten the advanced users (and R/Py/Julia for even more advanced users), so to speak.

pmontra 6y ago

A customer of mine has both Office and LibreOffice on their Macs. They tend to use Word and Excel (not much) but can open odt and ods. However most of their documents are created and stored on several online platforms. Word and Office are not as important as they used to be.

dang 6y ago
Hi, sorry for complete offtopicness, but would you mind emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite for a good submission and we don't have any other way to contact you!

tyingq 6y ago

O365 is probably the final nail for any broad deployment of LibreOffice in a largish company. Especially with so many working remote from their own PC's. That's despite the fact that online Word is probably less compatible with regular Word than LibreOffice is :)

easton 6y ago
At least it can render the document correctly in Word Online, last time I gave LibreOffice something complex the fonts and formatting were messy (same goes for Apple’s built in Word previewer, which I’m pretty sure hasn’t been updated since iPhone OS 1.0).
- tyingq 6y ago
  "At least it can render the document correctly in Word Online" Sometimes. Online Word chokes on many things, and misses simple stuff like center aligned columns.
  - kiwijamo 6y ago
    It's almost never the same layout as in proper Word even for simple documents. It's only really useful for shared documents you don't need to print etc.
- vetinari 6y ago
  > the fonts and formatting were messy Did you have these fonts installed, or LO was forced to use substitutes with slightly different metric? Just having identical fonts available is 99% of solving the layout problems.
- davidgerard 6y ago
  I'm inclined to think this is, almost entirely, a fake objection - just something people feel they have to claim about LO. Google Docs is absolutely bloody useless at DOCX reading in every way, and messes up quite simple documents, but nobody ever raises this objection. LO is really fantastically good at reading the fake standard called DOCX. In my experience, it handles it more consistently than MS Word - which is notoriously incompatible with other versions of itself. Put it this way: I believe this class of objection when the objector links the LO bug, with a test document.

buovjaga 6y ago

Here is a list of deployments in the public and private sector: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations Feel free to add any missing ones :)

genezeta 6y ago

Last couple of jobs I did, they used LibreOffice. The thing is they were administration (Army, Home Office) and in the last decade a lot of the administration here dropped MS in favour of Libre for economic/political reasons. And then, just a couple of months ago they dropped Libre and switched to mmm... OnlyOffice. There hasn't been much talk about it -compared to when switching to Libre- but it seems it was decided because they wanted a suite that was available via web but didn't want to go back to MS with O365 or use Google.

calvinmorrison 6y ago
Microsoft is just amazing at 'helping' companies chose software. If you're already on a microsoft stack at work, maybe running some in house servers, exchange, some other things, and you're partially in the cloud as well, it's a no brainer to get office as well with it, and teams, and whatever else. Microsoft has an entire ecosystem that works fairly well. It doesn't make much sense to just use libreoffice when Office just works and comes with the the rest of the pie you are eating.
- franga2000 6y ago
  I'd add a small asterisk here, since MS stuff doesn't actually integrate well. It integrates barely sufficiently while making third-party integration near impossible, so you really don't have much of a choice.
  - calvinmorrison 6y ago
    I have been a linux user since about 2006. I didn't really even know anything about the MS stack when I started at LargeCorp a few years ago. I was actually pleasantly surprised how well most things just worked. Teams was a bit shakey at the start, but the office online integraiton was nice, we were able to collaborate, exchange worked out of the box nicely, the phones in the office were even tied into whatever system we had so I could have my number even if i was sitting at a different desk for a week. I understood why when teams came out they said "okay stop using slack because we now get teams for free". They already have MS every-other-product and now they got another one at no extra cost.

justin66 6y ago

> I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting. > In my experience, everyone uses MS Office, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users. At one job, I recommended OpenOffice for handling some very old files that were in a Lotus format Microsoft Office didn't support. I wouldn't call it gaining traction, but they installed at least one copy.

blackhaz 6y ago

I'm transitioning our small telecom business to LibreOffice. Not sure if that is representative at all. MS Office subscription model makes little sense for us. LibreOffice works well, and I am happy to see predominantly ODTs and ODSs now in the internal circulation. Files in external correspondence still have to be MS Office. Having a full stable office suite like LibreOffice was probably the final reason I've switched to FreeBSD on my desktop, and haven't looked back.

