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 (dat...