[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for...
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Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their
business?
We're a ~40 person startup, about to scale post-series A. We have
been using Google Suite since the beginning in 2015, and honestly
it's just terrible software and feels like it has had zero updates
in 7 years. One of the biggest problems for me with Gsuite is that
there is no real offline support (I know there is supposed to be,
but it has never worked for me, plus the drive isn't available
offline). I work a lot on trains crossing Europe, or sometimes on
flights. I just want to have my files accessible. I use
LibreOffice personally, and I'm thinking about moving the team to
it before we seriously grow. Has anyone tried this in their
companies? Was it successful? I'm especially interested in
companies of a similar size (or larger) than ours, and those where
not everyone is super technical / a software engineer. My big
concerns are support and training, I think there are companies who
offer this which would make it a lot easier. (Edit: to be clear,
our CFO will probably continue to use Excel, as will some of the
team who build very complicated modelling sheets as that is what
they're used to, but I'm thinking for the rest of us who mostly
need decent spreadsheets, and good word-processing and presentation
tools).
Author : gtf21
Score : 27 points
Date : 2022-06-05 20:50 UTC (2 hours ago)
| unnouinceput wrote:
| The company my wife works for is using LibreOffice entirely. Said
| company is a national retail service, focused on books and school
| related consumables, with around 40 stores opened throughout the
| entire country. And is using this since at least 2017, the year
| my wife went to work for them, possible since their beginnings in
| early 2000's, but I'm not sure since I haven't asked.
|
| 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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well, this is probably smaller than the companies you're thinking
| of, but my wife's retail store (two owners, just her and her
| business partner, 0 employees) use LibreOffice. They aren't
| trying to do any fancy graphing. For basic word processing and
| spreadsheet calculations, it works fine. It can produce some
| graphs, but I think in this area it is not as good as Excel
| (although I haven't used Excel in a while). Not too much of a
| training load, if they've used other office suites.
|
| 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.
| posguy wrote:
| There are a few IT people and Managed Service Providers I deal
| with that have become pretty adept at cutting over small and
| midsize businesses from G Suite to Microsoft 365.
|
| The office suite is better, the email client configurability is
| significantly better (from what they claim, I'm a Thunderbird
| on Linux person), and you get single sign on too.
|
| My firm uses our own mailserver (with DKIM and SPF),
| LibreOffice for doing our cost comparisons for clients and
| other document generation needs, and has been pretty happy with
| that. We are split across Windows, Linux and MacOS, the sole
| tether for about half of our Windows users is a dependence on
| iTunes backup (since apparently they don't trust iCloud,
| ugh...) for their iPhones, preventing a migration to Linux.
| oezi wrote:
| Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some
| point, I wouldn't recommend it. Spending 10 USD per user/month on
| Microsoft 365 is a small investment but it gives most users
| instant familiarity with the tools and provides you with tools
| for collaboration (drafting contracts for instance). I don't
| think you can save money if you look at training effort alone. In
| the worst case you will be seen as hard to integrate (and hence
| buy) as a company because of a weird office stack.
| codevark wrote:
| ISL wrote:
| I feel like the biggest blocker to modern adoption of LibreOffice
| is the inability to collaborate in ways that Google Docs enables.
|
| Are there open-source implementation of Docs, even poor ones?
| yaks_hairbrush wrote:
| Maybe this: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/
| thecleaner wrote:
| Or to run on MacOS without crashing.
| gbear605 wrote:
| Huh? I use LibreOffice frequently on macOS without any
| crashing at all. Is this a common issue?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Sandstorm.io is Docs-like in it's collaboration features. But
| the OP specifically discussed offline operation as an important
| functionality, so cloud-based collaboration tools without a
| local application may not fly.
| fred967 wrote:
| I try to convert the company I work to use Nextcloud with the
| collaborativ solutions.
| dhruvkar wrote:
| We're a ~40 person wholesale distribution company and I moved our
| company to LibreOffice. We also use Google Suite.
|
| 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.
| kappuchino wrote:
| Have a look at the plans of Schleswig-Holstein, a federal state
| of Germany. The want to switch 25.000 PCs to LibreOffice and
| Linux from Windows/MS Office. Details here:
| https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-s...
| kzrdude wrote:
| How will they do without document review and collaborative
| editing features?
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