Interest in LibreOffice, the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, is on the rise, with weekly downloads of its software package close to 1 million a week. That’s the highest download number since 2023.
“We estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but it’s important to note that we respect users’ privacy and don’t track them, so we can’t say for sure,” said Mike Saunders, an open-source advocate and a deputy to the board of directors at The Document Foundation.
LibreOffice users typically want a straightforward interface, Saunders said. “They don’t want subscriptions, and they don’t want AI being ‘helpful’ by poking its nose into their work — it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,” he said.
There are genuine use cases for generative AI tools, but many users prefer to opt-in to it and choose when and where to enable it. “We have zero plans to put AI into LibreOffice. But we understand the value of some AI tools and are encouraging developers to create … extensions that use AI in a responsible way,” Saunders said.
Does anyone know how to get endnote or a similar citation manager to work in Libre Office?
Zotero is the tool you want. It works perfectly.
Oh, that’s fantastic! Thank you, I will give it a try!
If you ever figure it out I’d love to know, too. I relied entirely on Libre Office as an undergrad but missed this feature of MS Word. I currently use a combination of Scribbr and Purdue Owl but would prefer an offline and open source solution.
Zotero has plugins for LibreOffice and other word processors: https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_integration
Copying my response from above for u!
I’ve been using Zotero since I converted a few weeks back. It has some really useful plugins, so I would recommend adding this one first- it’s like a store where you can easily browse and add them :))
I’ve using using it with Obsidian (there’s a short guide you can find online), so while I’m writing an essay in Obsidian I can just hit a key shortcut and it lists every paper I’ve saved to Zotero. Then when I click one, it adds the citation!
I’ve been using Zotero since I converted a few weeks back. It has some really useful plugins, so I would recommend adding this one first- it’s like a store where you can easily browse and add them :))
I’ve using using it with Obsidian (there’s a short guide you can find online), so while I’m writing an essay in Obsidian I can just hit a key shortcut and it lists every paper I’ve saved to Zotero. Then when I click one, it adds the citation. So useful
I like LibreOffice, but I prefer Onlyoffice.
It’s like this meme:
Alternative to Photoshop: Cracked Photoshop Alternative to Office: cracked office
XD
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And maybe those are only the ones that download it directly. But every Linux user downloads it from other repos.
Yeah I’m wondering for how many weeks.
And then how many millions of ms office users there are? (Or billions…)
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Oh it’s great news either way. I’d just be curious about the numbers.
Nice. Maybe now Microsoft will respond by
offering non-subscription optionsinventing a new proprietary industry-standard file format so their bloated ransomware remains mandatory.Fortunately platforms like docs are providing sufficient competition that I don’t think they’d be able to lock it down as effectively as they once could.
They’ll have to settle for “warning” the user if they detect a file that was made by libreoffice.
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It’s still enabled by default and acts as FUD for the average user who won’t know to disable it and will get spooked by it.
That it can be opted out of doesn’t change its propaganda value at all.
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I’m glad to see foss Software taking off. In the past, we had to be a tech enthusiast to Realize it with an option. Now it’s pretty well known.
The large tech companies didn’t get greedy and try to be so gross with privacy settings. People wouldn’t make the move. They only have themselves to blame.
If you’re into music, there’s a great open source synthesizer.
The US becoming a questionable country and people realizing how almost every digital service and product is US based also ended up becoming a huge incentive to start seeking out alternatives instead putting all their eggs in one country. If it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have been making so many product shifts and seeking out foss alternatives or at the very least nonUS alternatives.
It’s been very cool seeing lot of people making attempts to try out stuff like Linux too even if they don’t stick with it.
I’ve been using lmms, but this looks amazing
My friend, FOSS has been readily available for more than a decade. Whether it’s LibreOffice or the GIMP or VLC or whatever, these are very old pieces of software.
It’s not taking off now. It already did. But now you personally are noticing. :-)
Well, I’ve been using this software forever, I’m saying now, normal folks, I see in the light.
Been available for close to 40 years
Love to see it. I haven’t used MS Office in well over a decade at this point and I have no plans to go back. LibreOffice is fantastic, suits all my needs, doesn’t pack itself with bloat and it respects my freedom and privacy. What more can I want from an office suite?
