When it comes to finding a suitable alternative for Microsoft Office, LibreOffice is widely considered to be one, if not the best, solution to take its place. And the best part? It also works on Linux. There are, however, a couple of obstacles in the way of transitioning to this open-source office suite. Differences in the user interface make it harder to find features if you're not used to it, file formats and cloud compatibility are a big question mark, and if you're using it on Linux, you are also sometimes confronted with visibility issues. This exploration will cover some of LibreOffice's many tools and settings that can ease your transition, not just making it look more like Microsoft Office but also behave that way.
About LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a powerful and free office suite, a successor to OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice), and was forked from the quite popular Apache OpenOffice. It represents years of development and is used by millions around the world. Its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your creativity and enhance your productivity. It comes with a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel (Calc), as well as a presentation tool for creating slideshows (Impress). The whole suite also features a vector graphics editor that kind of resembles Microsoft Visio (Draw), a math program for creating more complex mathematical formulas (Math), as well as an alternative to Microsoft Access (Base), which can also interact with some commonly used database solutions.
Key Features
- Comprehensive Suite: Includes Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).
- Cross-Platform: Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- High Compatibility: Supports a wide range of document formats, including Microsoft Office file types (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx).
- Customizable Interface: Offers multiple UI layouts, including a traditional menu-based interface and a tabbed "NotebookBar" similar to Microsoft's Ribbon.
- Extensible: Functionality can be expanded with numerous extensions and templates available online.
- Open Source: Free to download, use, and distribute, with an active community supporting its development.
Getting Started and Customization
When comparing the graphical user experience, LibreOffice's approach is a lot different from today's Microsoft solution. While Microsoft 365 nowadays heavily relies on Tapped Windows, LibreOffice still uses regular menus, which is nice if you're used to it but also kind of overwhelming if you're just switching. Many prefer the tapped view, which you should be able to select during first setup or under View > User Interface. You can also choose if you want to apply this style only to the program you're currently running or the entire Suite.
LibreOffice's appearance heavily depends on your desktop environment, especially if you're using dark mode on systems like GNOME. If you are a dark mode user, all of the icons might become white, which, depending on your monitor and current lighting situation, can be suboptimal. We can, however, change this behavior by first going into Tools > Options > LibreOffice > View and downloading the Colibre (or similar, like Elementary or Karasa Jaga) icon theme. The Colibre theme, in particular, is not only the default icon theme on the Windows version of LibreOffice but it also mimics the style of many icons from the Microsoft Office suite. Just make sure that you use the default theme for light mode and the Dark theme for dark mode, and you should be good to go. Some advise against the use of SVG-based icons, but they might work better with fractional scaling, so just try them out and see what works better for you.
Oh, and while we are in the options, if you're new to Linux and ever had to scroll through a lot of pages, then you might have already noticed that you cannot really use AutoScrolling, as the middle click on your mouse is instead used for pasting. Luckily for us, we can change this behavior right here under the Tools > Options > LibreOffice > View > Mouse settings.
Tailoring the Interface
If we take a look through each of the tabs in the tapped view, we notice that each tab does not necessarily contain all of the elements that you might expect. This does not mean that these features do not exist; you often find a lot of them hidden under the drop-down menu on the right. Let's see if we can fix that.
If you open the customization options (right-click on the tab area > Customize), then under Notebookbar, you can enable or disable elements that you might want to use. The way this works is that you can choose a Target, like the Home tab, and start to toggle the settings. The difference between the two options below is that they just further filter each section down in case you only want to edit a certain part. What is currently not possible is to rearrange the items as you like, even though it looks like you could do it, and it currently also only seems to be compatible with Writer, though this is probably still due to development. Once you are familiarized with LibreOffice and you feel comfortable moving back to the default interface, then you can customize everything in the Menus tab anyway.
For our tapped view, however, there are still ways how we can enable elements that are not natively displayed: introducing toolbars, which are on their own again customizable. You can simply use one of the templates, adjust their elements, or create your own. With a right-click on a toolbar area, you can unlock it and pin it to any edge of the screen you want. A big advantage of this is that they are persistent across the tabs, so you set them up with the tools that you often need and have access to them at any time. Anyway, this is currently the way how you add items that you don't want to search for.
