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[–] 381 points 1 year ago* (23 children)

https://www.libreoffice.org/ for anyone who wants microsoft to stop messing with their office apps.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I second this. There's a little bit of a learning curve on some of the functionality, but it's not bad at all. And most of the functionality is very easy to find. I moved over to Libre Office several years ago and it's been great.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Office would have a learning curve too if you hadn’t been using it since you were a child.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    This is very true. I hadn’t used Microsoft Office since 2007 and at my new workplace everyone’s using it. It’s really hard and I don’t find anything. Yesterday I was working with tables but I gave up and had IT install libreoffice instead.

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  • [–] [S] 61 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    There is also only office which has better compatibility with MSOffice file types

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    This here.

    I wish Only Office got as much fanfare as LibreOffice. The UI is much closer to Microsoft Office and it tends to have better compatibility.

    I have both installed though and use them both lol.

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  • [–] 85 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    OnlyOffice is Russian-owned, via a holding company in Singapore. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions threatened the business, they obfuscated this, but it's still Lev Bannov's product.

    The importance you attach to this is up to you, but they try quite hard to hide it.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    LibreOffice has a ribbon UI too.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    Libreoffice their latest blogpost is from the 20th of August 2025. There have been a few releases in the past few months as well.

    Openoffice their latest ( Apache Openoffice 4.1.15 ) was released almost 2 years ago ( December 2023 ).

    Libreoffice seems like a more recent, better supported tool over Openoffice which hasn't seen any updates since 2023 according to their own website.

    I'm on my phone, so I didn't search extensively. But I think that also plays a role in why there's a much larger fanbase for libreoffice rather than Openoffice.

    I've no recent experience with either so I can't comment on how well either works.

    Edit: I looked up the wrong one. My statement remains correct w.r.t. Openoffice, but they mentioned Onlyoffice which is a different product.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I believe Open Office and Only Office are different products.

    Only Office had a major release in June, 2025.

    And you are correct that Open Office last update was back in December 2023.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    openoffice is an apache project, created when oracle gave them the code and rights to the openoffice project. ibm later donated symphony to them. anyone familiar with apache knows they do things their own way, and usually slowly.

    libreoffice originated from a fork when openoffice's status under oracle was in doubt. it progresses faster than apache, as most developers also switched.

    onlyoffice is an entirely different application. decent enough, but with its own quirks. it can also be slow on lower-spec systems due to the heavy reliance on js. originally a latvian-russian project, it was reorganized (via new corporate entities in uk and sg) to hide the russian ties for 'reasons'.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    Man, wouldn't it be nice if both of our counties didn't have ridiculous propaganda and fascism so that we could just cooperate on shit like this without having to worry as much about maliciousness on a state level?

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  • [–] 180 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    I suppose this means Microsoft will not count Word doc file sizes against users' cloud storage quotas, right? Right??

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  • [–] 80 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    It'll be like Google: everything goes in, nothing comes out unless you jump through difficult hoops, price continually goes up.

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  • Getting anything out is already almost impossible. I moved sway from 3rd party cloud storage a couple years back. I had to get 500gb from onedrive and it was refusing to download at anything more than 50kb/s (my internet was significantly better than that)

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    If you're in the EU, you can apply for a GDPR request to get sent a copy of all your data in their cloud, same for iCloud. Takes about 48 hours in my experience.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    How is this served? Do they send a usb drive? Or a download link of some sort?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's a download link, on their respective dashboard you can select between the catagories you want. Like on Google you can select if you want youtube, drive, gmail, or everything at once.

    With GDPR they have 7 days to comply, and it should be available to any EU citizen even when outside of EU territory. So I'm assuming you can just change your region. Either way, takeout.google.com is where I'd go.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, i ised take out before, it took 2 weeks to download my photos, i think 8 60gb downloads. It was painful, I got hopeful that youbhad discovered a workaround.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Ah, that's unfortunate. Tbh I've been downloading 200GB there frequently and haven't had any issues.

    GDPR can also be called upon using a registered letter and they are required to deliver as well. I'm not sure but that might be a way to recieve a physical copy.

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    [–] 82 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    "Fuck you, Microsoft." -Everyone, at all times

    Even if you're not ready to come to Linux, you're definitely ready to switch to LibreOffice. I dare you to try it.

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  • [+] 12 points 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I'm unclear on the differences between OpenOffice (which I genuinely thought was retired, didn't realize it was still a thing) and LibreOffice. If it ever gives you trouble, do make the switch.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Writer and Impress should cover Word and Powerpoint perfectly. Even if your colleagues use Windows, you can still open them just fine.

    Excel though is troublesome, especially those with coded VBA or some plugins from companies. But for basic Excel? Calc can do the job ok too.

