Interest in LibreOffice, the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, is on the rise, with weekly downloads of its software package close to 1 million a week. That’s the highest download number since 2023.
“We estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but it’s important to note that we respect users’ privacy and don’t track them, so we can’t say for sure,” said Mike Saunders, an open-source advocate and a deputy to the board of directors at The Document Foundation.
LibreOffice users typically want a straightforward interface, Saunders said. “They don’t want subscriptions, and they don’t want AI being ‘helpful’ by poking its nose into their work — it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,” he said.
There are genuine use cases for generative AI tools, but many users prefer to opt-in to it and choose when and where to enable it. “We have zero plans to put AI into LibreOffice. But we understand the value of some AI tools and are encouraging developers to create … extensions that use AI in a responsible way,” Saunders said.
European countries should adopt linux and these alternatives instead of paying for windows and Microsoft. Much more private too.
and also its not american! linux is great! but imagine iwth more investment and programs need to make the apps beter compitable with linux! linux will be way better
I have a job that involves working with spreadsheets. I have Librecalc at home and both Libre and MSOffice at work. I have also had a college course about using Excel specifically. Both really can do mostly the same things but because MS does everything in a specific (backwards) way, people trained on MS who are not otherwise “computer people” can’t cope with needing to unlearn and relearn. So the end result is paraprofessionals are locked in.
I really enjoyed spreadsheets before becoming a programmer (I still enjoy them, I just spend less time on them) and basically self taught over the years using Google Sheets.
There are several really useful functions on sheets that simply do not exist in Excel, and there are others that work almost the same but not quite. Having to use Excel drives me insane sometimes because of how clunky it feels.
By contrast, using LibreCalc feels kinda how you’d expect an open source Google Sheets to feel? It’s slightly clunkier, but it gets the job done and generally feels better to use than Excel
I’ve gone full circle
Loved sheets, then hated them because we should just use a DB
Now I do stuff in sheets with a tab explaining how I got the data because I can email it to someone and in 4 months it still answers their questions.
I used sheets because it was portable and flexible, but now I’d almost always just use a db instead.
My main use for excel now is “I need to send data to someone who isn’t a programmer” and doing json > CSV conversions to see if my 3000 rows of data from a 3rd party have all the necessary bits.
I guess it depends, I can make a pivot table in like 30 seconds, which is faster than setting up and loading data into a notebook.
I managed to get my father in law to fully switch to libreoffice, which is in itself a great achievement, as he’s almost 70 and he used to be an msoffice user for most of his adult professional life.
Libreoffice is just great and Europe should start backing and using more open source, non greedy corporate backed projects.
Hi, I hope you don’t mind me asking how you achieved this, my father is 79 and has Parkinsons with hearing problems, he’s deaf in one ear and partially in other ear, so he has personality issues, really can be stubborn and difficult to deal with, been having trouble getting him away from Microsoft products like Windows or Office, any ideas or advice be really helpful and appreciated, ty :o)
I mean, I’m not the person you asked for tips, but I wanted to drop my two cents.
If he has many health issues, asking him to switch software at his age will be challenging, and requires a lot of patience. You could start wanting to show him with excitement, like, showing how cool it can be to try out something new. He might get easily overwhelmed if things work differently than what he’s used to, so try to guide him in that.
but yeah, be very patient with him. I’m sure he’s got a lot on his plate already.
Just keep making sure he’s getting the medical treatment he needs.
I wish your family the best!
Well, I guess there is no universal answer and it obviously can’t be some generic method of achieving this,but what I did was to explain in detail how MsOffice is basically just a standard because people made it so out of convenience and lack of true alternatives and it’s not cheap, plus whatever is made freely available by a corporation means it’s actually you paying with your data for it.
It’s a process and you’d have to convince him to at least allow you to show them side by side or explain how it’s always up to date and you don’t have to throw money at it every x years just because it’s called MsOffice202x, because the benefits of upgrading are not worth the money.
It ain’t easy, I know… but I am also providing support myself when requested, which can become a headache fast, especially with “difficult” people.
FOSS software will win eventually. It may take time, but if good FOSS software is being built by enthusiasts then a time will come where proprietary software fucks up. And when it does, FOSS is ready to take it’s place. And as soon as FOSS has become a standard in some field, why would there ever be a need to go back to proprietary?
Besides the jank, you can set up libreoffice inside a docker container and server it over https. There you now have cheap-ass MS365.
There’s also a network version of LO.
Microsoft Office is adding in AI? Spreadsheets can take a lot of work to create, I can just imaging an AI tool going in the messing one little thing up, and it being near impossible to find the error. Or not even know your calculations aren’t being done the way you want.
Excel is maybe the one place I can see AI being useful because lots of people can describe what they want a spreadsheet to do but not actually do it.
I just wouldn’t trust it to do it right
Which means you have to check each and every formula and we all now how difficult it is to read and understand excel formulas we didn’t write ourselves…
I find the ones I write myself hard enough to parse after 15 minutes of writing them.
Exactly.
I can just imaging an AI tool going in the messing one little thing up, and it being near impossible to find the error.
It doesn’t put formulas into the cells. It will write the formula for you, but you have to put it in yourself.
Also, there’s versioning in Office, so your spreadsheet blowing up for whatever reason isn’t a problem at all - just roll back to the previous version of the file.
I just find it better, to do a little research on formulas, and figuring it out yourself. You’ll become better at spreadsheets. I’d have to try it though, it would depend on the actual implementation of it.
You’ll become better at spreadsheets
Great! Thing is: a day only has 24 hours and right now I need to get better at managing IT infrastructure and business processes, not spreadshets.
If you have the time to research Excel - go for it! Absolutely nobody is forcing you to use Copilot.
I’m not jazzed about AI in document editors and spreadsheet software because I’m dyslexic enough that I have trouble finding some big errors.
Copilot can design a table, and even fill out some data, but it won’t input any formulas. It will write them for you and tell you where to put them, but you have to copy-paste them on your own.
Also, with versioning, even if it did and caused a problem, you could always just roll back to a previous version of the file. Not really an issue.
Hopefully more of us make donations. Free is good, but it’s nice to contribute even small amounts to your well used FOSS apps
See it wasn’t that hard:
- Common sense ? ⛔ IDGAF
- Freedom ? ⛔ IDGAF
- Privacy ? ⛔ IDGAF
- Subscription ? ✅ Let’s crack this software or find something free instead
LibreCalc and python for the win! I just love from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, import json, import re, import urllib.request.
My biggest pet peeve is since it’s a suite rather than separate programs, there’s only one path for saving files that’s saved. So you can’t have Writer save to a different location from Calc automatically.
As someone with a lot of files and folders, and a hatred of having to click around too much, this annoys the shit out of me. But I don’t think there’s any way around it because of how the program was created. It’s literally the one thing keeping me from switching.
Do you pin favorites? If you don’t, maybe that could help
You can request features on their website! It’s called enhancement request, go and contribute :)
Obligatory comment that endorses pirating software. We need to make sure this stereotype about Lemmy remains accurate.
I like LibreOffice, but I prefer Onlyoffice.
Microsoft is going to make the S, E, A, R, and . characters subscription only for $1.99 / month.
So we’ll have to go to libre office to spell arse?
Correct, you can call Microsoft arse and any variant thereof for free on LibreOffice.
Pandas killed VBA for me that was about the only reason I had to use an ms office suite
It’s like this meme:
Alternative to Photoshop: Cracked Photoshop Alternative to Office: cracked office
XD
