Which office suite are you using and why
I try using Org-mode/Latex with pandoc,, but end up using only Office for docx and PowerPoint.
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I try using Org-mode/Latex with pandoc,, but end up using only Office for docx and PowerPoint.
I typically use libreoffice, but if I ever have the time to learn latex I’ll switch, I’ve heard nothing but good things aside from the learning curve
The learning curve is actually pretty manageable. Took me an afternoon to be good enough to create lab reports for Uni. Creating your first template takes a bit but isn't super hard. Afterwards you can reuse that and only need to tweak.
This is the Tutorial I used. For an editor I'd suggest VSCode with LaTeX Workshop. (There's also LTeX which is a great grammar and spelling checker)
I second this, haven't used the tutorial, I just learned by doing in the beginning and than took a course at Uni, which was really good and got me all the way to quickly being able to set up my own templates and quickly get a document done.
LaTeX workshop with vscode is also great, however if you're a (neo)vim user already, give https://www.github.com/lervag/vimtex a try, it's an awesome plugin and works flawlessly, especially when combined with zathura as pdf reader.
org-mode's initial goal was to make writing latex easy. It can do a lot more today, I use it for pretty much everything text related.
If you're interested in trying out Emacs, check out Doom Emacs or Spacemacs.
I just wrote a book in Latex and it's really easy. You just learn as you go. The only problem was when a publisher required a docx-document. It was possible using pandex, but my end notes were all screwed up.
It's very difficult to learn, you just need to adapt to the Latex style of writing and Latex takes care of (almost) all the formatting.
I use Markdown (very rarely LaTeX too) in Neovim, and LibreOffice for anything I can't do in Markdown.
Sometimes I'll start up the MarkdownPreview plugin I have, but typically I don't.
If I need to share it, I'll typically convert to PDF with pandoc or a random tool online if I can't get pandoc to work the way I want it.
I'd say 95% Markdown + Pandoc for when I make documents. The other 5% is LibreOffice.
When it comes time to make graphs and charts I really like wasting my time so I always try out something new (or old) to get the job done. Last time I used Pygal.
When it comes to dealing with docs from colleagues, it is all LibreOffice and Zathura.
similar here, vim + org mode plugin & emacs/pandoc to export
LibreOffice, as I've been using it from soon after it was forked from OpenOffice and I'm used to it, and I don't think it's worth it to learn how to use another office suite when the one I use works fine for everything I need to do. I had tried OnlyOffice on another computer and I was positively impressed, but not quite enough to feel I should switch; in the end I only even use a small subset of the features LO has.
Always used and will be using LibreOffice. It just works for me.
I'm using LibreOffice at the moment.
Me too. It is obnoxious as hell but it just works when you have to read and edit a doc your colleagues have sent you.
In what ways do you find it obnoxious? I find that many of my issues can be solved by heavily customizing the UI, but there are certainly some QOL features I miss from excel (not least of which are lambdas & tables).
That I think. I make most of my docs in markdown now days so if I get a word doc I haven't spent time to learn the UI. It's a me problem.
Markdown for myself, Google Docs when I'm collaborating with others, and OnlyOffice after puking a little in my mouth for having received a docx or pptx by email.
I mostly use Libre Office, and sometimes Gnome Office
LibreOffice, I came for Linux support and PDF export... and stayed for the only Office that I know how to use 😄
This is pretty much me also!
IDK if I'd describe myself as a libreoffice "power user" but trying to figure out how things work in other suites is a pain.
I'm quite happy with libreoffice.
It can be a piece of crap sometimes but less so than MS Office.
With LO I have a passionate love-hate relationship.
Same sentiments, especially with Libre Office Calc.
I love that it's got a lot of useful features, to the point that almost everything I used to do with MS Excel and Google Sheets can be done in LO Calc, but stray a bit further out and even looking for documentation can be a huge pain.
It's a combination of limited (if at all available) documentation for less-than-mainstream features, and the help forum user knee-jerk replies of “if you don't like it, go back to MS/Google,” “if you want it so badly go program it yourself”, or even various replies that can be summed up as “don't even bother asking.”
I never would ever entertain asking a question on the various LO help fora because of this.
However, I still use Libre Office since it's useful, and for my purposes, almost as good as the alternatives. It's the vocal userbase's anti-normie stance that usually fuels my hate for it.
I hear you! And both the love and the hate grow stronger over the years
LibreOffice and avoid MS trap&trash formats as much as I can
OnlyOffice coupled with a Nextcloud instance. I can't stand the dated UI of LibreOffice/OpenOffice.
there are different libreoffice UIs in the View menu fyi
@heimchen I keep easy. Just Libreoffice for everything.
Libreoffice usually, but I was a dedicated Google docs user for years and I do miss the auto-syncing since it meant I could never really lose my work but I've been trying to reduce my Google usage. I'm travelling at the moment (months long trip) so haven't been able to set up some sort of alternative system without access to all my devices.