freeopinion 6y ago
#isp-oss:matrix.org

littlestymaar 6y ago

> But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, This sounds really paradoxical to me: granted Calc isn't Excel, but it has maybe 50% of the features when Google Doc has, I don't know, maybe 3% … When doing basic things, you are almost always good with Calc, meanwhile Google Doc is like the most minimal spreadsheet you can get.

franga2000 6y ago
Keep in mind that the author already states they rarely need an office suite, so needing spreadsheets is an ever rarer occasion. For those kinds of users, Google Sheets is perfectly fine and even has some convenience features that the competition doesn't (for me, those are mainly great checkbox and dropdown support, some fancy "online" formulas that can do things like currency conversion, and linking spreadsheet ranges into Docs).
- ricc 6y ago
  But then he said this: > Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel Which sounds really BS when compared to Google Sheets, as the post that you replied already mentioned.
  - franga2000 6y ago
    Both are true, though, if you consider a non-power-user's perspective. Calc is behind Excel and Sheets in usability, but ahed of Sheets (and behind Excel) in "power". You can do more with Calc out of the box, but it's much more annoying to use than Sheets and if you don't need that power, Sheets is the better choice (ignoring philosophical issues).
    - ricc 6y ago
      I would agree that "Calc" has worse usability if you're talking about OpenOffice. I find LibreOffice's Calc to be as usable as Excel because it reminds me of Excel 2003 (and older). Additional anecdata: I asked my wife who hates using Excel and she said that LibreOffice Calc was no different.

swiley 6y ago

My understanding is that it's popular among EU users.

908B64B197 6y ago

At some point I recall Munich tried to switch to Libre/OpenOffice. After spending a fortune they ended up going back to Microsoft Office because it just worked.

teddyh 6y ago
You mean, after Microsoft spent a fortune “convincing” them? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LiMux&oldid=992562902#History https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LiMux&oldid=99256... Also, it seems that they have now switched back to Linux again: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  When they switched back they still had something like 40% of workstations running Windows. I assume they'll make the same discovery as last time: It's not free as in free beer; they'll have to develop the missing pieces themselves if they want it to work.
  - tlamponi 6y ago
    Yeah, because the efforts to switch all over was constantly messed with, from Balmer cancelling his vacation for a immediate visit with the Mayor, to people complaining that their random exe cannot be installed (which was mainly due to newer stricter policy and every admin can tell you that this is a general complaint). Oh and did you actually read the links? FYI: They are switching to Linux again. https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      > to people complaining that their random exe cannot be installed When it's critical software that's required to get work done it's a legitimate complain. And that's why they were still running Windows in parallels years after "switching"

Closi 6y ago

Additionally both Google Docs and Libre fall down if you are doing more comprehensive data analysis. Google Docs is functionally pretty close to most of excel, but has significantly more restrictions in terms of row count. Libre office misses key functionality available in the latest office releases last time I checked. Things like unique(), filter(), let() and more recently lamda() really do change the game.

franga2000 6y ago
Out of curiosty, what kinds of things would actually hit the row limit? It's hard for me to imagine a situation where you have enough data points to reach it, but don't have any specialised software to analyze it.
- galacticdessert 6y ago
  Don't know about the comment author, but in consulting huge excels are quite the normal. Especially when dealing with data driven domains such as energy
  - Closi 6y ago
    Yep I’m in consulting, good guess! (Supply chain & logistics)
- Closi 6y ago
  I work in logistics consulting - it’s pretty common to receive orderline data that is a few hundred thousand rows and excel is great at analysing it (eg to build a material flow). Excel for this is significantly faster and more flexible than any other tool I’ve used. Also transport data and models can often use many columns. Google Docs limit is actually the active cells used so this then reduces the row limit further. If we receive data that is a few million rows on bigger formats, we will still use excel, just with PowerQuery / PowerPivot and using measures which works pretty well up to 10 million records or so. Bigger than that and we will use PowerBI.

agumonkey 6y ago

Slight remark: it's easy to forget, but even for document edition.. legacy can strike hard. My last bout at a court room they were using WordPerfect 12, due to coupling with its template system with the legal doc generator.

chrisseaton 6y ago

I think they have a lot of users in Africa, Eastern Europe, places like that. If you look at their blogs they also have contributors there and focus some outreach there I think.

