It’s for my mother, who so far cannot stand LibreOffice.
What about Zoho?
If you must have MS office, then I’d go with MAS/Massgrave like others have said.
It’s well documented, requires minimal setup (if going default route), and is much less risky than going into the grey market for keys or downloading cracks elsewhere.
Out of curiosity: what she doesn’t like?
I bought my license for like 4 or 5 usd after a life of sailing and using libreoffice, not on ebay but on one of those praised website that sells key for games and suchdeleted by creator
Are you able to run it through wine?
i don’t want to start a war but sorry, office is the defacto when it comes to office work and libreoffice still have many problems with formatting and editing existing .docx files (things seem better when it comes to .xlsx and .pptx) not to mention that your documents might not look similar on both due to missing proprietary fonts.
its a good software in itself its just that its compatibility with office is a little dodgy
It’s because it’s not the native format. How does MS Office show/edit ODT documents? Does it work better?
Idk i have never worked with a complicated odt document Although, I would expect some problems because of fonts
Come to think of it. I tried that a couple months ago and The results weren’t so great.( I told word to specifically save my docx document in ODT format)
I don’t understand why ODT is complicated. It’s a zipfile with inspectible data. The standard document is also not as vendor-specific as MS OOXML which is thousands of pages that everybody gave up upon.
I think they meant complicated in the sense of having a complex document with formatting and so on (like a scientific paper)
Not that the file format itself is complex.
I meant the document (with a lot of pictures, tables, graphs, using a lot of different fonts, etc.) Not the file format.
I still don’t really know what you mean. How a document looks like depends on you. I’ve got very many fonts available, much more than average Microsoft Office user has. And it’s easier to use LibreOffice from my point of view, because it emphasizes structure. It looks much cleaner by default than MS Word. The only thing MS Word is better in is typesetting. LibreOffice simply fails to place letters properly.
Documents produced by office suites are not really good for publications. They are very annoying to handle, no matter if it’s MS Office or Libre. The cheapest option to have something professional is LaTeX.
I’d argue that no one gives a shit what the docx looks like as long as it looks good as a PDF or presentation slide.
And for that I use whatever is at hand, which mostly consists of Gsuite shit at work. Sometimes O365 for school (because NA is stupid) or work. At home it’s
Librestill Gsuite…
u can download OFFICE official ISO fom microsoft directly and use MASS to activate just take like 5 mins downloading, installing and activating.
MASS?
Is MS taking the Adobe stance on piracy of not caring unless businesses do it? How do they let this exist on the Git remote host that they own?
and you can be sure that it’s clean
what about onlyoffice?
This really depends on what she’s using it for. If she’s going to use it for anything business related, she needs a legal copy. That includes her sitting down to write the next great American novel or Sookie Stackhouse series. If she’s just needs to open recipes someone else sends her, not a problem at all.
How are people installing it on Linux these days? Arch specifically.
I’ve been using it in a windows VM. Unfortunately for my work, I need the formatting of Excel and Word to be legit that I can’t for the life of me seem to replicate in Only or Libre. That and PDF rendering always gets a little wonky somehow.
OnlyOffice Desktop Editors…
Simpler interface but lacking more advanced features of MS Office or Libre. It has the features 90% of users actually use though.
Nearly perfect DOCX formatting compatibility. The only thing I have ever noticed when collaborating with Word users is the bullet symbols on list items may be different on my end.
Glad to see someone mention OO. I was going to, and saw your comment. I will always be down for LibreOffice, but OnlyOffice might be the “best” option for lots of people that are easily intimidated with change (or more specifically how something looks different). Even if it is lacking on some features, it just matters how the person it is recommended to uses MS Office. Being fair using MS Office or any of the similar suites is overkill for what they do. If smaller programs like Wordpad (RIP) or opensource Rich Text Format editors could handle so many general purpose documents.
Agreed. I really tried to like Libre/OpenOffice over the years but it never felt right. OnlyOffice really hits the spot for me.
I don’t use Windows much any more but I was happy with the discounted student version of Office 2016, afaik the last perpetual license.
Onlyoffice sucks very bad with macros in my experience, lacks some advanced functions, and infuriatingly doesn’t seem to have options search, but other than that it’s fantastic, very intuitive, ergonomic and sleek option.
My own daily driver.
If I’m doing anything substantial, calculation-wise, I use openpyxl.
Interesting!
You might also find the Python library pandas useful. Its “DataFrames” can mirror your excel data 1:1 and you have convenience methods like to_excel(). Easy to combine with numpy for performant matrix math.
XLSX just becomes a container for storing/sharing your data, and while Python is used for analysis. I would use matplotlib for plotting rather than embedding in the sheet.
It might sound like a pretty obvious thing, but have you tried changing the tools into the “Tabbed ribbon” that office uses instead of the classic old 90s organization scheme in options ?
I have come to notice that when people who don’t really work with computers very well, in particular boomers, say that they can’t stand LibreOffice, they mean they don’t like the layout of the tools, because they can’t find anything they need. I suppose they just got used to where everything is with modern office.
Just change it and see if she will like it better. Usually solves it for the boomers i help. Nothing is holding LibreOffice back more than their default layout scheme. They really don’t know their target audience’s pain points AT ALL. Just goes to show why you need to study your users using the product without being explained anything.
I don’t get why their default is a layout that has been outdated for 24 years. Nostalgia or what? Only really old people who used computers in the 90s a lot will intuitively find it useful.
i came across a guide on rentry that said how to permanently activate office 365 downloading from official microsoft servers
don’t have the link
Massgrave.dev
Why not just change to the other kind of header bar – Notebook or what not.
I’d say no because at least LibreOffice won’t change for no reason every few years.
Also, fuck Microsoft & their products & Adobe too. They can get lost and we shouldn’t prop them up as defacto when other options exist.
Krita is waving for some Photoshop users
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Not an expert, but I think they’re actually Latvian.
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Very insightful, thanks. All this does seem very fishy at best. Best to stick with LibreOffice then.
