Libreoffice and MS Office

[ppppenguin]

As part of my move to Linux I've started using Libreoffice as my main word processor. Until now I've used the ancient Office 2000, if only because it's available to me without cost. Never liked the look of later MS Office anyway.

Inevitably there are a few differences and a couple are bit annoying. Does anyone have any ideas?

In MS Office, if you select a word or group of words the selection easily snaps to a word boundary. This makes is easy to select whole words or groups of words. Libreoffice doesn't do this. i've tried googling to seei if there's a way to do it but my searches only seem to bring up snapping of graphics alignment and suchlike.

Envelopes and labels. MS Office has a large selection builit in.  How do you do it in Libreoffice?

[peter scott]

Hi Jeffrey,

I can't remember the differences but you may find that Open Office suits you better than Libre Office.

Peter

[ppppenguin]

Libre Office seems to be the mainstream alternative to MS Office. Here's a short comparison: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/libreo...openoffice
The ability to save to DOCX and XLSX could be important for me so Libreoffice is potentially better. Otherwise there's probably not much in it.

[Shuttle]

One other option to consider is Softmaker Freeoffice. Softmaker is a German company and I suspect some of the source code is a fork of Libreoffice. It is available for Linux and Windows in both free and paid for versions.
 
I have been a Linux user for many years and have used Libreoffice and Openoffice since they were called Star Office (also German, I believe). I notice that many Linux distros are offering Softmaker Freeoffice in their software repositories alongside Libreoffice. IMHO Freeoffice is much more stable and is much less bloated.
 
The biggest problem with Libre/Open/Star Office has been the compatibility with MS office if you have to share or edit files. Since I discovered Softmaker office this problem has gone away - I regularly share docs and spreadsheets with MS office users and I have found Softmaker (both the free version and the paid version which I use on windows) totally transparent (you can opt to save to docx/xslx by default).
 
Softmaker have a matrix on their website which shows the limitations of the free version which are, in my view, not that restrictive for the average user.
 
Note that Freeoffice and the paid for versions have separate sites - search for ‘Softmaker Freeoffice’ or just use your package manager.
 
I have no connection with the company, just a satisfied user.