Best office suite

Applications
1

Hello,
I’ve read articles on best distro etc and wondered if there is interest in comparing offive suites. Been using kde desktop for long time, and openoffice then libreoffice. I thought id give calligra (its part of kde etc) a run but cant freeze headers when scrolling down long sheets. Anyone got any ideas (I likely missed something). Then be good to see what latest LO does and compare them. Thanks for anything

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LibreOffice is your best bet in open source office products.

If you want to try other non-foss solutions, try OnlyOffice, WPS Office and FreeOffice.

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There have been many topics regarding office suites, for various reasons. I think it would be nice to have a thread where all thoughts can be merged together regarding different Office suites for Linux.

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4

Thanks for your thoughts. will stick with LO and having a go with 6.2

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Good idea. Many of us just use what was installed with our Distribution and perhaps a thread would encourage us all to look at the alternatives available. It would also be nice to know why others use them. If they would were all in one place that would make it easy to do rather than have mentions spread out all over the place.

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If you are creating the document, then you have control over the formatting. Thus, the differences are likely to be minor for most uses.
If you are opening documents from others, especially when created in MSWord, formatting will be an issue. On @MikeREM’s suggestion (was it you?), I installed WPS office, which is able to preserve the formatting of MSWord created docs far better than Libre 6.0.7. But my sample size is tiny.
I think it would also be useful if we can get feedback on how documents that we create will look when opened by a Windows user in MSWord.

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i think i understand your reasoning here, but for my (also small sample size) use i generally just create a pdf (an option in libre that i don’t recall being offered in microsoft) if i need to share a document with someone i think is using micrsoft office. granted that is for situations where there is no need to edit on the receiving end.

i can second @ElectricDandySlider’s comment about using the suite that was installed with my distro. i think in the previous version of bodhi that was wps and with the change to 5.0 they switched to libre. i don’t find much difference between the two except that pie charts were a bit more polished looking in wps. otherwise i stick to fairly basic calc and writer use that feels very much the same.

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Thanks for all thoughts here. If a spreadsheet has headers frozen in LO, and it is opened in calligra sheets then the format is lost. I like to try to compare software from time to time, see which i prefer and stick with it. (Just being inquisitive I guess). If we dont find limitations, and make our ideas public, the push for development is not there! Thanks

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I do wish we could bite the bullet and admit that Microsoft Office is The World Standard, and that instead of wasting time with valiant but ultimately inadequate wannabees (LibreOffice, WPS, …) we find a philanthropist to drop bags of gold on Microsoft at whatever rate necessary to induce them to develop and support Office for Linux. (The most recent ‘gotcha’: LO Writer did not display comments inserted in an MSW doc prepared with ‘Track changes’ on.)

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Still wouldn’t be open source then. Microsoft could make Linux versions for free, if they made the software FOSS, because people would develop support for that on their own, without getting paid by Microsoft.

That said, sometimes it simply is really hard to port something to Linux, see my Grudge here.

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When it comes to open source, I guess I’m a pragmatic, not a fanatic*. As you say “… it simply is really hard to port something to Linux”, so I say leave it to Microsoft to port and support. I’d pay to use it.

  • But I am an advocate, and have been since UNIX v6…
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