These wonderful people are behind LibreOffice, offering a free alternative to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Remarkably, most of them contribute on a completely unpaid volunteer basis
Fucking heroes 👏
Microsoft Office is a parasite holding people hostage with extortionate subscription fees
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I can vouch for libre office. It's so much better than it was I now don't miss PowerPoint or word, and I really don't miss Microsoft
As some one who lives in Excel, IMHO Calc is 80% of the way there - and that’s no easy task! Excel has been the primary tool of capitalism for decades now, it’s one of the most polished pieces of software ever (and yes I’m aware how annoying it can be sometimes lol)
Controversial take: that missing 20% is a deal breaker for my use cases. I'm still in awe of the volunteer developer network, but Calc has fallen short of being an Excel replacement for me.
I feel you, but I always find a way to make Calc work. I might spend a day or five searching for an answer. But there is always a way.
The lack of Tables support is rough, for one.
I was just using LibreOffice Calc to build some spreadsheets with formulas and everything. I've got no complaints.
These people are heroes
I love them!! LibreOffice rules so much. I'm so happy it exists! Thank you to these heroes of FOSS. 🫡
I used to consider LibreOffice Calc an "alternative" to excel and Google sheets, because I just had so much experience using them.
So while I liked LibreOffice, it was more on an ideological level. I used the other spreadsheet software much more often at work.
But then I just "forced" myself to use Calc exclusively and pretty quickly got used to how it works, until there was no friction at all.
Didn't really think much of it until someone at work sent me a link to an online excel spreadsheet and it felt clunky as hell compared to what I was used to. I couldn't figure out how to do the simplest thing, had to look everything up, and just felt frustrated by the whole experience.
Anyway, it's funny how my old alternative became now my main. Kind of reminds me of my journey from Windows to Linux, really.
In case a dev of LibreOffice reads this: I love you. Heroes <3
Second this, of all the very worthy free software contributors out there these people are surely doing some of the most practical work for day-to-day software freedom for many users.
Bless these people. Donate to LibreOffice if you use it and can afford it.
Not to mention: This software must be as boring for most coders to work on as it is essential for all of us to have. Let's be honest it's not the sexiest kind of project.
I'm glad we have a volunteer community that can get excited about maintaining and improving office software for people around the globe. There's a rare intersection of discipline, passion, and skill at play there. :)
Thank you for making it possible to do my school work Windows-free, LibreOffice team 🙏
Wow I've never heard about LibreOffice before. This is great!
I'm honestly surprised you use lemmy, but never heard about LibreOffice. There are so many cool softwares that are probably waiting for you to find them out.
Oh if that helps, I joined Lemmy just recently about 2 weeks ago. I'm surely finding interesting and unique things on here!
welcome and it is good news that lemmy cather to everyone :)
If you want to find alternative tools i can recommend using https://alternativeto.net/ it recommend tools that are alternative to other.
you can sort by paid, free, proprietary, etc
As some tools can be quite ubiquitous and/or you can have different use case, please check different alternatives.
Whatever your need, you will be surprised how many tools exist.
a nice one is firefox instead of chrome,edge, opera or safari. It is open source, do not collect your data, is light on ressource and if you add the extension "ublock origin" you have a truly ad free web browsing experience. (adblocker do not work anymore on browser and adblock have been bought by a marketing giant)
Nobody made fun of anyone though...
Nope, but someone was one of the lucky 10,000
Salute to all the men and women fighting greed and totalitarianism!
Building alternatives can feel like hurling pebbles at goliath, but it is truly a substastial contribution that hacks at the roots of billionaire control.
Yeah, but David killed Goliath with a slingshot and a pebble
Real life heros and model citizens of the world I wanna live in.
Such a great app and great group of people. Thank you for sharing.
Never had a bad experience with this software
Nor have I. I've also not paid to use office once.
My only bad experience with this software is users moaning that it's not excel and word. And users using word/writer as a layout tool, without using the layout tools in that software: tab tab tab space space space space align left: why does nothing line up 😔
My struggle, which is admittedly my own and I just need to practice, is that my hands have reflexive memory on how to get the the end of a column, how to freeze the top row, how to sort..I just do that all by the keyboard and I haven't been successful is re-training my hands. I 100% love these people though, they should have a shrine or something
❤️
Fortunately, their work is appreciated and used around the world. I like libreoffice very much, there is no looking back.
