Pop!_OS (Linux)

If you need collaborative editing then Google's office suite is unmatched. Otherwise LibreOffice is perfectly fine as an alternative to keep your personal data off the cloud.

I used OpenOffice, and later LibreOffice, for all of my assignments in grade school and college. If you know how to use one office suite then you essentially already know how to use them all. There are some guides that can help you find certain features in the menus.

Compatibility-wise, if you intend to share documents across systems that may also require editing the documents, avoid saving documents in the Microsoft OOXML formats; use the Open Document Formats instead. You may also want to embed the fonts used in the document in case the person who opens the document doesn't have the same fonts. As a good portion of document layout issues are caused by missing fonts being replaced by substitutes that have different character heights and widths.

Finalized read-only versions of your document should be exported as PDFs. LibreOffice does have the option of generating a hybrid PDF that contains the original ODF source embedded in it. Which you can use to avoid having to maintain two separate files — the rendered PDF and original ODF file.

Although I would recommend Scribus over LibreOffice Draw because it's much easier to snap elements to a precise grid for perfect precision with a printer.

I use LibreOffice! Calc, Draw, and Writer are very user friendly once you get used to where the tools are. Impress is a pretty good replacement for Powerpoint: the stock graphics leave a lot to be desired--but that's a simple fix with a good stock image service. About the only thing LO doesn't do is notes, but I'd check out Xournal++ if you were looking for a way to replace OneNote. Plus, LibreOffice doesn't push OneDrive down your throat. It's been a win-win for me.

Another thing to consider if you really like typesetting is to learn LaTeX: it's a slightly steep learning curve(especially for advanced topics), but it'll do things that your typical WYSIWYG word-processing suite couldn't dream of doing. Plus there are a lot of templates available that you can adapt for your purposes.

I do. I'm never going to pay for Microsoft Office. No need. Libre does fine.

I've been using it for years for all personal office suite uses.

Along with GIMP for photo editing

Yes. I've been using it since the old OpenOffice days. It works well, it's easy to learn, it's well supported, and it's free.

I use nothing else, unless my employer forces me to use MS office, offline. No online documents here, you never know when they sell your data...

I use it for pretty much everything that I would use Microsoft Word for. Essays, signs, résumés, legal documents... lots of uses.

I use libreoffice, draw, and calc.

I lost all my work to Melissa in 1999 and never used MS office again.

For me, yes, and not just for personal or academic use. I've created and editted countless business documents with it. I've gotten at least four jobs with the resume I wrote with it.

I use collabora, which is essentially an online webUI implementation of libreoffice that can integrate with nextcloud, which I self-host.

All the benefits of an online office suite, all on my own hardware.

I use OnlyOffice. Mainly for the far superior MS office compatibility. Occasionally I'll use LibreOffice for the extra features not available in OnlyOffice.

I have been using it forever. I love it, and usually install it for friends and family members. Drive is fine, but they are indexing and reading your data, and I prefer to own my software.

I have it deployed at work for my 55 users instead of getting Microsoft Office licenses for all of them. They are not sophisticated users and it suits their needs. I probably field a few more questions for it than MS Office but they would call about that too since they think I am Google.

I personally think that Calc does a better job handling various CSV files than Excel.

I use Calc all the time for work. A lot of our clients send in xlsx files and I can open them and get the information out of them easily. Sometimes I need to build or modify CSV files. It's a powerhouse for that.

I stylized my (for print) resume with Writer. Unless I'm working collaboratively I use writer for any documents to be printed. Any docs that aren't destined for the press are just markdown.

LibreOffice is very appreciated and I'm glad it's a standard on most distros.

If I had to choose only one program it would be OnlyOffice. I like LibreOffice Writer okay but Calc can’t handle my .csv files as they are too big while OnlyOffice does fine with even my largest of datasets.

I use it and it works just fine for my needs. I wouldn't say I'm a heavy user though but it does everything I need it to do and it does it well.

Nothing to learn it's a doddle to use, My 76 year old mother was quite happily using it occasionally on linux box up until she broke her neck two weeks ago - really (4 vertebrae).

Well, I have a license for MS Office from work that I have never actually installed, because Libre Office is just much simpler to deal with. I'm sure at some point I will need it, but since WFH started there has been no such time.

