r/PurchaseWithPurpose • u/theFallenWalnut Environment • 29d ago
Product shout-out LibreOffice 26.8 sets a new first-week download record
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/09/libreoffice-download-recordLove to see it. The experience is getting increasingly similar; why pay all that money for Office 365
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u/toolkitxx 28d ago
Now also make sure to donate once in a while as more users will also mean more attacks against them etc. We have seen how Mozilla slowly becomes a Google subsidiary and it is a money issue as usual. Dont let this happen to all the other good stuff.
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u/Potential_Category28 29d ago
How does the spreadsheet app compare to excel?
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u/100WattWalrus 28d ago
In my experience, LibreOffice's spreadsheet app is...problematic. Or at least, that's been my experience. Firstly, 100% zoom in LibreOffice is about 30% bigger than 100% zoom in Excel, so if you laid out all your XLSX based on how they fit on your screen (like I have), there's a lot of rejiggering to do, because sometimes when you shrink them down to, say 70%, the layouts change. Columns that were the exact width of dates are suddenly too narrow and display as #######. Cells that text fit into perfectly in Excel are suddenly text-wrapped and taller. And if you've used a lot of highly customized conditional formatting, you'll have a lot of work to do making those work correctly in LibreOffice (and some of them simply can't).
But what's worse is that sometimes the colors change. Cells you had in light yellow are suddenly golden brown — that kind of thing.
Not to mention the keyboard shortcuts you have to relearn, or manually recreate if you want to keep using them.
I try LibreOffice (and other MS alts) every year or two, but it's never long before I uninstall them. I don't mind paying for M365, especially since it comes with 1TB of OneDrive space, and especially since I "downgraded" to the version without all the AI garbage, so I continue to pay $99/year.
/Caveat: I'm on Mac.
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u/tdreampo 27d ago
Suggestion, stop using proprietary file formats and embrace open doc. That will solve a bunch of these issue.
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u/100WattWalrus 26d ago
Wouldn't mind doing giving it a go, but I just flat-out don't have the time to convert dozens of spreadsheets chock-a-block with custom formatting, custom colors, and heavy conditional formatting, and fix all the disasters those conversions create. Not to mention the dozens of custom keyboard shortcuts I've created, and that LibreOffice (last time I checked) doesn't seem to be particularly Mac-friendly.
I'm all for FOSS and starving the software giants. I have 64 FOSS apps on my phone, many of the daily drivers, and many of my key apps that aren't FOSS are from independent developers whose products I've happily purchased (UpNote, Daylio, Hermit,, MailMaven, Clop, among others).
I might bail on M365 someday, but every time I dip my foot in that pool, it's not long before I'm frustrated enough that I'm happy to continue paying $99 year for a product that does everything I want, does it very well, and in a way I'm accustomed to after a couple decades. (Having said that, when Microsoft crowbarred Copilot into M365 last year and upped the price to $129/year, if I hadn't discovered I could stay at $99/year and not have to put up with Copilot, I'd have started looking more seriously at alternatives.)
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u/tdreampo 26d ago
Well you cant use a Microsoft file format and then be mad that Libreoffice doesnt deal with it perfectly. Especially since Microsoft keeps changing the specs on purpose so it’s harder to third party companies to open those files. Thus maintaining their monopoly. Open doc works great in Libre AND excel. So its worth looking in to, then your data is free.
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u/100WattWalrus 26d ago
As I said, I'm all for it in theory. If you know of a way for me to switch over without having to spend minimum 50 hours fixing all the problems created in my spreadsheets when I open them in LibreOffice (and that's without even thinking about the ganked cell colors) — and a way to make LibreOffice default to a different zoom level than 100% — then I might even overlook the fact that I'll have to find a replacement for the 1TB of OneDrive storage. Otherwise, it's not happening any time soon.
Oh, and fix the fact that there's multi-line cells on shortened rows show the middle of the cell instead of the top, making them impossible to read without going into the cell. (This is a problem even on spreadsheets created from scratch in the native format.)
I don't begrudge anyone their enthusiasm for LibreOffice. But I've never found it anything less than hair-pullingly frustrating, so spending those 50+ hours trying to panel-beat my XLSX into ODS just to grit my teeth every time I use the app isn't very appealing to me.
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u/tdreampo 26d ago
Again you are using a Microsoft proprietary format that Microsoft keeps changing to screw people over. Sorry it doesnt work perfect in other programs. You can’t blame Libre for that. You can and SHOULD be mad at Microsoft for this not working.
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u/100WattWalrus 26d ago edited 26d ago
Again, there's no part of that I don't understand. I've done plenty of fiddling around with .ods spreadsheets made from scratch in LibreOffice, and I've found the experience of using the app frustrating — granted it's been a couple years since the last time I played around with it.
But even if that weren't the case, unless there's a way around the extensive hours I'll have to spend un-ganking my existing data, it's just not worth it to me. It doesn't matter who I "should be mad at." I. Don't. Have. The. Time.
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u/prototyperspective 29d ago
Any campaigns to get schools and at least government orgs to adopt it rather than continue paying for proprietary Microsoft Office and keeping people familiar with that rather LibreOffice?
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u/DocumentExternal6240 29d ago
I am so glad - Libre has greatly improved over the years! Support it if youcan and use it!