https://www.libreoffice.org/ for anyone who wants microsoft to stop messing with their office apps.
There is also only office which has better compatibility with MSOffice file types
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.
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.
Mm knowing that makes me never want to go anywhere near OnlyOffice now, oof.
LibreOffice has a ribbon UI too.
TIL! Thank you, kind stranger!
Gerne!
That it does :)
LibreOffice is awesome too. No complaints really.
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.
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.
You are correct. I misread ( or my brain farted ) and looked up the wrong one.
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.
Office would have a learning curve too if you hadn’t been using it since you were a child.
The breaking point for me was when I was showered with Copilot+ pop-ups on every single hover. Let me fucking copy/cut/paste/format in peace. I never asked for any of this, and neither did any user of any level of expertise.
Switched to OnlyOffice as it felt to perfectly answer my needs. There are still some quirks with non-UTF-8 documents, but you know what, I’d rather iron those issues out than be shoved a product I didn’t request nor need at every single interaction I have.
I highly encourage anyone that hasn’t done already to explore alternatives to the M*crosoft Suite, if they haven’t done it by now. Every update is just the worst form of enshittification known to humankind. Can’t wait to have an intrusive slop AI agent tell me how to do my Maths in the Calculator app next.
Let apps be just apps again 🗣️🗣️📢
Apps? It’s programs and applications!
Jesus christ. So glad I ditched MS. It’s like getting out of a cult - once you see it looking in from the outside, you finally realize how terrible it is.
Some executive noticed that they can’t sell you larger cloud storage if you haven’t used it up.
Then someone on the office copilot team said they wished they had access to more comprehensive data about what people write with office apps and the rest is history.
At this point that’s almost like ransomware.
At this point, why even have desktop apps at all?
Teams and Outlook are basically busy glorified web browsers that load the online version… Now word is going to send your shit to the cloud whether you like it or not?
Google docs does this, but they don’t have a desktop app to deceive you with. You create the doc, and edit it where it is, on the cloud, using a web interface that’s vaguely “word”-like.
The only people this will “help” is all the inept business people that can’t figure out where to put their data so it’s not lost. There’s lots of those.
Why I use libreoffice.
I would love to switch to LibreOffice (or similar) but I haven’t been able to find a way to get tables to work in the same way they do in Excel, and that’s a deal breaker for me. None of the suggested approaches come close to being able to select a range, press ctrl+t and immediately be able to filter/sort/lookup using column names from anywhere in the document. I use that feature dozens of times a day, and so does everyone in my circles that deals with financial data.
You can purchase the Microsoft apps , word, excel, PowerPoint, as a package that you own. There are no upgrades. You own them.
I am in the process of moving to Linux and Libreoffice at the moment. I’m working at getting myself off of Onedrive.
Once complete I will start the process of getting off Google. I’ve been using Proton for years and I am going to remove any other online support.
I think you name the range, and then you can do the same using ctrl+shit+L
I may not remember right, but I haves used calc and excel interchangeably since it was open office. Some things in excel drive me up the wall, some things in calc do to.
Either way, the best thing I found was get the data out of spread sheets and into something that can work with it better. Like sql or pandas.
But I get that for financial work, it is a staple. Which frightens me to no end.
I suppose this means Microsoft will not count Word doc file sizes against users’ cloud storage quotas, right? Right??
It’ll be like Google: everything goes in, nothing comes out unless you jump through difficult hoops, price continually goes up.
Not to be used to train AI. We promise…
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.
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
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…
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
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.
LLM’s out here running wild. How Rude.Maybe I should switch to Linux again.
This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?
The most important choice from the beginner is not even the distro, but what window manager to use, that will be your first interface and you need to be comfortable with it first.
Before doing anything you can try out different Linux Distros at Distrosea
Just do mint. If you don’t like it, try another. I went mint and it felt comfortable and worked so I’m happy with it. Might try Debian next time for more stability and less cutting edge.
Remember that most major distros now offer live ISOs, which means you can easily try them out before committing to an install.
Yes. You may distro hop eventually, but you will not go wrong starting there from Windows.
I stuck with it. I am OK that somebody else did a really nice configuration out of the box for me. It’s still an open Linux system. I make embedded computers do the right thing all day at work, and at home I’ve been getting more outside work done than ever. So any projects like setting up an Arch install to learn more about linux will at minimum have to wait for winter.
Having switched many relatives to Linux recently too, Mint will be your best jumping off point for a familiar feel and pain free experience as someone new to Linux. If you love that and find yourself wanting more, then the world is your oyster! I started on Mint and ultimately settled on Fedora Plasma after trying out a half dozen different options.
I don’t want to type stuff into a command line. Like ever. If this is possible then I’m in.
Haven’t had a need to open one the entire time I’ve been on the OS! Other than for my own development needs, but that’s my own use case and nothing to do with operating the OS as a user.
If you mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud by default, you need to modify the default setting
…or just use some other app for your private documents and Word only for work-related stuff or such. I use Word/Office at work and have absolutely no issue with all the documentation being saved in the cloud. But for private stuff I would have to think twice if I want this.
I switched to OnlyOffice for my work files. I have had no compatibility issues with my coworkers
This made my blood boil, and then I remembered I switched to Linux a month ago… all good.
No, I don’t think they will. LibreOffice
Libre office does the job for me! Auto save on cloud sucks. At least you can turn it off! For now.
Auto save on cloud sucks
Why?
Because I do not want Microsoft to have access to all my documents.
As if windows does not send telemetry
Don’t use Windows either.
Telemetry ≠ Uploading whole documents Which does not mean I defend Windows telemetry but it’s quite different
Comes from a person who hasn’t written telemetry. It’s either useless or contains private information
Private information doesn’t necessarily mean “entire contents of all word documents I have ever created”
because your phone/laptop doesn’t have a global wi-fi connection, and you might want to open a document pause for dramatic effect outside of your home or work!
I’ve yet to see a cloud storage solution that doesn’t have offline-storage.
Like… WTF is going on? This is the Technology community, and yet you people come here and comment like you’ve only dealt with computers in the 90s…
The file is saved locally, then - as soon as there’s a network connection - gets uploaded to the Cloud and remains in both locations. You can access it from both “ends” - if you edit it in the Cloud or on a different device, the changes get sync’d down, etc.
i’ve seen my friends who never changed a setting in their life struggle with not being able to access their files when their internet died. how default settings work i do not know exactly myself, i don’t use cloud saving
There are only two possibilities here: either they were trying to access these files offline on a different device, or they had their storage completely full.
In the latter case OneDrive will kick out the oldest files to Online Only, so that you still have space to save newer stuff locally.
Oh, I guess there’s a third option - they were using some obscure third party cloud storage. Something that’s not Filen, OneDrive or DropBox.