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  • [–] 81 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    tip: do not write about the revolution, short stories, hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, or your teenage angst and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.

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  • [–] 60 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    tip: Only write about the revolution, short stories about your hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, your teenage angst, and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.

    For everything else, use LibreOffice.

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    directions unclear, now I’m directing a netflix special on sexy horse guerrillas.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Ha! Exactly where I was going with that.

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  • [–] 71 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    Not to be used to train AI. We promise...

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    They'd break SO MANY international and data security laws if they tried breaking into people's OneDrive, it'd be hilarious to see the number of lawsuits they'd lose by default.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    they're probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS. besides, you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    they’re probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS

    As soon as you find proof, you have literally free money up for the taking at any court.

    you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data

    That's... not how any of this works..........

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    an obscure clause in TOS won't be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done, it could also be an "and" where you expected "or", or an ommision of a specific thing... my point being - it's always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law

    it very much is how it works though? show me a lawsuit someone lost before they got caught commiting a crime. and how would you even go about proving that your unpublished documents were used to train AI? even an entire life's work of one person is just a speck in the training data, it's impossible to definitively prove your work was stolen and used to train an AI. besides there will always be plausible deniability that the AI just made shit up that happened to look kinda like what you once wrote

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    an obscure clause in TOS won’t be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done

    That means nothing. Illegal terms can't be enforced in contracts or terms of service.

    it’s always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law

    No. Written law always takes precedence. If they spied on your data stored in OneDrive, they'd lose by default the moment the case hit the courthouse.

    As for your second paragraph: yeah, I agree. If they did that, the damage would've already been done. But it would kill the business once found out. The benefit is not worth the risk.

    For example: you're saying that they would use it to train AI, right?

    They don't train AI. They get a trained model from OpenAI.

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  • [–] 144 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    This is certainly about making sure your files are safe and definitely not about stealing your data for training AI. /s

    Don't let Murdersoft steal your data. Don't contribute to their corruption or genocide assistance.

    Step 1: https://fedoraproject.org/
    Step 2: https://www.libreoffice.org/

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Thanks, going to try out LibreOffice. Does it has same (or similar) functions as Word itself?

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's designed to be very similar. If you are already familiar with Word, you should feel right at home.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm not exactly s power user in Microsoft office, but I found using libre office to be very similar. Never had issues using it for school back in the day and I'm sure it's better now.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    My only problem is how Libre Office handles their style system. It's forced use for things like Footers, and very hard to manipulate and turn off unlike Word.

    My own way to bypass it was to replace a new document text into an old converted word text that had the correct footer pages from Word.

    I really hate page and Style guides because they always want to propagate everything through entire documents, instead of only changing things on a page by page basis. Adding things to previous pages when you change something isn't helpful.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I’ve been using it for over a decade now and have only rarely come across broken documents due to proprietary features. If you’re making docs for yourself, I’d say it’s pretty much a 100% replacement. Things can get a bit more fucky if you’re having exchanges where you edit with Libre and someone else edits with Word. But other than that, they’re pretty darn close.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    As a clueless individual, how are they assisting genocide?

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    Wow thanks for the resources! I appreciate you dropping links I had no idea this was going on. Of course Google and Amazon are involved too, could have figured as much. Appears the only way do avoid the military industrial complex is to cease using anything provided from our oligarch overlords. What an age we live in.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Working hand in hand with the Israeli government in mass surveillance and (likely) AI-generated targeting data.

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  • [–] 69 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Thank you to the skilled developers who bailed on OpenOffice when the shit stain company Oracle bought Sun, and formed LibreOffice.

    I can only hope there will always be digital freedom fighters on the side of good.

    I've donated to LibreOffice, and you should too, if you use their suite.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I love LibreOffice, but I wish there was an Android app. I've even considered learning more app development to try and help, but it's such a daunting task.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This here. Not fully featured but a decent reader and editor which we hope will improve with time. Good effort on the devs!

    LibreOffice & Open Office Document Reader | ODF https://f-droid.org/packages/at.tomtasche.reader/

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  • [–] 64 points 1 year ago
    [–] 117 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Let's say this huge breach of security and privacy is okay.

    How are Microsoft ensuring these sensitive documents are not being transferred via or stored on servers located in hostile countries with lax data laws (such as foreign nations like the USA?).

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  • [–] 82 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Microsoft has already said it doesn't matter where your data is stored, it isn't safe from the United States.

    But you can change this behaviour in settings, it's just the default for now.

    So, if you don't trust Microsoft to handle your documents, but still somehow use MS Word and OneDrive, for the moment you can still stop it from saving your Word documents to their servers.

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