ChrisRR 6y ago

I used to use LibreOffice all the time because it was free, but then Google Docs overtook that for me Nowadays I don't even have an office suite installed because of Google Docs

tlamponi 6y ago

The defence ministry of Italy does, as well as other Italian government bodies. https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-microsoft-to-libreoffice-how-italys-military-is-starting-its-march-to-open-source/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-microsoft-to-libreoffice-... Well and my company does, but naturally biased as we're European (meaning, sending over lots of data to Microsoft is a bit more frowned upon) and produce open source software ourself.

ACS_Solver 6y ago

Anecdotally, I'm "the Linux person" at my company, so I have LibreOffice on my machine. Everyone else is on Office 365. I rarely need an office suite, and LO does the job for me, but with the online MS Office apps, seems like LibreOffice is further from professional adoption than ever before. The online collaboration aspect seems to be the killer feature. If I load Excel Online in a browser to edit a file together with someone else, that just works, and it handles simple use cases very well. I suppose the web version of Excel wouldn't deal with complex spreadsheets well, but complex MS Office files are also prone to fail in LibreOffice. I continue to run LibreOffice because it does what I need, but seems like cloud office suites are now expected to be an option, and the FOSS options there seem to be way behind.

davidgerard 6y ago
Collabora Office is the online collaboration version of LO, and it works well enough that Collabora sell it to companies as a service.

e40 6y ago

I tried for a while, but gave up. Using anything but MS Office is swimming upstream. It's just not worth the hassle. I have been impressed with Google's in-browser compatibility, but it isn't a replacement. It's just nice not to have to fire up Word or Excel and get a quick glance, if that's what I need.

Apofis 6y ago

Doubtful, everything is going web app these days. Web Assembly will help bridge the performance gap between native apps and webapps, which is really the last pain point.

augustk 6y ago

> In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users. Of which quite a few in the latter group think that proprietary software is for suckers. https://www.tedxgeneva.net/talks/richard-stallman-free-software-free-society/ https://www.tedxgeneva.net/talks/richard-stallman-free-softw...

physicsguy 6y ago

It’s used in Universities by academics using Linux that need to open word documents sent to them by admin staff in my exprrience, but that’s about it.

blablabla123 6y ago

I work as Software Engineer but LibreOffice is my first-choice for any Office related task, both at work and at home. The CSV import/export is far better than that of MS Office - and Docs for that matter. Which is exactly what I need, Spreadsheet is the most common tool I need at work. But I also use the other tools, not that often though. Most notable IMHO is the well-working PDF export in Writer that predates any built-in PDF export in Office or Windows by years. But yes, some "normal" tasks take a few clicks more than in MS Office when you're not used to it. The look&feel is really different and the UI still make this 90s-OSS-hardly-works impression - which is unjustified. On the other hand it is far more powerful than Google Docs and I can check in the files in git which is not an option for Google Docs. FWIW I think there's an online version of it as well now.

ksec 6y ago

>MS Office or Google Docs I see these two as very different need and usage. Google Docs is for some basic cross department collaboration usage. Which is replaceable only by Office 365 online but not traditional Office itself. With Office, 2007, 2010, 2013+ ( Anything beyond 2013 is far to new for most Enterprise upgrade and usage ). These group of user aren't going to be switching to anything. I am willing to bet money there are Trillion dollar revenue today relying on Good old Excel SpreadSheet. From Small family business to large Investment firms using Excel to its limit. Which is working perfectly fine, DONT FUCKING TOUCH IT. Even if LibreOffice promise 99.99% of Excel compatibility, are business and Enterprise willing to risk 0.01% of failure? For What? Ideology to not use anything from Microsoft? Or Supporting Open Source? I have stated this before, the biggest lock-in Microsoft has might not be Windows, but Excel. Companies are more than willing to switch over to Mac as long as Microsoft Excel is on the platform. ( Which is also one reason why I see a slim possibilities of Microsoft one day open sourcing Windows Kernel )

zxspectrum1982 6y ago

As a long-time Linux user, I cannot remember when it was the last time I used LibreOffice. I have been using the free-but-not-opensource WPS Office for years, and it's great. Lightweight, featureful, works a lot better with Microsoft formats... no reason for me to ever touch LO again. https://linux.wps.com/ https://linux.wps.com/

wrp 6y ago

I have promoted Open/LibreOffice among humanities and social sciences colleagues for around 20 years and have seen zero uptake. The problems are 1) they just accept whatever IT puts on their office machines, and 2) their primary user concern is compatibility. They not only need to stay on Word, but they generally need to be all using the same version. I use only LibreOffice and it does cause problems when exchanging documents.