Pandas killed VBA for me that was about the only reason I had to use an ms office suite
And IIIIII helped!
It doesn’t surprise me, Microsoft is enshitifying everything they have.
I love Libre so much
The funny thing is you can still buy Office standalone but you have to actively go looking for it and Microsoft doesn’t advertise it because 365 subscriptions make more money.
Microsoft doesn’t want you buying standalone versions of software, but they still have to sell it because there’s still a market for it.
And if you monitor Slickdeals, you can often get a copy for under $40.
Wow, the way they write “best value” on the offer for 8.50 £/month is just brazen.
If you use Office Home 2024 for 120£ for just 15 months or more it’s already cheaper.
What’s annoying, too, is that a lot of the methods that have traditionally been used for discounts (education, nonprofit, employer-based discounts) are now only applicable to the subscriptions. So if you do want to get a standalone copy and would ordinarily qualify for a discount, you can’t apply that discount to that license.
I really like LibreOffice but I still need Excel. It’s a good 20 years ahead of the OSS software. It works find if your doing light work though
That’s the problem: if you want greater adoption, you must cover the needs of accountants, because Excel knows perfectly well that they are the fixed source of income for companies.
Makes me wonder, what exactly are you missing on LibreOffice Sheet?
For me biggest missing I’ve found is web/external queries. Excel has a system to log in to an API, retrieve that data and format it before it lands on your sheet.
Libre functionality here is lacking/non existent.
My workaround was to write a python query, add it as a cron job, write that data to a csv then call that csv from my sheet with a timed refresh. Not something the average user can or wants to do.
Everything else I’ve found achievable.
Easiest thing I can think of off the top of my head is dealing with pivot tables. UI is terrible in OpenOffice also integrations with PowerBI does not exist along with XLookup not existing last I checked
OpenOffice?? That thing is dead. I thought we’re talking about LibreOffice.
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Sometimes I think these little updates are just a ruse to upload our personal information without us knowing. I stopped auto-updating a few years ago and only update when the software is not running correctly or something new is introduced.
Is it just me, or do new office features seem kinda pointless or unnecessary?
I feel like almost all the updates of the last two decades have been:
- Security updates in a code base that was traditionally quite vulnerable to malware.
- Technical updates in taking advantage of the advances in hardware, through updated APIs in the underlying OS. We pretty seamlessly moved from single core, 32-bit x86 CPU tasks to multicore x86-64 or ARM, with some tasks offloaded to GPUs or other specialized chips.
- Some improvement in collaboration and sharing, unfortunately with a thumb on the scale to favor other Microsoft products like SharePoint or OneDrive or Outlook/Exchange.
- Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.
Some of these are important (especially the first two), but the user experience shouldn’t change much for them.
Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.
This is a very ignorant and prejudiced take.
AI in Excel is an amazing feature that will help TONNES of people do what they never could It can design tables and write (but not insert) advanced formulas for the user.
Sure, you could say “just be an Excel expert”, but - for example - my daily work is nowhere near Excel. Learning its advanced features would be a 100% waste of time, just to be able to prep a fancy chart every couple of years. So, instead, I can just ask Copilot to do that fancy thing for me, instead of wasting hours online, trying to figure out XLOOKUP, or some such.
As someone who has taught many children how to use excel, the new AI features make using it easier but teaching and learning harder. A lot of stuff now happens automagically, and that makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work. So doing basic stuff is now trivially easy, but learning to become competent enough to do more creative and advanced stuff is more difficult.
I used OnlyOffice thinking ‘Hey, this is a really similar alternative to MSO!’ Then bugs with slide previews and their ordering happened in the middle of presentations and even worse, memory usage ground my laptop to a halt (electron apps open up with close to 1GB of memory, such as obsidian).
Libre office still hasn’t crashed and the slide previews are accurate. The interface has always been a bit…unrefined even with the new tabbed layout but I can live with that.
OpenOffice 3 had the best office suite UI I can imagine.
Dunno where all this “MS is good” comes from.
Don’t like today’s LO UI.
I didn’t even know this existed until a few days ago. Downloaded an AppImage to try it out and was able to make a decent pdf with minimal hassle.
I was really worried I’d need to use Foxit Phantom Pdf just to edit a pdf a couple of weeks ago, but libre office draw was very little hassle, with the exception of a bit of shifting of text.