Formats, Fonts, and Compatibility Settings
Let's talk about formats and fonts, especially when you're sending files to others or storing them in a cloud storage that also comes with their own online office suite. In this case, you might not want to save your file with the Open Document Format (ODF) but rather with Microsoft's default extension. Well, you of course could choose it every time you save a new file, but the faster way is to just set it as the default in the LibreOffice Options under Tools > Options > Load/Save > General. There is an option to "Always save as," and here you want to choose the Office version that is best applicable to you. For cloud storage or professional environments, this is usually the option corresponding to recent Microsoft Office versions (e.g., Word 2007-365, Excel 2007-365). This is something that you need to set in every program of the suite, by the way.
While we are here, you can also set up a timer on when a document backs itself up in case your PC or program crashes for some reason or choose to "Save AutoRecovery information every X minutes" entirely. If you set up LibreOffice for the very first time, you might also want to check the language settings under Tools > Options > Language Settings > Languages and Locales, since those determine how dates, currencies, and similar display. Normally these should be set by the system settings, but it's still best to verify, especially when you start with an already open document.
Under the Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > Basic Fonts (Western) settings, you can choose a different default font for the program as a whole. If working with other people that use Microsoft Office, it might also be a good idea to install some Microsoft fonts (like Calibri, Cambria, etc.) beforehand. Lastly, it might also be a good idea to enable the checkbox for "Add spacing between paragraphs and tables (in Word documents)" under Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > Compatibility, as LibreOffice uses a different approach to spacing, and this helps keep the document formatted when shared.
Focus on Calc (Spreadsheets)
If you choose the tapped interface in Calc, the Excel alternative, then it's again the same story with the toolbars. One thing not shown before is that you can also customize the right-click context menus if you want to. If you don't want to have some elements or change the order of them, then in Tools > Customize > Context Menus, you can. Another thing that many don't know is how to import CSV files without drag-and-dropping them. The truth is, it's very similar to Microsoft Office: accept you open the file via File > Open, and the Text Import wizard appears, instead of it being called "Import this or that". Filtering via columns works with the AutoFilter (Data > AutoFilter). You can create formulas via the Function Wizard (accessible via the `fx` icon) and, a bit more hidden, LibreOffice also features table styles under Format > Table Styles (or via the Styles sidebar), similar to how Microsoft does it.
Cloud Storage and Collaboration
You can nowadays also directly save to cloud storage. The first method depends on your distribution and desktop environment; GNOME, for example, allows connecting Google accounts or OneDrive to directly access documents via the file manager. However, LibreOffice also features some remote location options itself under File > Open Remote or Save Remote. The thing is that these don't necessarily work all that well, so your results may vary.
One thing should be said: collaborative working at the same time is currently not supported in the way modern cloud suites offer it. However, in Calc, it is already possible via an experimental setting, so we might actually get to see it improve soon.
Final Thoughts
Sure, LibreOffice is not always as powerful as Microsoft Office, especially when complex files are transferred over to someone else. However, LibreOffice can be quite powerful in itself. It technically also could run some Visual Basic macros from Microsoft products, but support is not all that great, and caution is generally advised with macros anyway since they can be used for phishing attacks.
Anyway, once you've set up your menus and toolbars, as well as adjusted your icon theme and the tapped view, LibreOffice is actually not half that bad. It's not always as polished and modern-looking, and it does require a certain workflow change as some elements are just in very different places. But overall speaking, many users are quite happy with it. If you want a cleaner but also potentially more restricting office alternative, there are, of course, many more options. But LibreOffice is one of the most powerful ones, and for someone who is just starting out or occasionally needs some Office programs, it should be more than enough.
Pros
- 👍 Completely free and open-source.
- ✅ Excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office formats.
- ✨ Highly customizable user interface and features.
- 💻 Available on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- 💪 Powerful feature set across all applications.
Cons
- 🤔 UI can feel dated or overwhelming initially compared to MS Office.
- ⚠️ Real-time collaboration features are limited/experimental.
- ❌ Perfect fidelity with complex MS Office documents isn't always guaranteed.
- 🐌 Performance can sometimes lag with very large or complex files.
- 🕸️ Built-in cloud service integration can be unreliable.
Download and Availability
LibreOffice is completely free to download and use. You can download it directly from the official website for Windows, macOS, and Linux. On many Linux distributions, it can also be easily installed directly from the distribution's package manager.