They don't have a revenue stream?
Yes - but only if people donate. So donate!
https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
YOU can donate to them 🫵
LibreOffice is the best! It just does what it is suppose to :)
sigmas
Absolute gigachads
I like and trust them more than alternatives (and keep their software available on my systems) though I'm using OnlyOffice a little more, at least for my presentations. Technically MS PowerPoint has more features than both, but I don't really need them (and they fuck with compatibility and are resource heavy). Plus, my Linux made presentations load properly on my students' Macs PCs and ipads, as well as in browser on the LMS (Canvas).
My feelings are, LibreOffice feels more like MS Office circa mid aughts, while OnlyOffice is more like modern MS Office and Google Suite, at least as far as the ribbon menu and default themes are concerned. I'm sure I can get LibreOffice to theme just as well but the default aren't... great.
OnlyOffice is sketchy.
If you are doing presentations I would highly recommend trying none of the above.
I only use markdown or one of the presentation ready things like marp or reveal.js.
So much better and it's just plain text or html.
You can manage presentations in git, find and replace just works, they look miles better and you can even do some neat tricks like having your students connect to a webpage and follow along on their own computers.
PowerPoint was and is a bad idea for presentations.
Well... I don't really have that option because of slide sharing and whatnot, the system requires pptx format, even for professors. Technically I'm not even supposed to use non-MS software, lol.
But I think you're right. It's getting to be a headache messing with OnlyOffice w/ master slides. Libre might end up being my only option simply because of its ability to work within my pptx centric work.
While it’s still early days, you might want to take a look at EuroOffice, a OnlyOffice fork to avoid their sketchiness and supported by a great number of organizations.
Thanks, I'll take a look. First day of the semester is tomorrow so I need to get this finished, haha.
Yeah a bit too close to look into this, but good luck!
That's crazy that it's because of slide sharing, when doing it this way makes it so much easier to share!
Doesn't suprise me though, they always make the worst decisions.
Hehe, yes, that and one drive shoved down our throats because they pay for it all. I can't even get them to approve my Linux system to receive school email, have to do browser Outlook.
I'll still consider these options if I'm ever back in doing academic research and going to conferences, though.
Been using it for years. I don't do much with it, mostly using Calc, but it's great to have.
Thankyou, I shall spend some time with it. Thankyou for the information!
It is amazing to see a picture of these amazing people.
Is there any more information on when, where, why this picture was taken? Community meeting of developers/contributors probably? (If the people are ok with sharing that information)
The greatest people I'm on W10 LtSC IoT with Libre Office, Firefox and VLC.
I'm eager to move to Linux but I've been with windows since 1993. I don't know how to move on.
I know there's Linux distros that are perfect for me out there and I want to leave Windows because regular W10 and W11 are trash.
I just need a nice Linux distro where I don't have to spend any time coding to install software.. I don't want to type in code to install things but I also don't want to move to Windows 11.
Consider joining the tens of thousands of people who've moved on to Linux Mint Cinnamon in the past year.
I've used Mint since for a dozen years, and have -never- learned to compile a program. Mint's software manager will display the thousands of wares (by category) and install (and even start) them for you. The updates manager makes sure you get all you need ... when you feel like it.
P.S. I built my first computer in 1978. I use Linux by choice.
+1 on Linux Mint. Some people don't like that it is based on Ubuntu, but I think Mint is a good repo for someone moving from Windows. I help my parents to install Mint on their computer when Windows 10 reached EoL and they have not complained yet.
I would also like to add that it is a good idea to create a live boot in order to check that speakers, wifi, printers etc. works on your computer before installing it. Note that it will be slower since it is running from the USB stick.
There's LMDE (Debian Edition) for the people that doesn't like Ubuntu. 👍
Oh yeah, a live boot from a USB is a very good test ... so they can try it out before making the leap. Better still, install it on a second partition ... then they still have access to their Win install.
Brilliant, Thankyou! I shall investigate based on your comment and another comment.
Thankyou for the information!
You are really going to like Linux Mint Cinnamon then. It's basically Windows but isn't annoying or hates it's users
In my experience it's also faster - at least compared to my work laptop's W11 (upgrading was a mistake)
Kubuntu may be a good distro for you. Linux Mint is also great.
Once you download and write the image to a USB drive, you can live boot into the drive without modifying your existing Windows installation. So you can test drive it without committing to switch to it.
