Seven Reasons for Choosing Libre. Office over Microsoft Office. OK, Libre. Office is free for the download, and you can install it on as many different machines as you choose. But a free price and a free license aren’t much good if the software doesn’t have the features you want. Happily, that’s usually not a concern with Libre. Office or its predecessor, Open. Office. Although many people assume that a free application must be inferior to one that they pay for, a comparison of Libre. Office with Microsoft Office (MSO) proves that the opposite is often true. Sometimes, MSO has features that Libre. Office lacks, but, just as often, it’s Libre. Office that has more tools than MSO. However, unless you’re concerned about a must- have feature, there’s usually no need for a point by point comparison. Focusing on performance and high- level interface choices alone, I can think of at least seven reasons to choose Libre. Office over MS Office: 7. The Classic Menu Structure. In 2. 00. 7, Microsoft Office has replaced the standard menu and toolbar with a ribbon, a collection of tabs with links and icons. Although most users have made their peace with the ribbon, many have not. ![]() Only a handful of other software companies have switched to ribbons, and, five years later, at least one company offers software to convert MSO to standard menus and toolbars at $3. By contrast, Libre. Office / Open. Office. Although nobody has shown that either the standard or ribbon layout is superior to the other, the standard layout does have the advantage of being easier to read, and of allowing users to discover functionality more easily. Being less compressed, the standard layout is also easier to read for those with limited close- up vision. Common Code and Interfaces. Unlike MSO, Libre. Office is not a collection of originally separate programs grouped together by branding and a few interface choices. Instead, Libre. Office applications were designed to share as much code as possible. This organization means that a Libre. Office installation occupies less hard drive space than an equivalent MSO installation, and is generally faster on the same machine. In these days of multi- terabyte hard drives, that may not matter on a workstation, although it could still be an issue on a netbook or lower end lap top. Even more importantly, many dialogs are the same between applications, which makes learning easier. For example, windows for formatting text or its background in styles dialogs are identical whether you are formatting a text document or a spreadsheet cell. Wir sind der kompetente Fachhanmdelspartber für FlexiSign, FlexiSIgn Pro, FlexiDesigner. FlexiSign ist ist die führende Software im Signmaking. Is and in to a was not you i of it the be he his but for are this that by on at they with which she or from had we will have an what been one if would who has her. Greater design control. MSO offers templates for slide backgrounds, tables, bullet styles, and almost every other feature. These templates have the advantage of being quick to insert, but users have extremely limited control over them. For those who want hands- on control over the details of their document design, Libre. Office rivals a low to medium end layout program. Features can often be set to one or two decimal places, ensuring that your design is exactly as you want it. Experienced users, of course, will save the results in a template so they don’t have to create a layout more than once.
A regular six month release cycle. In the last decade, MSO has averaged a release every three years. Users have to pay for upgrades, although the cost is less than buying an entirely new version. These new releases have often been late, and have frequently changed file formats. In the few years of its existence, Libre. Office has settled into six month release cycles. While few office suites have major changes at this stage in their evolution, this release cycle means that Libre. Office can respond more quickly to changing needs and evolve more quickly. So far, releases have been more or less on time, and backward compatibility is total. Each release is free for the download. Better navigation. One of Libre. Office / Open. Office. org’s unique features is the Navigator. This floating window allows you to move through the document by using headers, graphics, tables, sections, cross- references, comments, hyperlinks, and other objects, and reposition sections of a document in relation to one another. It is especially effective if the objects you added are given descriptive names — for instance, if a picture is labeled “Author profile shot” rather than the default “graphics. The longer the document, the more useful the Navigator becomes. The closest MSO has to the Navigator is its search functions, which are not nearly as convenient if you want to move to more than one position in the document. More extensive styles and automation. Besides the usual character and paragraph styles, Libre. Office includes styles for pages, lists, and frames — none of which have more than limited equivalencies in MSO when they have any at all. These features help to automate