LibreOffice

My copy of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is getting a little long in the tooth, and I hear there is a new version coming out pretty soon, so when I started setting up my new MBPr, I figured it was a good time to try LibreOffice.

<p>
  It might be <em>really good</em>, and I could get rid of MS Office completely, or maybe it will be good enough to get me over the hump to the new version&#8230;
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<p>
  LibreOffice comes in a convenient package that looks like a single file for the Mac (even though it&#8217;s really a directory). You just copy it to your &#8216;Applications&#8217; folder and you are done! The suite comes with <strong>word processing</strong>, <strong>spreadsheet</strong>, and <strong>presentation</strong> modes just like you would expect. It&#8217;s been a long time since I&#8217;ve used this software package (back in the days when it was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice">Sun OpenOffice</a>), and I was quite surprised to find <strong>drawing</strong>, <strong>database</strong>, and <strong>formula</strong> functions. I suppose they were there, I just forgot!
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    <a href="http://joshaust.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Screen-Shot-2012-06-26-at-3.38.00-PM.png"><img src="http://joshaust.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Screen-Shot-2012-06-26-at-3.38.00-PM-300x200.png" alt="LibreOffice Applications" title="LibreOffice Applications" width="300" height="200" class="size-medium wp-image-166" /></a>
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      LibreOffice Applications
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    <p>
      It also seems to do a pretty good job of opening MS Office files, and the formatting is certainly better than just using <a href="http://docs.google.com">GoogleDocs</a> to view and edit MS Word files that someone else emailed you. I&#8217;m almost done with my MBA, but the de facto standard at Tech is MS Word and Excel. You absolutely must be able to view/edit/produce these file formats. It&#8217;s a requirement of the school, and they mean it.
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    <p>
      I get the sense that the LibreOffice spreadsheet program is not nearly the beast that Excel is, but then again neither is <a href="http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/">Numbers</a>. Where I would have been hung up with the LibreOffice spreadsheet is when one of my courses required an add on pack for Excel, such as a statistics pack. In fairness to LibreOffice, even Office for Mac&#8217;s version of Excel did not support the same sort of add ons that the windows version did (at least in Office 2008 for Mac).
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    <p>
      The LibreOffice presentation program ok OK, but not nearly as polished as <a href="http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/">Apple&#8217;s Keynote</a>. That&#8217;s not really a surprise, because even PowerPoint is crap compared to Keynote. In my opinion Keynote is the best productivity app in the iWork Suite from Apple.
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    <p>
      <a href="http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/">Apple&#8217;s Pages</a> is much better at doing page layout than MS Word or LibreOffice&#8217;s Text Document, but what do you expect when you compare dedicated word processing apps to a page layout app that can also word process? Well, most people expect to be able to do a little bit of layout, and LibreOffice does let you do that. I&#8217;ll have to play with it a little more to determine exactly where the line in the sand is where LibreOffice becomes frustrating and I want to go back to Pages.
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    <p>
      In any case I&#8217;m going to try it out and let you know how it works for me. If I get desperate I can always use the laptop my employer provided me with (or Pages) to create/edit documents. If anyone else has experiences they want to share please do so in the comments!
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