If you need collaborative editing then Google’s office suite is unmatched. Otherwise LibreOffice is perfectly fine as an alternative to keep your personal data off the cloud.

I used OpenOffice, and later LibreOffice, for all of my assignments in grade school and college. If you know how to use one office suite then you essentially already know how to use them all. There are some guides that can help you find certain features in the menus.

Compatibility-wise, if you intend to share documents across systems that may also require editing the documents, avoid saving documents in the Microsoft OOXML formats; use the Open Document Formats instead. You may also want to embed the fonts used in the document in case the person who opens the document doesn’t have the same fonts. As a good portion of document layout issues are caused by missing fonts being replaced by substitutes that have different character heights and widths.

Finalized read-only versions of your document should be exported as PDFs. LibreOffice does have the option of generating a hybrid PDF that contains the original ODF source embedded in it. Which you can use to avoid having to maintain two separate files — the rendered PDF and original ODF file.

Although I would recommend Scribus over LibreOffice Draw because it’s much easier to snap elements to a precise grid for perfect precision with a printer.

For me, yes, and not just for personal or academic use. I’ve created and editted countless business documents with it. I’ve gotten at least four jobs with the resume I wrote with it.

I use nothing else, unless my employer forces me to use MS office, offline. No online documents here, you never know when they sell your data…

I use OnlyOffice. Mainly for the far superior MS office compatibility. Occasionally I’ll use LibreOffice for the extra features not available in OnlyOffice.

Much of my work is collaborative document creation. I’d love to use LibreOffice but try as I might, I can’t work out how to connect it to corporate SharePoint sites etc.

Working with MS Word on anything but trivial documents is miserable. So many bugs and weirdnesses. How is it even possible for Word to let its documents become sour using its own file format!

I say “sour” because the documents are still accessible, so not fully corrupted… but over time, weirdnesses creep in such as tables losing their positioning data, cross-references breaking for no reason etc.

Yes, I’ve used it for years both privately and on business machines.

I sure do. On everything.

I do. I’m never going to pay for Microsoft Office. No need. Libre does fine.

I’ve been using it for years for all personal office suite uses.

Along with GIMP for photo editing

I have it deployed at work for my 55 users instead of getting Microsoft Office licenses for all of them. They are not sophisticated users and it suits their needs. I probably field a few more questions for it than MS Office but they would call about that too since they think I am Google.

I personally think that Calc does a better job handling various CSV files than Excel.

If you find yourself not able to commit to LibreOffice you can always try OnlyOffice. For people that are used to the Microsoft products, those are quite easy and samey feeling replacement’s.

I do, on Windows (boo-womp). It really does the job well, but I need some more time to get used to it.

If I had to choose only one program it would be OnlyOffice. I like LibreOffice Writer okay but Calc can’t handle my .csv files as they are too big while OnlyOffice does fine with even my largest of datasets.

Like everything else it depends on what you’re trying to do.

Bugs and operational issues aside a document written in Libra office is not going to be pixel compatible with the word doc. In many cases, The formatting can be pretty far off.

But the same goes for Google docs although they make a pretty solid attempt to make them close they’re still not pixel perfect.

If your output is a printer or a PDF I don’t really think it matters what you use they’re all serviceable within reason.

If you’re working with someone on grants or trying to find a job and need to give them an editable document for some reason It’s probably best to use Microsoft word.

I use Calc all the time for work. A lot of our clients send in xlsx files and I can open them and get the information out of them easily. Sometimes I need to build or modify CSV files. It’s a powerhouse for that.

I stylized my (for print) resume with Writer. Unless I’m working collaboratively I use writer for any documents to be printed. Any docs that aren’t destined for the press are just markdown.

LibreOffice is very appreciated and I’m glad it’s a standard on most distros.