this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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LibreOffice is starting to look nice! How an office suite looks shouldn't matter, but... it does. I have decades of experience with Word and Excel, and while I don't love them, they are kinda the standard against which I compare others. Before (last time I looked, a few years ago maybe) LO looked like Office 95. Trash. The program was okay, but it irked me it was an all or nothing affair, like you had the LO core and you only saved a few KB by ditching one of the apps in the bundle. These days, that is less of an issue — and LO looks more like Office XP. It's a good look, especially for Ribbon haters. (I quite like the Ribbon, but I'm also nostalgic for the time before it, so I could take or leave it.)
I'm on a Mac now and we have our own office suite (iWork) and that's free, private, and it can read/write docx/xlsx files (newer Office files) pretty well. We use Microsoft 365 at work, and I have no problems importing anything made on that to the iWork apps (Pages, Numbers), and/or exporting files from them to the Microsoft formats and using them at work.
I don't think any spreadsheet program is quite as good as Excel, though. And I really don't do number crunching with it, I use it more to make forms. What I really like in Microsoft's suite is Publisher, and Apple doesn't have an equivalent of that. Not sure if Libre does. I think the other suites want their word processor to do double duty as a publisher, but none of them are quite there IMO. But as far as Word goes? Yeah, I'll swap that out with Libre Writer or iWork Pages (or even Google Docs if I weren't concerned with privacy) in a heartbeat. Word is nothing special.
I’ll prolly go with libre then since they have the best options that are private. And i have a PC so those Mac options won’t work for me.