Most modern Linux have optional GUIs for package management — software packaged by your distro mantainers — often integrated with flathub — a website for downloading and installing distro agnostic software, with limited access to system resources, like android’s permissions — and system management.
Generally we prefer to type in "code" as it is very straightforward and faster as well. For Windows, you go to system settings, install updates, wait a while, and reboot to install updates. This only updates Windows itself and some of their software, i.e. drivers, office, etc.
For linux it depends on the distro, but for Debian/Ubuntu based ones it goes something like this in a terminal emulator:
Each line is executed independently, and roughly translating them in order of appearance:
sudomeans do the following command with administrator privileges;aptis Debian’s package manager tool;apt updateis anaptcommand that checks if there any new packages for either your system or installed software;apt upgradeis also anaptcommand to install these latest packages;flatpakis a tool to manage distro agnostic packages, commonly from flathub;flatpak updatechecks and install new versions of the installed packages.While the explanation is a bit long winded, these commands runs in seconds to a few minutes, depending on how long it has been since the last update. It might be necessary to reboot afterwards, specially if you have nvidia graphics, for example. But it updates all the software you obtained through them, without the song and dance of going to each vendor’s website or third parties. They vetoed all of them in your stead.
Mind you, while flatpak apps from flathub may have unstrusted software — which also have a limited access to the system — your distro has higher concern for safety than Windows by not making you download an random executable from a website.
I just ran
flatpak updatefor the first time. Thank you. (I had been using KDE Discover's updater.)I recommend using Debian with KDE. :)
They are my heroes!
Put the women in the front!
just being a little snarky. I appreciate all they do.
I think I downloaded open office like 20 years ago. It hasn't changed much and only just now started getting updates again.
I should probably switch to libreoffice but I'm too old and set in my ways. That and I don't really use it for much more than the most basic of word processing and spreadsheet.
It's nice to see the picture. I'm sure there are/were some pretty cool people who worked on Word and Excel, and their iWork equivalents as well. I use iWork (though I don't think Apple calls it that anymore) on my Macs and iPhone, though not very often. iWork is completely different... so you have MS Office which we all know. Then there's Open and Libre Office and those are kinda like Office '97 looking. (Not to disparage them! Not everyone likes the ribbon. I never minded it though. And if you don't like the ribbon, Office XP was kinda peak.) Well, iWork is completely alien to both of them, with most stuff being to the right of your workspace rather than above. It's weird. I can kinda dig it but I don't really like it, especially since they shoehorned the dumb Apple Intelligence into it. I have tried LibreOffice on my MacBook (and I've used it on PCs as well) and it's kinda just fine.
If I had a preference, it would actually be MS Office because I have so much experience with it, but I'll never trust Microsoft with my data again since they inexplicably wiped my entire OneDrive storage, Office files and all, with no warning. Their site shows my OneDrive as empty and the links were all clouds on my Macs (not synced to device). Microsoft kinda just said "fuck you in particular." I do very well with Office at work. I'll never use it at home again. Looking at the options that are free to me — iWork and LibreOffice — I suppose I slightly prefer Libre? I've been using Ellipsus for like a Google Docs alternative though (it's an anti-AI creative writing platform, I just really dig their mission statement).
i ditched MS Office decades ago, before that I had used Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect under DOS, went to Open Office and been on Libre office for years now. Thank you team
i just wish they would implement a proper dark mode icons. not this high contrast crap
Yeah, Same here honestly
Just the other day I was reading their RSS feed where they often post pictures of their meetups and thought the same thing! Even thought about posting something like this myself.
Maybe also because just before that I was using an unconfigured edge browser with all the tabloid media on the new tab still activated. Its full with all the latest drama and gossip from celebrities and I was like "who TF cares?!?!?". This is so much better, just humans being really cool!
Based gigachads
🫡
Microsoft gonna have this picture in the wall and start crossing them off one by one
These are the people who communities like the LinuxSucks community attacks
Every day I thank the stars that I've never had to use office software. I used Abiword for writing papers in school and you don't need Excel when you have APL instead. I've never once needed anything more than a text editor since then.
Forgive my ignorance...what's APL?
It's A Programming Language focused mainly on tables of numbers. It's like a spreadsheet but without the spreadsheet (and much slicker syntax).
Cool, sounds fun to mess with!