Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

Are there open-source implementation of Docs, even poor ones?

I LAUGH at silly FUD like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", "You can't read documents ", "format compatibility problems!!", because that all is just FUD.

If I ever (rarely, maybe 4 times total) receive a price file or spec that is unreadable by LibreOffice, I just ask to resend it to me in some open format cause I lack the software to open their proprietary file. And I did received it in a PDF or .odt every single time I asked.

That said, I liked the software more in their OOo days. When it became LibreOffice it became somehow more buggy and ugly. OOo with the right icon pack was very neat and had a superior interface to MSOffice. LibreOffice icons got uglified and are no longer pleasant to look at, and combined all looks... Worse.

Their online efforts are also disastrously bad. LibreOffice Online is based on a flawed idea to run LO on a server and deliver rendered images to a user. It works super shitty bad. They should have just made a web-first editor for OpenDocument file format, with concurrent editing. (Maybe when I'm finally done with the XMPP I'll look for funding to make just this. ... )

The issues I face with my company are usually accountants/bookkeepers are used to using Excel. LibreOffice usually can handle anything they are wanting to do. It just means a little extra time googling/playing around with it to work the same way. I try to keep everything on Google Sheets however.

That said, if we were scaling post Series A (we are not), I'd look to see whether there are teams that need advanced modeling or feel comfortable with Excel. Everyone whose job is not spreadsheet wrangling can go with LibreOffice and Google Sheets.

I don't really think there's anything I know of (that a normal small company would use especially) in which LibreOffice will not be as good or better than Google Suite, so if that's what your current office suite is then the transition should not be too painful. Googling for the answer works for most questions.

I have worked at a company that started with Googledocs and ended with Markdown (paper / design docs) and reveal.js for presentations. And that is something I can take recommend. Why? Because it is simple text that can be stored in a repository and you gain the ability to compare versions. It is easy to change and you can convert it to almost anything. The most important target is obviously pdf to communicate with customers. Nobody wants odt, docx or other strange formats that require more than a browser.

Convincing the technical people was not necessary or done quick. Non coder like the CEO did like the suggestion least, but it was a revolution from the base and people who code where mostly creating content or talking at conferences.

She recently got a job and has to use Office but her LibreOffice experience hasn't set her back.

Don't let the naysayers stop you.

For text, Markdown with inline semantic HTML if necessary and CSS stylesheets if needed is better, since it properly separates style and presentation unlike word processors.

For modelling, Jupyter-like notebooks are much better than spreadsheets since they properly label objects, don't make everything a 2D grid, and use a proper programming language.

For data, databases are better than spreadsheets.

Presentations are just documents, so there is no reason to use separate software.

For drawing you can use Inkscape and Gimp.

For collaboration you can use normal distributed version control like Git (with solutions like self-hosted Gitlab).

Any suite only exists for it's output. If you use a generic format then you can convert to specialised ones as required. If you save in a proprietary format, be prepared for vendor lockin.

Say HTML5 for docs, some form of CSV/YAML for spreadsheets etc you get the idea.

Keep your data, then your suite decisions flow from that.

Are you donating towards the cost of maintenance and development?

If not, what changes could they make to convince you to do that?

If you find an awkward corner case in any piece of software then you will find support rather lacking from the vendor. I use LO myself: I'm a business owner and can use what I damn well like! I don't force anyone else to use LO but we are a MS tin partner or something so get our tricks err drugs err software a bit cheaper.

Training: I was a trainer back in the day and it's all about concepts and not the implementation. I've used Word from v1 to date and 2.0 was a sweet spot in terms of functionality and performance (2 floppies worth of code but could do quite a lot of decent WP and rudimentary DTP stuff eg hanging indents, decimal tabstops and text/image frames with text flow. Modern LO Writer has a turtle implementation in it, coz reasons. Nowadays I struggle a bit to find things in the ribbons. Super Calc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel and LO Calc all do the same thing in the end to a greater or lesser extent. I wrote a Finite Capacity Planner (yes: Finite) in Excel for a factory around 1995. I'd have to rewrite my functions in Python or whatever but it would run in LO quite happily.

Another anecdote: My wife is not IT minded in any way as such and has worked as a classroom assistant in schools catering for special needs and adult support services etc for several decades. She has had various IT offerings foisted on her from Acorn Axxx machines to PCs running Win 9x etc. At home she used to have Windows on her laptop but I eventually had enough at Win 7 when yet another graphics "driver" update needed a good six hours on the operating table to fix. She now runs Arch (actually!) and doesn't care. It just has to work. She also uses LO, which seems to work OK and isn't the oddest office suite she's been forced to use.

Don't overthink it. LO Writer and Calc are extremely capable apps and Base looks like a pretty good effort too when I've used it and you get all the rest of it but I tend to avoid Presentation type apps (such as "Poor Point")

If you are capable of running a start up then LO will work fine. If some of your staff are incapable of any flexibility - I'd start to reconsider my choice of staff. A startup is all about being flexible and seeing opportunity and so on. If any modern IT user is "incapable" of getting on with LO then I'd question their ability to work in a startup environment.

The issue isnt whether LO is good (it is) but whether the LO team can compete with a trillion dollar corp that considers 365 as a central pillar of their business, invests in it accordingly, and whose changes to the software become the defacto standard overnight.

But really, probably none of that matters. If you think Google Workplace is too clunky, you’ll never be happy with LibreOffice. Just get O365 and get back to work. It’s not worth saving ~$5k annually.

For the last 4 years, I’ve been CIO and VP Eng of a now-series B company. We’re at about 70 FTE. We use Google Workspace and O365. We tried to move everyone to Google, but we couldn’t do it. As you noted, there’s just too much missing from it.

