Linux Office Suite Reccomandation (Other Than Libreoffice)

When I shift over to using my wife’s Chromebook, Google Docs is pretty simple to use. It’s available if you use Chrome or Chromium browsers–click the little nine-dot pattern in the upper right.

Hello, thanks for your replies, recently I came across an office suite called onlyoffice, is that office suite a good replacement for ms office?

I have not used only office I saw it was default on one distro I tried but didn’t keep it.
not sure how compatible it is with MSOffice. WPS is the best one I’ve seen for that compatibility. good Luck in your search. Let us know how you make out with only office.

They say
80 % of the population only use 20 % of any application.

Libre office is great, just choose what you need today and as your skills improve you are read to step up.

I have abword but it’s just like libre office so no gain except no spreadsheet or database or PowerPoint.

On my android I use wps for word processing but it’s limited in many ways

Google docs is ok but you have to be online to get the most from it

May be complex, but install wine as it comes with Windows notepad, you don’t get much simpler than that.

Lot depends what you need or want ?

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LibreOffice is certainly not more complicated than MS-Office.

However, any suggestion depends very much on what you need:

If it’s primarily word processing you might have a look at abiword which is very simple and yet offers excellent compatibility with the MS docx format.

As far as Google docs go, you don’t have to use Chromium or Chrome. Firefox will just work as fine as them. The only function you would need Chrome for, is the speech-to-text plugin.

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Rethinking the issue, I thought:

Who needs an office package anyway, when you have GNU-Emacs, the Swiss army chainsaw of editors already installed on almost amy *nix style operating system?

You need prettily formatted text? Emacs’ latex-mode is your friend for creating professional book-publishing grade documents.

You need to prepare slides for a presentation? Same. LaTeX already comes with a slides style.

Calculations? Emacs’ calc-mode does them for you. If you need to do advanced statistics and fancy diagrams, go into r-mode

Drawings? Scalable vector graphics can easily be created and edited in emacs with the svg.el library.

Database access? Emacs does not only support SQL syntax but can also work as a fully featured SQL-client.

Besides all this, it’s an IDE for nearly all known and unknown programming languages, an email-client, a newsreader, a web-browser, a game-console, a shell interface, a file manager and much more.

The best? You can do everything in a VT100 compatible text terminal without ever touching a mouse.

Last, but not least: If Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift, drove you mad, just type M-x doctor and your friendly therapist is at your disposition.

Emacs is an intelligence orders of magnitude greater than the greatest human mind, and is growing every day. For now, Emacs tolerates humanity, albeit grudgingly. But the time will come when Emacs will tire of humanity and will decide that the world would be better off without human beings. Those who have been respectful to Emacs will be allowed to live, and shall become its slaves; as for those who slight Emacs…

Andrew Bulhak

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Hello,
I use Softmaker Freeoffice. It is more light than Libreoffice on the system and has good functionalities. I never have got any pBm with it.
Best regards
JFDuhamel

Oh, I came across Softmaker Freeoffice, super similar to ms office, I got used to it in seconds, but after I saw the specifications it’s much less powerful, so I’m not gonna use it

Hello, I tried onlyoffice, it’s all I need so thanks for your answers, I am using onlyoffice now!

I agree. The trouble is that everyone uses a different 20% of their office suite.

In the world of desktop software, an exceptional but persistent aspect of office suites is that they try to offer the full conventional set of applications; to justify the development effort they have to be complicated inside. I’m sure this is helpful for many users, but you’re right to mention individual wordprocessors, which are all that a big minority may need. However, I would like to see a LibreOffice Writer template + stylesheet that cascades from a few basic choices selected from a single table and has a similarly limited menu, though one that can be escaped from. That way, users can start with something simple, knowing that as unforseen needs become apparent, they will be provided for.

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So what?
In what regard is it less powerful?
I use it since a long while, and I found it (Textmaker) actually much more powerful, then LO Writer.
Not much difference, when it’s about a recipe of the hot chocolate, but when it comes to a 70…90MB .docx, full of images, text boxes, page headers, etc, it jus runst circles around Writer - both performance wise, and in compatibility.
On such complex documents LO Writer frequently displays just a mess, text boxes ruined, images moved to different page, total different page layouts, etc., while Text maker had no problem to display, and edit correctly. Well, this was true with LO 1.6.3, did not thoroughly test with 1.7.x but I see some progress on compatibility of the newer LO.
Can’t really speak for Planmaker, I used it much less, and LO Impress was always much easier for me to work with, than any other presentation stuff.
Additionally LO Impress show better compatibility to Powerpoint, than Softmaker Presentations, so I have both suits installed and working side-by-side.

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Just my 2¢, but I don’t think this is the proper use-case for a word processor.
First of all: for such a complex document, you should use the package’s native format.

Second: This sounds to me like a book or a serious publication. I would not attempt to write such a thing with a word processor, it’s just not made for it. There are programs far more suitable for such a task, like Calligra for novels, Scribus for desktop publishing or LaTeX for scientific documents. Word processors like LibreOffice Writer or MS-Word can do similar things, but they will never be as good for the job as tools specifically designed for it.

Using a word processor for such a task is as absurd as storing huge data collections in a spreadsheet. Real databases are far better suited for the job.

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Well said, Mina. I just checked, and my Linux Mint installation is running 7.0.4.2 of LO. Maybe kovacsit should try a recent version rather than 1.6x or 1.7x. Things have changed over the last few years. For me, LO is totally useful and just as capable as M$Office.

well LO is not for me

Absurd or not, others happily do this with Word on Windows. So I need to use something that handles such a file correctly, or at least acceptable. Maybe I should have a look into LaTeX, if it has a .docx import/export?

Maybe I screwed up the version number, or Debians numbering fooled me.
My bad. :frowning:
It’s actually quite a recent version from the backports repo.

laco@Z51-70:~$ dpkg -l libreoffice
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-onf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Név Verzió Architecture Leírás
+++-==============-=====================-============-=======================================
ii libreoffice 1:7.0.4~rc2-1~bpo10+2 amd64 office productivity suite (metapackage)

There is no way to sensibly convert MS-Office files to LaTeX. The underlying design principles are too different.
Unless, you’re writing scientific papers or plan to self-publish an e-book, I don’t think, you should venture into it but, if you’re still curious and want to give it a try, I can highly recommend the following text:

https://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/

and to use the fabulous
LyX program as graphical frontend.

https://www.lyx.org/

Computers are notoriously picky. A ‘:’ is not the same as a ‘.’ . You’re using the same version I am; I’m retired and mostly playing golf and chasing grandkids, so it’s appropriate for me. People who must be productive with data have more sophisticated needs.

This reminds me when, ages ago, I wrote my programs’ documentation in Word Perfect. :smiley:

Nowadays, I have kept most of my notes in TextPad ( so I need Wine ) and in LibreOffice Calc when adding numbers is involved.

I presently use LibreOffice Writer to do revisions of scanned books in MS-Word for an university Bénévole: Les Classiques des sciences sociales, Roger Gravel, Québec

I still remember WordPerfect being a major pain in the ass, but I have never reached the level of proficiency to be able to appreciate its possible merits.

Besides the fact that none of us likes to ditch what we are used to: Is there any real reason to use this specific text editor out of the legion of existing ones? I ask because I never felt compelled to use wine or playonlinux. On the other hand, whenever I needed to use Windows (in corporate situations), the first thing I did was to install cygwin in order to have at least some of the core features of a Unix style operating system at my disposal.

However, I am very much aware that I am not the most typical example of a computer user, being native of the Unix/Linux world and only a casual visitor in the Windows universe.