Depends on the use case. For my own stuff I usually use LibreOffice, for docx compability I use OnlyOffice and for presentations I use Latex with TexStudio.
TexStudio is a brilliant LaTeX editor! I used it almost exclusively during my studies.
Libre Office user for over a decade, recently moved to OnlyOffice and liking it a lot so far. Seems to do better with MS formats than LibreOffice, snappy and responsive. UI is cleaner IMO.
Libre is still good though.
markdown - vimwiki for notes latex, overleaf - for research OnlyOffice - for docx and pptx
I like Libreoffice but it breaks the documents more than OnlyOffice.
and sometimes I have to double check in office365 the presentations before giving them because its always a shared computer with windows installed...
LibreOffice. Been using it for the past 14 years, and I see no reason to stop now.
When I'm working on local files: LibreOffice
When I'm collaborating: OnlyOffice
More and more I find myself using Google docs and sheets. It's nice that I can update things from my phone and easily share with people because everyone has a Google account.
If I am forced to use word documents, then Onlyoffice.
Otherwise Latex for text and presentation (beamer).
For tables I use the terminal program sc-im, which also works with excel files.
OnlyOffice, I think it has the most polished UI and the LanguageTool plugin is really handy
How did you get lnguagetool to work with onlyoffice?
I use LibreOffice. It’s pretty much the gold standard for FOSS office apps.
That being said, I tend to save most of my simpler documents as regular, old-fashioned plain text whenever possible, whenever there’s no formatting to save.
It's Google Docs for me. Even when I don't need its live collaboration features.
For my own use, I tend to go markdown for everything. Then it becomes either a blog post with hugo, or an email with markdown here (a browser and mail client extension to turn your markdown into html in a rich text field, or in an email), or a html doc.
For work, when I have no choice, I use office365. It sucks though, it's not even fully compatible with using the desktop versions of the apps (size of elements, positioning will always be slightly off)
I work mostly with texts, but if I need something office-y, I go old school: gnumeric for spreadsheets and abiword for documents
Abiword is so nice and underrated. The support for p2p collaboration in a document is nice.
Mostly Markdown too, but I wouldn't call that an "office suite". I rarely use classic office suite software. If I have to, LibreOffice and at work I had to use — surprise — M$ Office.
I’m getting into Linux which ones would guys recommend?
as the answers reflect: markdown for simple stuff (sou can convert with pandoc) and libreoffice for the more complex stuff and sheets especially (its preinstalled with most linux distros nowadays). documents of formal nature that exceed ~10 pages might work best in latex.
LibreOffice and OpenOffice are the two most popular I believe. One will usually come preinstalled on your distro (for me in Fedora it's LibreOffice.)
Edit: I have confused OpenOffice with OnlyOffice.
While I agree with LibreOffice as an option, no one should recommend OpenOffice anymore. Its just not well maintained.
Most people don't know this, but OpenOffice is pretty much dead. It hasn't been getting any real updates for quite a while. LibreOffice is pretty active and is the one you'd want to go with.
Source: check their repositories and also https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/LibreOffice-vs-OpenOffice
You could try OnlyOffice, I believe it has better compatibility with
.docxfiles in comparison to LibreOffice.The main problem for me is writing in RTL languages (right to left) I have a windows vm only for that use case
Is support for RTL languages not very good in Libreoffice?
I use LibreOffice. I was using office 365 on my laptop and I just got sick of microsoft (especially after that incident where it took them six months to give me back access to my outlook account essentially rendering many services on my old PC useless) so I started looking up alternitives to Word.
My family had been using KingSoft which is a hot buggy mess so I chose LibreOffice instead. It was one of the first open source apps I chose after leaving Microsoft and I haven't looked back. If I had to pick a problem it's that 365 was way better at correcting mispelled words but other than I love LibreOffice!
I use Rstudio with Quarto (really nice) and libreoffice
Are any office suites as good as MS Office for referencing and citations? One of the things that keeps my wife stuck on windows/macOS is the need for a good Office suite for university
Using libreoffice+zotero here. Works awesomely.
Mostly LibreOffice, although sometimes also Google Docs (for Collab).
Because LibreOffice is available as the default office suite on most Linux distributions.
At home a combination of Emacs with org-mode and iWorks, I use the icloud version on Linux. I have an annyoing issue with LibreOffice and that is why I have stopped using it. The issue is that sometimes (often) the last five lines of the document is not saved.
I personally have found SoftMaker's TextMaker to be best word processor, with a backup/fallback being Libre Office. It's got a great UI, good features, and overall is just a good experience. Honestly, the whole office suite is quite good. I definitely like it better than WPS. It's also nice that you can just purchase a one-time license and have support for 3 years, for a fairly reasonable price, tbh. Yearly subscriptions are also available if you prefer that route.