features like tables of contents or outline lists. Learn to use them properly, and the time- saving can be immense, especially when editing extensively. Greater stability. MSO works reasonably well in smaller documents — for instance, in twenty page text files. However, the larger the file, the more likely it is to crash, opening the possibility that it will become too corrupt to be recovered. This limitation is in marked contrast to Libre. Office. Its ancestor Open. Office. org is rumored to have been designed for stability because its original coders were required to write its documentation in the program. This rumor is credible, because (as I can personally witness) Libre. Office is capable of handling documents hundreds of pages long or hundreds of megabytes in size. The main limitation is the amount of RAM on the system you are using. Libre. Office does occasionally crash. However, unlike MSO, the times that it has failed to recover all files after a crash are so few that I have to strain to remember them. In fact, in ten years of using Libre. Office and Open. Office. I can only recall two unrecoverable crashes — one of which was on a document of over 9. By comparison, I have had as many crashes with MSO in a day. Beyond free cost and license. As these points show, using Libre. Office is not just a political statement or a matter of putting up with inconveniences for the sake of multiple installations from the same source. Of course, free cost and free licenses can be significant advantages. But, in Libre. Office’s case, there are also pragmatic reasons for preferring free software over its proprietary rivals. Install Libre. Office and start to use it with an open mind, and you should find additional reasons to prefer it as well. BY BRUCE BYFIELD. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Review & Rating. Only a few weeks ago, Google's online office suite, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, wasn't much more than a Web- based variant on traditional desktop- based office suites like Microsoft Office and the open- source Libre. Office. Compared with desktop suites, Google's productivity apps have always offered a smaller feature set—for example, footnotes but no endnotes—but they also offered the advantage of making your documents accessible from any Web browser and making it easy to collaborate in real time. With its latest update, Google Docs integrates more tightly than ever with the rest of Google's offerings, making it easy to search the Web for related information while editing a document. The result is a fast, easy- to- use suite that is excellent at facilitiating both productivity and teamwork. What Is Google Docs? While Google's office offering is impressive, there's considerable confusion about about what exactly it is. First, it is sometimes considered to be a sub- offering of Google's mammoth online service, Google Drive. Furthermore, Google has broken its suite into its component parts, as Apple did with i. Work's Keynote, Numbers, and Pages. All the parts of Google's suite look similar, and if you've learned to navigate one, you can navigate the others, but there's no single online link that leads to the suite as a whole. Google's official name for this not- suite is now Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides—the names of its word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation apps, respectively. But most of the world still calls it by its original name, Google Docs. For the sake of convenience, I'll call it that here. To make matters even more confusing, the subscription- based business- oriented variant of Google Docs, which used to be called Google Docs for Work, has been renamed G Suite, with new collaboration features to go with the new name. Look for a separate review of G Suite to come shortly after the publication of this review. Naming confusion aside, the main difference between Google Docs on one hand and desktop- and- online suites like Microsoft Office 3. Apple's suite of i. Cloud apps (formerly called i. Word) on the other hand is that Google Docs exists only in your Web browser. Microsoft and Apple's offerings let you work on the same files either in the spacious, high- powered setting of a desktop app like Word or Apple's Pages, or in the more limited feature set of apps with the same name running in a browser or on a mobile device. Aplug- in to Google's Chrome browser lets you edit Google Docs in Chrome while you'reoffline, but it's less convenient than a desktop app, and you have to remember to install it before you need it. If you don't need the features of a desktop app, then Google Docs may be all the office suite you need, but you should also consider the free alternatives provided by the online versions from Microsoft and Apple. I'll describe some of the pros and cons of these alternatives after taking a closer look at Google Docs. Intuitive Interface. As you'd expect based on Google's other offerings, Google Docs stands out for its elegant, highly usable interface and fast performance. Almost everything on the toolbars and menus has a clearly- marked keyboard- based equivalent, so, for