Honestly, I have no idea how people can stand MS Word. It's a complete piece of shit that barely works. If you want it for a text editor, you will have a much better experience with any other suite. But Excel is good, and Power Point does that thing it does quite well (if that's a good thing, it's up to opinion). Those are harder to replace.

If you find yourself not able to commit to LibreOffice you can always try OnlyOffice. For people that are used to the Microsoft products, those are quite easy and samey feeling replacement's.

Like everything else it depends on what you're trying to do.

Bugs and operational issues aside a document written in Libra office is not going to be pixel compatible with the word doc. In many cases, The formatting can be pretty far off.

But the same goes for Google docs although they make a pretty solid attempt to make them close they're still not pixel perfect.

If your output is a printer or a PDF I don't really think it matters what you use they're all serviceable within reason.

If you're working with someone on grants or trying to find a job and need to give them an editable document for some reason It's probably best to use Microsoft word.

Not having constant internet access, LibreOffice is a valuable tool to me. I kind of dread the day when the development of fundamental desktop applications assumes a constant internet connection.

Yes, I've used it for years both privately and on business machines.

Used LIbreOffice throughout college. I use it when I need to, though I don't use any office productivity apps beyond a spreadsheet these days. When I DO need something like that, I Just use the LibreOffice integrated into Nextcloud.

I sure do. On everything.

Much of my work is collaborative document creation. I'd love to use LibreOffice but try as I might, I can't work out how to connect it to corporate SharePoint sites etc.

Working with MS Word on anything but trivial documents is miserable. So many bugs and weirdnesses. How is it even possible for Word to let its documents become sour using its own file format!

I say "sour" because the documents are still accessible, so not fully corrupted... but over time, weirdnesses creep in such as tables losing their positioning data, cross-references breaking for no reason etc.

I used to use it for all my office needs, then Google docs got really good!

I think owncloud/nextcloud use libreoffice code for their collaborative office suites behind the scenes.

Used it extensively while i was doing a degree, zotero is just far superior to word's inbuilt reference manager.

Been using it (or OpenOffice) since I was in high school. So probably since shortly after OpenOffice first released in 2002. Then in college I would have switched over to LibreOffice once it forked off in like 2010 or 2011, whichever it was.

I use it even in the once a month time I have to touch Windows, chief.

LibreOffice is eons better than any bullshit microsoft product

I use LibreOffice to fill out important documents and taxes. I don't trust google, or myself for that matter, to hold that kind of data securely in the cloud without encryption.

I use on Windows, bc It has regex, a huge thing for me.

I use it even on windows. I don't think it is good, one of annoyance is to open a document and discover a photo is out of place (even in odf). but there is just no alternative.

Fortunately, for most of my serious writing, I use latex.

I juggle between whatever office suite is installed at the time. I’ve found that they’re all pretty much the same. If you know one, the rest are virtually the same.

I use it. It's rare, because I tend to use emacs+org-mode for private documents, or one of various other formats for interchange, but when I need to work with Microsoft Word or Excel documents, I use it.

Also, abiword theoretically is a lighter-weight editor for RTF documents, but in past years, I've found it to be pretty unstable, so I tend to use LibreOffice to view RTF documents.

I do, on Windows (boo-womp). It really does the job well, but I need some more time to get used to it.

I use it, I also hate it with a passion. I also hate Microsoft Office, its a little better but not worth installing and registering.

Nowadays if I need to write something I use either plain text, Markdown or LaTeX depending on what I'm doing. For presentations I use LaTeX, Draw.io or Google Slides. For spreadsheets I haven't found anything decent yet so I end up using Calc.

Anyways, the Google alternatives are decent to be honest, I just prefer to avoid Google, otherwise I would use Docs, Slides and whatever their spreadsheet app is called.

I do a lot of work in LibreOffice Calc these days - I use it to outline text documents as well as make computations that I can revise. It doesn't need to have tons of features to do what I want it to do, but if you dig into it, it can do some pretty powerful stuff.

Draw is also just fine for making meme text.

I used OpenOffice and then LibreOffice all the way through college. However in the past couple years I moved to a combination of Office 365 and VSCode because I used the OneDrive cloud storage which comes at a pretty solid discount.