this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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Libreoffice. I tried it long ago and it was bad, but that is no longer the case. Give it a chance
"But the interface looks slightly different and I'm scared of being in charge of things"
Whats really funny is that the interface is closer to MS Office 2003 which was Office pre "ribbon" interface. So the current version of MS office is actually the weird one that changed.
Yeah I remember when they introduced the ribbon and I hated it. Now I prefer it
You can change the interface, including a ribbon style interface.
To be fair the interface is pretty kluncky. But it’ll do.
I don't think it was ever bad, the compatibility with Microsoft office is not completely their yet making it not usable to Excel experts of for some teachers due to docx support being a bit lackluster
It is worth pointing out that the only reason docx support is lackluster is because of active efforts from MS to undermine third party support. It is a interesting story actually, but I don't recall exactly, but it goes like this, there was some regulatory push to open formats and MS undermined this by creating and making the docx (and all other *x family) open but make it so convoluted and unnecessarily difficult. If I am not mistaken they even keep unnecessarily updating and changing it so third party is always lagging behind in support and the cherry on top that MS don't correctly implement its own format on purpose so the files are effectively broken for anyone that follows the spec to a T.
I remember reading about how LibreOffice was better at recovering broken Excel files than Excel itself. It was a long time ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if that still were the case at all.
I think Excel has more functionality than any of the FOSS alternatives, unfortunately. It's some pretty powerful software.
But I've also run into cases where LibreOffice could do things Excel couldn't at the time.
Like enter strings that are longer than 255 characters into a cell.
Yeah a lot more, 90% won't miss any of though.
It was never bad.
The dark theme controls are still pretty bad, bruh.
Yeah, but given how many time I have used libreoffice and before that open office to do what word and excel couldn't, I am not very concerned with themes.
Gotcha. Well, I should say that, at least back when I was on Windows, trying to use LibreOffice's dark theme was extremely crippling; entire rows of buttons would be invisible to the point of trying to go dark making the program invisible (and if you're really used to dark themes like me, that can be quite unpleasant).