example, you can enter a comment either by clicking on an icon or by pressing Ctrl- Alt- M in Windows or Cmd- Option- M in mac. OS. Features that tend to be confusing in traditional apps are clear in Google Docs, partly because they're more limited. For example, paragraph styles are limited to nine separate styles, one for normal text, the others for various titles and headings. You can modify each of these styles from the Tools menu, and save your modified styles as the defaults for all documents, but you can't create new styles as you can in Word or Pages. On the other hand, inserting a live stock price in a Google Sheets worksheet is effortless—simply use the built- in GOOGLEFINANCE function—while the same feature remains surprisingly complicated in Excel and Numbers. Revisions and Collaboration. Google Docs has always stored all your revisions and made it possible to go back to an earlier state of a document in case you need it. When you collaborate on a document, and open it after someone else has edited it, it alerts you to recent changes, and stores fine- grained records of revisions, much like the optional Track Changes feature in Office and i. Cloud. The online versions of Office and both the desktop and online versions of the i. Cloud apps have similar but less fine- grained tracking of recent document versions. Microsoft Office lets you turn on fine- grained Track Changes in a document in the desktop app and then continue to track changes in the same document in online Office. In contrast, the i. Cloud apps have an annoying gotcha. If you turn on Track Changes in a document in the Apple Pages desktop app, you can only view the document, not edit it, in the i. Cloud version of Pages. Exploring Google Docs. The niftiest new feature in Google Docs is its Explore button, which opens in a pane on the right side of the browser window and displays information and suggestions based on what's showing in your document. For example, if you click on the Explore button in a worksheet, the pane will let you ask questions about your data, including suggested questions like "What is the Median of Column D?" A formatting box suggests improvements to the visual display of your data, like adding shading to alternating rows. A further Analysis box displays charts showing different visualizations of your data, somewhat like the answers you can get from Excel's Pivot Table feature, but offered without any work on your part. In Slides, when you're editing a presentation, the Explore box offers online images related to the subject of the current slide, and you can drag them directly into the slide. Microsoft Office has comparable research features, but they're not as easy to use or as flexible. Templates. If you remember the early days of Google Docs, you'll remember that its document templates tended to be elegant but extremely minimal. All that has changed in the broadband era, when it takes little or no time to download complex graphics. Google has taken its cue from Apple and Microsoft, and now provides visually gorgeous templates for documents, worksheets, and especially for presentations. Unlike Apple's template designs, Google's don't require you to be a professional graphic designer, and Google Slides' presentation templates are rich in vivid and vigorous slide designs that anyone can use. To get an idea of Google's skill at devising Web- based apps, try out Google Slides in a browser and compare it to Microsoft's Web- based version of Power. Point. Microsoft relies on a reduced version of the familiar Office Ribbon, an interface designed for desktop apps, where the Ribbon packs dozens of functions into a compact toolbar at the top of the screen. In Office's Web- based apps, the reduced- function Ribbon sometimes seems wasteful, with blank space instead of the options displayed on the desktop version. It can also seem inefficient, since the Ribbon tab hides other layout features that you might want to use without switching tabs. Google uses a pane at the right side of the window for many features that Microsoft puts in the Ribbon, while also displaying a standard toolbar of features you use often, and the effect is subtly but noticeably more efficient and friendly than Office's model. In Slides, for example, you can modify transitions in the right- hand pane while still accessing basic formatting and drawing features in the top- line toolbar. Working With Microsoft Office. Google Docs can import Microsoft Office documents with impressive fidelity, and it also imports open- source formats like those used by Libre. Office. Don't expect it to import Apple's i. Cloud documents—but nothing else outside of i. Cloud can import i. Cloud documents, either. You can export from Google Docs in Office, Open Document (Open. Office and Libre. Office), PDF, HTML, and e. Pub formats—a more useful range of export options than you can find anywhere else. You can also use Google Translate to convert a document into another language, with predictably uneven results; a similar feature, using Microsoft's online tools, is built into Microsoft Office.
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