The only slightly related issue has been the one client who continues to send email attachments from Outlook as winmail.dat.

Example, at our office we have a standard way of sharing info (Slack), and store shared information in Notion. But some folks use Google Docs/Sheet, some prefer Excel, or Markdown files for their on work uses

I like Google a little bit for its ability to remote code the spreadsheet and the sharing feature, but now in a large financial institution, Excel works perfectly fine.

I suppose the Word and PowerPoint alternatives are not as bad in LibreOffice, so if that's your main tools, go for it.

When she started to work for she asked me if we have LibreOffice on our computers because she had to edit some documents she took from work. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they relied on LibreOffice for document management. Nowadays LibreOffice is installed on all our home computers alongside Microsoft Office as well. She can switch to whatever she finds easier and I taught her to always convert her documents to .RTF to be sure she has no problem switching between home and work.

I have a similar use case (plus add in cafes where I'd rather not be on their wifi or my own mobile data). It amazes me how many company IT people I've spoken with over the years who just don't comprehend some people work without being connected to the internet 100% of the time.

Dropbox remains my solution there. I'm also MS Office - too much interaction of documents with my clients to try anything else.

-the report generated by our laser alignment machine is in a 1993 ms write format. o365 says its no bueno.

-the diagnostic tool we use on some truck engines for valve calibration, advance and timing spits out an interactive doc in some esoteric ibm format I think? we edit the output in libre, feed it back into the tool, and it makes our adjustments.

-our shop floor uses libre because we don't have enough internet to run o365 without huge delays. we switched four years ago.

-our ancient jit parts order system will gladly handle lotus dif files, so libre does too

I’ve never seen a single person react to it’s apps as being unfamiliar or different, especially considering the variety of UI shifts M$ Office has displayed since Office 2k. If you were referring to some specific API and integration with Sharepojnt or something I might understand your trepidation, but as your question stands, I have to say that I can’t think of a specific downside to it.

I suppose that deciding upon an output format that you will send out to clients or suppliers will be your main concern, as you will essentially choosing which version of M$ Office you are pretending to be. I find that the older pre-xml format is more universally supported but YMMV

But LO Calc is bad, or at least was when I was trying it last time. It has been creating broken tables especially where filters / conditional formatting is involved and was endlessly crashing on attempt to create graph from 2 channel scope (cca 2*2000 X-Y values). OTOH in Excel I can have table with more than 30k lines with filters, sorting calculations and everything works swiftly. No, I am not going to fool around with a database.

In Word vs Writer scenario is not anything really appealing to me as I don't use them too much. So I am neutral on those.

Recently, frustrated again with some excel shenanigans, I looked around and I discovered softmaker office. I immediately got a license and experimented a little. It seems very compatible with ms office. It still costs money, but less then ms. So in the near future I might try that route, along with thunderbird to replace outlook.

I feel like LibreOffice/OpenOffice file compatibility with MS Office peaked in the early 2000's. The last time I tried to load a Word doc in LibreOffice a few years ago, it looked very janky. About the same as it did in 2004.

Sadly, I still receive 2 or 3 Office attachments a week. So MS Office compatibility is still very relevant.

To be clear, as your edit says, your CFO and other modellers are probably going to have to use Excel. There are just things that work in Excel and nowhere else.

Writer is a problem in that it is a straight rip-off of Word, which supports the same file formats, but which is not fully compatible with Word.

Word and Writer handle styles differently: glyphs change, despite availability of the same fonts; alignment changes; tab stops are all over the place.

They handle images and floating things differently, sometimes placing things on different pages or behind other objects or text. Word online makes this even worse, because it doesn't handle image captions properly, and converts the image and the caption to a second image.

I get all sorts of weird problems with Writer and Word - no particular blame attached - and unfortunately the answer is always the same: do your work in native Word on Windows, unless all your work is going to be in LibreOffice.

I think that the basic premises behind modern word processing are just wrong, and it's because Word is so ubiquitous that everything else has to follow it. I think there is a space for a new style of WP which takes nothing from Word, or Writer, and which lies somewhere between that point and professional typesetting wares like LaTeX or InDesign; something which does less more professionally.

But it's just a dream, and it doesn't really take into account Excel, which is Microsoft's killer app and probably the keystone of the company's entire business.

Then of course there's the whole parasitic, prying surveillance and snooping in the name of "helpful" user experience enhancement, telemetry and other bullshit corporate-speak for shamelessly sucking up your data. Another awful-smelling infection spreading among all the big corporate software players and making MS Office in its latest versions much more like the abomination that is GSuite (or anything by Google really). Do you really want most of the documentation being created by your business to be subject to perpetual viewing by these companies? I'd hope not.

Libre Office isn't perfect, but at least it has much less of all the above while still keeping most of what makes an office suite simply work across the board.

Hiring someone to translate those "complicated" sheets in to a combination of python and basic CLI tools like grep to work with CSVs might be worth it in the long term, but for word processing and presentations, if you can export to PDF rather than be passing things in and out of the organization, OpenOffice should work well.

Your issue will be that ultimately, if you're not exporting to PDF or ODT but trying to export to Microsoft's proprietary format you'll always end up chasing some obscure bug on a deadline that will make the entire endeavor not worth whatever costs were present up until that point.

And the CFO uses Google Workspace as well.

I always use the same software that the C-suite uses for those files we transfer between us.

I used Abiword and a lot of Gnumeric in the past. Now everything written in emacs, and then directly glued to postgresql, R or Perl. I hadn't opened an excel since... one decade maybe.

I agree that for finance employees, Excel is way better than anything else available.

Offline - works fantastic tbh. Tons of experience on long haul flights