Microsoft Office is the most widely used office suite in the world. Every day, millions of users make use of their programs, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others, both for personal use and for work. However, the Microsoft suite is not the only one that we can install on our computer. What’s more, there is an alternative, totally free and open source, which is gradually becoming one of the best free alternatives to Microsoft programs: LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is probably the best alternative to Office that we can find. This office suite was born as a fork of OpenOffice after the project was sold to Oracle, and transferred to the Apache foundation. LibreOffice, controlled by The Document Foundation , has managed to leave OpenOffice far behind, becoming one of the best office suites available on the net.
However, both users and most companies still prefer to go through Microsoft’s ring and pay for the Office (or Office 365) license to be able to use programs that, almost almost, could be available for free and open source . Why?
Office compatibility
The first problem we run into when trying to use LibreOffice is with compatibility. Most Word documents are saved in DOCX formats , which guarantees excellent compatibility with other Microsoft programs. But outside of its ecosystem, there are always problems.
If we have ever opened a DOCX document with LibreOffice we will have seen how everything is left on the shoulder. Badly ordered texts, wrong fonts, photos wrongly placed in the document … everything has been destroyed.
It is true that LibreOffice 7.0 has greatly improved the compatibility with Office documents. Even now we can save by default in DOCX for better compatibility with Office. But there is still a lot of work ahead to offer the best compatibility. The Document Foundation should pay much more attention to compatibility and work hard on it so that with the release of the next big update, LibreOffice 8.0, it is finally 100% compatible with the original Office documents.
Cloud storage and collaboration
Another aspect where LibreOffice also lags behind is in the integration with the cloud. Microsoft has OneDrive and Office Online , and even Google has Google Docs . But this office suite has neither cloud storage nor an online suite. And the collaborative features also leave a lot to be desired, not to mention non-existent. This makes this suite out of the options of many users as it cannot meet their needs.
It is true that The Document Foundation has an “online” mode, but it is nothing more than the same usual suite to be mounted on a server or in a container. Something that, the truth, is not very practical. The company had to launch a real alternative to Google Docs and Office online , in addition to offering a small storage system so that users can save their documents in the cloud, share them and access them from anywhere.
Goodbye Java
It’s true that when the project started, relying on Java made things a lot easier. And besides, it was the best way to make the suite available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and any other operating system. However, today, basing such a program on Java only brings performance problems . Java is a thing of the past, today there are far superior technologies, both in terms of features and security and, above all, in performance.
It is an almost impossible job, but The Document Foundation should think about abandoning Java and using a more modern and optimized programming language. It is not normal for Writer to consume 4 times more memory than Word 2019.
Ditching Java and adopting other, more modern technology would not only improve the performance of the suite, it would allow the program to continue to grow.