Best free alternatives to Microsoft Office

LibreOffice for everything but Outlook.
 
backstreetboy said:
Ooenoffice is dying. Not sure why it's included here? Google docs and Gmail is good enough for me.
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There's Oracles and apache versions of openoffice. One is dead, but the other one is still some what active, although most devs have moved on to libre.
 
Very impressed with WPS - for me closest to the real deal - have installed it on couple of NGO systems and no problems as far as formats and behaviour is concerned
Ad supported, but non intrusive
 
Oh and Google docs, it will surpass office soon
 
I love articles by Jamie. He's an asset to MyBroadband.
 
LaTeX, for those who need more features than what MS Word provides.
 
ajan said:
There's Oracles and apache versions of openoffice. One is dead, but the other one is still some what active, although most devs have moved on to libre.
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saor said:
Because if it wasn't everyone would be pointing out that it's missing. A lot of people still use it.
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On Wiki it states
Development status Moribund
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Libre is the best of the free ones. Such a shame most people diss it because of it's looks.

In the past I used/try WPS(Kingsoft), it was limited. I couldn't edit or create a MS document, without buying it. Seems that changed now, I downloaded and tested it again, and I now can do that all. Just have to wait 5 seconds for an ad to skip.
 
Toss up between Libre and Google Docs. Comparable features really. Both very close to Microsoft.
I tend to switch between them randomly.
(One thing Libre has which is better than anyone else is support for mulitple scripting languages, including Python).

Edit:
To break it down in my experience:
Spreadsheets: Excel > Goolge > Libre
Word docs: Libre > Word / Google
Other: Who cares, I guess Powerpoint is better for presentations(offline), if your presentation machine is connected to the Internet, there are a host of online presentation tools which make PPT look rubbish.
 
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Having been out of a job for the last 7 months, I did some work for a client in Zimbabwe. (I did get paid.) By that time, the free trial MS Office license had already expired and I didn't have a Windows license either. The first draft of my report was done on Google Docs on an old laptop under Xubuntu. When I realised that there isn't support for table captions (there is for Figure.captions), I switched to LyX, having used LaTeX at Varsity in 2000. The double quotes didn't work as expected, but after much reading of manuals and online forums, I figuredon't out that my keyboard layout was wrong and gave umlauts when typing double quotes.Then the client wanted a Word version, so I converted it to HTML.
 
The thing with WPS Office is:

After printing a number of times -in their Word equivalent- it starts putting watermarks on the printout.
That said, not sure if it's changed, but this was the case beginning of 2016 still.

I put it on a few new laptops for this place I was contracting at and when it hit "the number" it started with the watermark thing.
I was totally embarrassed. I hardly printed anything, so I wasn't aware of this "feature", having already used the software for a few years. (The only way to get rid of it was to pay.)

I promptly uninstalled it and installed Libre Office...as far as I know, they haven't looked back.

Not sure if this has changed in the meantime, but yeah...I rather recommend Libre Office these days.
 
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