Microsoft Office is relatively expensive and does not run on Linux too well. The
ID: 661874 • Letter: M
Question
Microsoft Office is relatively expensive and does not run on Linux too well.
There's at least
Openoffice.org
LibreOffice
Run MS Office in wine (does it work?)
Run MS Office in CrossOffice (is it better than wine?)
Run MS Office in virtual machine (requires both Office and Windows licenses)
And on cloud
Google Docs (Google Drive)
Office365
I'm receiving some files created with MS Office from other, but those are not complicated. Additionally, minor breaking in formatting is tolerable, as files are primarily for transmitting information, not presenting it to e.g paying customer in best possible format. Being able to both open and export to MS Office compatible files is a must, though. Working normally on different format is okay.
In addition to that, I don't have specific feature requirements. I'm looking for recommendations for office suite (in this case, word processor, spreadsheets, slides) in Linux. I certainly don't need every bell and whistle MS Office offers.
Explanation / Answer
I think the first thing you need to do is evaluate how you use Office and what you need it to do. I find what I need in office apps is subtly and annoyingly different on Linux than on Windows and a lot of the cross-platform approaches don't cut it. This may be partly to do with the things I do with spreadsheets and the like, but it is something to think about.
In general you are going to have one of two strategies to go about this. Many people (myself included) use both.
In general LibreOffice and OpenOffice are reasonably comparable. These will get you most of the way there for basic documents. Perfect compatibility is never possible but for simple documents you shouldn't have a problem.
However, it is where you get beyond the simple cases that you really need to do more research and where your tool choices may change. Personally because I do a lot with LaTeX, I find most word processors and spreadsheet software relatively insufficient for anything beyond business letters. I also end up using Gnumeric quite a bit as a spreadsheet because it has a LaTeX export option. In essence the spreadsheet is a small piece of other things you are usually doing and how this all fits together is important. Similarly I find Abiword is very useful for light-weight word processing tasks (including reading/writing simple MS Office format documents).
So my recommendation is to start with LibreOffice or OpenOffice (take your pick) and then evaluate what you need and what other tools you need to add to meet your needs.