There is a free (as in beer) version, called FreeOffice you can try. It's what convinced me the full version was worth it. My backup is LibreOffice, and while some years ago the difference was stark, LibreOffice has come a long way in terms of support and feature set. So it's definitely come a long way.
I would advise you to consider switching to LibreOffice from Open Office, if nothing else though. Open Office has not received a major update release in close to a decade now, and LibreOffice is truly the successor to it, as it's actually forked from it.
Latex on VSCode for personal things or otherwise Overleaf for collab. Otherwise default to google docs/Librr Office
I was using LibreOffice on everything but for some unknown reason it just flat out stopped working on my machine so I installed OnlyOffice and honestly I much prefer it.
What makes you prefer OnlyOffice over LibreOffice? I like how OnlyOffice seems to decrease possible format errors, so I tend to open docs in it after putting them together in Libre.
The main thing for me is that it actually works still :P
Other than that I think I've just got so accustomed to the MS Office ribbon interface now that I start to get lost in the interface a little (95% of the time I use office type products it is at work where we don't have a choice - at home I mostly just use markdown for my own notes and documents).
LO user here, but agreed, the OO UI is much nicer out of the box.
I don't know if it counts but I've been using pandoc for the entirety of my college life so far which includes creating presentations and writing papers. For collaboration with other students, we would usually use Google Docs. It's pretty much the standard nowadays.
99.9% of customers use Microsoft Office, so I have QEMU windows for this purpose.
For own work/at home I find I mostly get by with textfiles/markdown and odd LibreOffice spreadsheet.
Why QEMU? I've found it's performance an compatibility quite lacking compared to VirtualBox, or since you're using it anyway to run nonfree software: commercial products like VMware Player/Workstation
If setup correctly qemu/kvm should have much better performance since it fully supports kernel level virtualization
LibreOffice and Onlyoffice on my Nextcloud server
Office 2021 bought outright. Was using office 2010 until recently as it kept having images disappear when scrolling etc.
Google sheets for some work stuff.
OnlyOffice is the prettiest and most MS Office like, Libre seems the most widely compatible (RTL isn't really supported on onlyoffice for example)
I was using Only Office for compatibility. Switched to WPS, it feels a little bit more compatible to me. I've tried opening my docs in Microsoft 365 and everything was perfectly aligned . Encountered some problems when using text boxes, but the blame's on me for that one
Locally I use LibreOffice, but I mostly spend time online using Collabora on my Nextcloud instance, and it works for the stuff I need.
Mostly just markdown for notes and logs and stuff. For spreadsheets libreoffice and collabora (selfhosted). Sometimes google docs, but only when other people use it and I need to work with them.
I hardly ever use any Office. Docs and PowerPoint are legacy from typewriter age. I use wikis or git markdown in git repos. But if i need to use an office suite, it is google.
Generally Libre Office but I'm trying out markdown with lowdown as my translator. I'm not impressed with it to say the least and niether groff nor latex are something I can put a lot of time into. Either way, groff is a bit archaic but I prefer it to latex's syntax (yes I know Rmarkdown is a thing).
I recently switched to only office. I.get a lot of .docx files cos of uni, and I found only office to have the least amount of bugs. Most of the files I got were broken in libreoffice due to reasons I wish I could understand. For note taking I just simply use neovim and write in a markdown file. For presentations I do the same and use marp to generate the slides from my markdown.
For proper work, MS Office. For everything else: Markdown, latex and plain text. LibreOffice for most personal stuff
Honestly, I rarely use office suites these days. Mostly either wiki pages or Notion. I still use Google Docs for collaboration sometimes and LibreOffice for the rare docx or odt.
MS Office at work because they pay for it and it's our platform for almost everything. LibreOffice at home and for other personal stuff.
Mostly only need a spreadsheet. I will use anything at my disposal, but mostly Calc (LibreOffice).
Most of my text editing is markdown or actual code, so that is just VSCode or my IDE.
Markdown with neovim for gits.
LibreOffice for spreadsheets and presentations.
LaTeX for publications and moderncv template for resume.
Etherpad for collaboration.
I've had a hell of a bad time using Libre for presentations. Has it gotten better lately?
whatever comes with the distro I am using at that moment, for me personally it doesn't matter much
google docs and wps office.
Forgive me since I'm not a hardcore opensource user.
Obsidian for notes, Libre Office and sometimes (please don't punch me) Google Docs/Sheets. Oh and LaTeX with nvim for docs that need to look real nice.
LibreOffice, since I'm a light user and it's usually available.
OnlyOffice. FOSS, great MS compatibility, more modern than LibreOffice, local apps and runs in web with Nextcloud with great document collaboration options.
Usually OnlyOffice though I keep LibreOffice installed as a backup as sometimes I've had weird compatibility issues with the former (very few and far between but still)
WPS Office for editing office files. LaTeX for writing articles. Emacs for everything else.