LibreOffice is a free and open-source Office Suite from The Document Foundation, presented as the successor to OpenOffice.org. The suite includes Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).
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Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 8.8 out of 10
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An integrated solution, designed for small or medium-sized businesses, bringing together the productivity of Microsoft Office with advanced security capabilities to help
safeguard data from external threats and help protect against data leaks.
With Microsoft 365 Business Premium, users can empower employees to be productive
anywhere on any device. Get more done with AI built into the Office apps. Work
better together with a hub for teamwork bringing your tools and people together
in one place.…
Mainly CSV and other formats compatibility, when compared to MS alternative, it's faster than cloud-based solutions (Google Docs, Zoho), I don't have to wait for MS Office to look at what I have in the cloud before saving something, its interface is better than MS Office, for …
there are no real competition in the field. Microsoft Office 365 stands out every other competitor and even if you consider single sub-item or functionality like MDM or EDR or Email services or Instant messaging and file sharing, you will easily understand andbe convinced that …
Microsoft 365 Business is the best option for small businesses that rely on the advanced features of MS Excel (like conditional formatting, advanced formulas, and macros), as well as companies that regularly edit and collaborate using MS Word documents. Unlike G Suite, it also …
Frankly, there's no comparison. 365 has more features, better synergy between products, and straight up works. They are always working on new features or a better way to use existing products. And there are new products that come out from time to time with our subscription. …
I haven't actually come across any other package as worthy as Microsoft 365 Business. I admire the way it gives access to all the applications at one place, like Microsoft Office, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Access, etc.
Dropbox is generally better at transferring folders and large files that can be organized and edited within the software. I find Microsoft 365 Business to be better at file storage and management than iCloud, but to be not quite as smooth and universally compatible as Dropbox …
The fact that it is free of charge for desktop use sets LibreOffice at the top of my list. Given our low software budget, and its feature set which is for all intents and purposes equivalent to big name brands, it is more than appropriate for our needs. I have noticed in some situations that exporting a spreadsheet in a particular format on my machine and then sharing it with someone who is using say Microsoft Excel results in unexpected behavior (i.e., formatting issues or unreadable data).
Microsoft 365 Business Premium is well suited to any size organization and is a must-have for business purposes. It is a vital component for the majority of work software needs, as the Microsoft 365 Business Premium package has apps to handle needs that I didn't know we had. It is a great way to provide the required software programs to teams, especially those that work remotely due to the great sharing capabilities built into it. Furthermore, the nonprofit program provided our small nonprofit with vital components for our remote work, while allowing us to keep our donated funds going directly to our mission.
It's free, which is the biggest difference between Office. It definitely feels like a full-fledged office suite of software for no more than the cost of an optional donation.
Lots of templates exist out on the internet for Writer and Impress (the Word and PowerPoint equivalents in LibreOffice). The open source community really likes to support one another in their usage of each other's software.
It works smoothly on almost every OS out there, including Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
The only thing that is a bit cumbersome is that it doesn't seem that you can save files directly to programs like one drive if you aren't using a Microsoft program to generate the document. An example of this would be if I am working in a PDF in our PDF Program I have to first save it to my desktop and then drag it into one drive. I end up with duplicates and that can sometimes make it hard to remember which is the most up-to-date.
We use it consistently and have a lot of documents in the OpenDocument format so it will be necessary to use LibreOffice or a compatible product such as Openoffice in the future to be able to open these files. Because the license fee for Libreoffice is zero it is not very costly to keep using it - the costs are mostly for keeping it installed on the office PCs and regularly updated, and solving employee issues with the user support.
Most people can quickly start using Writer or Calc or Impress for basic tasks even if they see Libreoffice for the first time, because the interface is similar to older (97-2003) MS Office or other software. Some features are less intuitive than in recent MS Office and some power users of MS Office need to re-learn some things before being proficient in Libreoffice.
The basic apps are straightforward and easy to use, especially since they have been around so long. I'm referring to the basic apps like Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, etc. Other features such as Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint Sites, Sharepoint Lists, Sharepoint Groups, etc. all require a higher level of knowledge to both implement and use properly
Libreoffice is a desktop app not requiring any server part so it is always available when the PC is working normally. Installing it on another machine if one PC fails is very quick and easy. This is a non-issue.
For big/imported tables or text documents with images loaded from the internet it is sometimes getting very slow, RAM and CPU intensive, and sometimes even hangs due to some memory leaks or other bugs. This is a long-term problem and is still not resolved perfectly.
In the last 5 years, Microsoft has come a long way. The performance of the products has become more and more user-friendly and it seems that the feedback provided by the user community is being listened to and worked on. The processes are very fast and seamless. There are negligible errors and doesn't slow the systems down.
Support is not officially offered. However, you can find answers to any usage questions or trouble-shooting online easily, typically starting with a Google search. (I believe that all forums / tips for OpenOffice apply equally to LibreOffice, and vice versa.) While Microsoft Office, for example, officially includes support, I find that typically you end up going to a Google search in any case. So, this is not really a downside. However, in all these cases, you end up doing a lot of figuring things out for yourself.
As mentioned elsewhere in the review, Microsoft has historically paid attention to community feedback and issues, but timeliness can improve, and so can the addressing of long-standing issues about which many users have said "I have this issue too!" but no official solution exists. For issues that do have a solution, however, the solution is usually not difficult to find, and the explanation of features on Microsoft's website can mitigate many problems.
Generally easy to perform, issues are how to ensure regular automatic updates on Mac OS X. Fortunatly we have only a few machines with OS X run by management and we can do these updates manually occasionally. Windows updates are quite easy with the support of third party software such as Ninite or Chocolatey, and Linux updates are super-easy thanks to the package manager (apt-get).
I have used MS Office, Google Docs as other comparable products. I like MS Office best of all. I like LibreOffice better than Google Docs; however, I believe that if Google Docs wasn't so limited in many of its features and web-based only, I think it has the potential to surpass LibreOffice if they don't fix the problems between full functionalities.
We selected Microsoft 365 Business Premium as it provides a better integration that aligns better with the needs of our company. Another obvious plus is that our staff was used to Microsoft Office so switching to Microsoft 365 Business Premium offered an almost seamless transition. The addition of Team and the SharePoint libraries sealed the deal as we were able to migrate our entire infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud thereby simplifying administration, backups and ultimately reducing costs.
With more users using it in the company there are more cases when a simultaneous editing of the same document is needed and this feature is lacking in Libreoffice even though the files concerned are shared and synced by some solution (we use ownCloud). Google Docs or MS Office365 via Sharepoint/Onedrive offer a better function for this.
Being a free GNU-based software, it is ideal for computers used outside the company's network or for users which do not require online collaboration tools.
Importing and exporting word processing documents is easy. PDF functionality is adequate and works very well.
You will probably need to invest in fonts if, for example, most of your company is using Microsoft Word fonts, which may be proprietary. In our case, we paid for a few key fonts; installation in the system was simple but done through IT, not the user.
For complex graphs and presentations, LibreOffice may not be the best alternative.
