LibreOffice Writer is a Viable Alternative to Microsoft Word (Premium)

While I have turned to a Markdown editor to solve the enshittification issues with Microsoft Word, that’s a bridge too far for many. Sure, you could use a web-based word processor like Google Docs. But if you’re looking for a straight-up native Windows app replacement for Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, part of the free LibreOffice suite, looks like a great option.

For those unfamiliar, LibreOffice is in many ways a throwback to an era in which Microsoft and open source were aggressively at odds. Microsoft viewed open source as a threat to its business, a “cancer” that might see Windows replaced by Linux. And the open source community viewed Microsoft as evil, an empire that needed to be defeated, freeing users from its iron grip on the industry.

It was in this climate that Sun Microsystems, then facing its own existential threat from Linux and open source, acquired StarOffice maker StarDivision as part of an effort to embrace the open source threat and take on Microsoft, its most hated rival. Sun allegedly decided on the purchase because doing so was cheaper than licensing Microsoft Office for its 42,000 employees at the time. But whatever the reason, Sun quickly announced its plans to open source the office productivity suite’s source code and to distribute it for free at OpenOffice.org.

Sun continued forward with StarOffice as a paid product, releasing StarOffice 6 for $76 in 2002, a dramatic savings over any version of Microsoft Office. And by 2005, it had started to more closely resemble the then-current Office 2003 with a similar feature set and the same pricing advantage. But Sun wouldn’t live to continue the fight: After discussing mergers with IBM and HP, the firm was swallowed up by Oracle in 2009 and while StarOffice was not a big factor in that acquisition, Oracle went on to rebrand Star Office as Oracle Open Office. And then it began reducing the resources it dedicated to both Open Office and the free OpenOffice.org.

And that’s where LibreOffice enters the picture as a fork of OpenOffice.org, created by unhappy outside OpenOffice.org developers who also started The Document Foundation (TDF) to promote the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), or OpenDocument, as an XML-based open alternative to Microsoft’s proprietary Office document formats. LibreOffice is only one of many StarOffice/OpenOffice.org forks, but it’s almost certainly the most popular, presumably making it the most popular open source alternative to Microsoft Office, even today.

LibreOffice isn’t just a throwback historically, it’s a throwback from a user experience perspective, with its apps offering the old-school menus and toolbars interface that Microsoft first jettisoned for the Ribbon in Office 2007. (Even the installer is old-school.) Like Office, it consists of several standalone apps—Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations, Draw (vector graphics), Math (mathematical formulas), and Base (database)—though it lacks an Outlook-like email and personal information management solution. It also runs just about everywhere: Windows and Mac, of course, but also Linux, the web, Android, and iOS. There is also a portable version on Windows, which is interesting. (I’ve only tried the normal Windows version.)

Most importantly to this discussion, the relevant LibreOffice apps can open, edit, and save in Microsoft Office formats, though they default to ODF formats for file saves. And while I can’t speak to the exact level of compatibility there, given my sporadic experience with the product, it is by most accounts pretty solid.

In recent days, I’ve experimented with a few traditional alternatives to Microsoft Word after seeing whether it was possible to exorcise the annoying pop-up warnings and informational boxes that triggered my original exodus. (It is not possible.) But I kept coming back to LibreOffice Writer, which is in some ways a blast from the past, yes, but also highly customizable in a delightfully early 2000s Microsoft Office kind of way. That is, yes, it ships with familiar and busy toolbars, but you can hone those as you like, along with other aspects of the app, and then save your custom configuration so that you can apply it to LibreOffice Writer on other computers. What’s old is new again. (Yes, Microsoft Office still supports this capability, though I suspect few use it now.)

Customization is important to me because the default Writer user interface, like that of Microsoft Word, is too busy. As a writer who understands and frequently uses keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, I prefer a minimalist interface that exposes only a handful of commands graphically as toolbar buttons. And so I spent a bit of time removing most of the buttons from Writer’s Standard and Formatting toolbars, rearranging them to occupy just a single line, and then saving the configuration. You know, like it was 1999 again.

From a day-to-day writing experience, Writer behaves just like Word. I changed the default font to Calibri and I enjoy the quality of the font rendering. All the basic formatting functions I need—bold, italic, underline, various headings, hyperlinks, and so on—is there and some keyboard shortcuts, like those for headlines, are simpler than is the case with Word, and more obvious. (Ctrl + 1 for Heading 1, for example, vs. Ctrl + Alt + 1 in Word.) It supports spelling and grammar checking, of course, though I needed to enable auto-correct while typing. In the end, I customized auto-correct, various visual attributes related to rulers, item boundaries, and the like, and finally arrived at something I feel is quite usable.

As I’ve noted in the past, one of my hard-line requirements for a writing tool is that it outputs to WordPress without any formatting additions or issues, and this need has prevented me from even considering certain tools, including Google Docs. But the tool I do use, Typora, has one curious limitation that I’ve had to work around: If I select the body of an article to Paste into WordPress and Copy it to the clipboard, it retains some formatting additions. So I need to do a “Copy without Theme Styling” instead of Copy, and that required me to create a custom keyboard shortcut (I use Ctrl + M). Which I of course still forget to use sometimes.

LibreOffice Writer does not have this problem: I can write normally, and use whatever styles I want, and when I Copy the text to the clipboard and then Paste it into WordPress, the underlying code is as clean as can be. In this regard, Writer is perfect. And, go figure, better than Typora.

Of course, Markdown is a key advantage to Typora: I like that this format is plain text and will always be both machine- and human-readable. But for its part, Writer supports a variety of formats—ODF, Word Docx, Rich Text (RTF), and so on—and I could make it work. For now, I’m experimenting with Rich Text, and I haven’t seen any issues.

Performance is likewise excellent. I can’t speak to whether it is “as fast as” Word per se, but it feels like it, and I’ve never run into an issue where my typing exceeded the app’s ability to display it in real-time.

No, it’s not perfect. I do vaguely wish there was a Simple Ribbon-type UI, and I suspect others might even prefer a full Ribbon. It doesn’t use the first line of a document as the default file name, which is inexcusable. (Word does this, but Typora does this even better by skipping over characters that can’t be used in a file name.) And that old-school UI will definitely turn off some people, though I feel like customizing it solves the problem to some degree. Everyone has their own needs and wants. Your mileage may vary.

But in the end, it’s hard to argue with something that is free, highly customizable, highly compatible, and just works. And if you balk at the high cost of Microsoft Office, the software giant’s subscription service fetish, or those annoying pop-ups that continue to set me off, you could do a hell of a lot worse. In fact, there’s no reason not to at least give it a try: As noted, LibreOffice is free, free as in literally free. And I’m surprised by how well it works, frankly.