Anyone use LibreOffice much? Is it just me or is it shocking?

[d000hg]

The only 'Office' stuff I typically need to do on my own PC is write invoices or mock up a quick spreadsheet and I never bothered getting an Office license as Libre is fine.

Yesterday I wanted to throw together a quick letter including photos and bits of text for a surveyor... good Lord is was torturous. Adding photos I could not properly control text flow, sometimes I literally couldn't get the cursor to go after the photo, It was like using Word back in the 90s and this was literally typing a line of text, pasting images from the clipboard.

I can forgive Libre it's clunky interface but I thought the fundamental software was supposed to be pretty decent (the spreadsheet always seems nice). Again if I was editing a Word doc I might understand issues but this was a blank doc with no styles or anything. I bet Wordpad could've done a better job, or google docs!

Was I unlucky or is it actually this terrible?

[Paralytic]

PEBUAK?

[d000hg]

PEBUAK?

No idea what that means. Seems like silly acronyms might be best reserved for the non-professional sections of CUK?

[Paralytic]

No idea what that means. Seems like silly acronyms might be best reserved for the non-professional sections of CUK?

LibreOffice is a dog, but it can be made to work - it just needs a little bit more effort/time than the MS and Apple equivalents.

[d000hg]

LibreOffice is a dog, but it can be made to work - it just needs a little bit more effort/time than the MS and Apple equivalents.

I used it years back and have always quite liked it but this just seemed ridiculous not to be able to handle such a basic use case. I know it's a really hard thing to do well - Word sucked at it for years - but after this long I just figured it surely would do all the normal things without any issues. The amount of work that's gone into it must be incredible.

I probably should just fork out for Office.

[Lance]

I probably should just fork out for Office.

MS Action Pack is £350 a year. You get 5 x licenses of O365 E3, and a bunch of server software and Windows licenses.
Also £75 a month Azure credits.
No brainer to my mind.

[ladymuck]

MS Action Pack is £350 a year. You get 5 x licenses of O365 E3, and a bunch of server software and Windows licenses.
Also £75 a month Azure credits.
No brainer to my mind.

+1 for the Action Pack

I've had it for a good decade, probably longer. You also get Office 2019 plus Project and Visio professional.

[gixxer2021]

I’m on Linux so use it and agree it’s a clunky nightmare! I’ve had it corrupt files when working with office files directly, so always convert to their own format then export back if I’m mailing out. If I was on windows I’d probably pay for office tbh.

[courtg9000]

I have it installed as a backup but I don't think I have used it in at least over a year.

[d000hg]

MS Action Pack is £350 a year. You get 5 x licenses of O365 E3, and a bunch of server software and Windows licenses.
Also £75 a month Azure credits.
No brainer to my mind.

To mine too, £350 a year for Office is lunacy. I had MAPS about 10 years ago (£199 I think?) to get free Visual Studio and I still have the folder with dozens of discs in I never used for products I haven't even heard of in some cases!
These days VS is free and my current client will absolutely not allow their stuff on any machine that isn't theirs.

If I got back into developing on my own kit MAPS might make sense but unless I actually want to run my own business servers, I can't see it. A basic home 365 sub would do us... but I probably won't need it for another 3 months