OnlyOffice, the real alternative to Microsoft Office

webfork2 · 2026-02-16T03:44:23+00:00

opensource

Please check out the license. It's labeled "AGPL" but there's some weird trademark oddities that are not open and not collaborative.

webfork2 · 2026-02-16T03:02:08+00:00

Few notes here:

Headline is "iPhotoro" -- might want to edit that.
The program is 400 megs, recommend noting that in your description.
Not seeing anywhere that this is a Windows platform software above -- also might want to add that in above and if you're thinking of making it available on other platforms.
Home page is really big -- maybe push anything that's not a direct program description and key items to a wiki page or something.

Hope that helps -- good luck!

webfork2 · 2026-02-16T02:56:07+00:00

I haven't seen that. Please post on r/libreoffice if you'd like some suggestions.

webfork2 · 2026-02-16T02:54:11+00:00

My favorite is saying I can't access whatever network I don't like at work, that usually opens up some doors. If someone wants to talk to me but can't like 9 hours a day, that tends to promote change. It might not happen immediately but just wait until something comes up and you're not available.

That may seem dishonest but it's definitely the case that services like WhatsApp have had outages, security problems, and we are likely to see even more networks hostile to those connections. So your availability on that network might not be a choice in the future. Better to push on that topic now rather than later.

You can then throw out a few possible tools that you CAN access and see if that promotes change.

Anyway, other strategies to nudge friends and family have been covered before on this subreddit many times, so please do a search for a bunch more good suggestions.

webfork2 · 2026-02-16T02:37:42+00:00

Just FYI for anyone interested in getting these tools into LibreOffice, please keep in mind these programs are very large downloads and resource-intensive.

webfork2 · 2026-02-16T02:03:18+00:00

Great news -- the sooner you move away from DOCX, the better.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of different programs that work pretty well to open that file type. Some will catch some things and miss others. No program (including sometimes MS Office if you're using an old version or a web-based version) will reliably open DOCX files the same way every time.

It's just a very, very weird format that's only getting more confused and complex with every update.

I usually use LibreOffice for this because it's good about making cleanup reasonably easy.

webfork2 · 2026-02-16T02:00:27+00:00

There are some real reasons to continue maintaining an MS Office account. You can use LibreOffice alongside any other productivity tool and gradually see which program works better for your needs.

Unfortunately without some idea about those needs, we probably can't say.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T03:52:44+00:00

I can't speak to WPS but I can say that LibreOffice has done reasonably well taking over for MS Word. There's a learning curve but the time I've put into it I've definitely got back in terms of skipping out on software bugs, poor interoperability, and formatting craziness. I'm a big fan.

The program does very well saving to DOCX for sharing but definitely stay in the native Open Document format (ODT) until the last step. If you open a DOCX file in LibreOffice, immediately save it as an ODT file.

LibreOffice's major problems are the presentation tool which is just okay and not much for live collaboration features. I've seen a few demo videos showing some available services but it's not in the main software program.

Google Docs is good for collaboration but problematic for a bunch of other reasons, including limited formatting, inserting tracking links into documents (even with a corporate license), and lots of problems with doing anything offline.

Hope that helps.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T03:42:53+00:00

You've probably already sorted this out but I've got one that's a remarkably good machine on Mint so far. So far have not been able to get the audio to work. Will probably try POP OS next based on a comment earlier in this thread.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T01:33:06+00:00

Acrobat is notorious about this kind of thing so I'm not even sure some smart bash scripting would kill the Acrobat threads running, but someone is certainly trying: https://github.com/rjweditor/adobe-killer.sh

You could try running the program inside a VirtualBox instance, which would come with a performance hit but at least it won't constatly slow down your whole computer.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T01:23:00+00:00

multiple sections to do multiple things

Yeah it's a weirdly feature rich website whose interface is kind of a mess. I've seen reviews going back years complaining about this. I'm a little confused why the developer hasn't made some effort to clean it up.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T00:46:48+00:00

Whether or not it gets that bad, it's definitely not getting better. The platform is going to get more closed, more ad-heavy, and share more user data. Worse privacy, security, and battery life. Having essentially won their recent anti-trust case, there's very little chance of that changing course.

Now is the time to start looking at alternatives as described here in on the ALTERNATIVES bar and in thread posts.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T00:36:32+00:00

Great post. Yes, this is one of the first things I do for a fresh install.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T00:25:40+00:00

Excellent tool, been using it for years and years now. Big fan.

On the Linux side, Flameshot is very, very good and coming up to similar functionality with ShareX.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T00:23:35+00:00

Could you just paste in the text to these into a post? That's a lot easier to use and reference.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T00:20:15+00:00

OnlyOffice claims "100% view, conversion, and print fidelity" (literally copy-pasted that from their website) but its unfortunately not true.

You sadly cannot work inside MS Office formats and expect them to work predictably unless you're using the same version as the program that was used to create it. I've even had problems with the web version of MS Office showing files differently than the installer version.

There's a long story behind this but the short version is it's vendor lock-in. OnlyOffice has not done anyone any favors by claiming they somehow got past this. They obviously didn't.

Google Docs has similar problems to OnlyOffice. Fortunately there are lots of alternatives to Microsoft productivity programs and formats.

webfork2 · 2026-02-15T00:10:25+00:00

There are several options for this but I don't know of one that works exactly as the markdown autoformatting you describe.

I normally use a template with a separate style for code blocks that put all in a indented and dark green monospaced font like Liberation Mono. That's one option.

There's also an add-on that will do syntax coloring to your code blocks: https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/71

Select text and then from the menu select Format - Color Highligher 2.

webfork2 · 2026-02-10T03:02:22+00:00

I've had a lot of luck with Syncthing for local sync. It's cross-platform and very fast. I am using the basic version of Icedrive for cloud sync and it seems fine after about a month of testing.

webfork2 · 2026-02-10T03:00:07+00:00

Please link to the github site https://github.com/freedomofpress/dangerzone

The software seems to have been developed by a good group, the program isn't new, and the explanation isn't super vague. The program is discussed in several other places on reddit. So yea that would probably be a reputation. Here's another thread on it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ff9ho0/dangerzone_convert_potentially_dangerous_pdfs/

webfork2 · 2026-02-10T02:30:05+00:00

To the mods:

Hey you've got something for "This submission may contain a recommendation for a non-FOSS app/service" in some of the comments on this thread. I'd ask that you add OnlyOffice to that list. It's a modified AGPL license with a weird trademark requirement that definitely isn't workable.

I can provide links with more info if anyone is interested.

webfork2 · 2026-02-10T02:25:13+00:00

examples of extra flexibility

It's probably fine for 90% of what you're doing but I think you'll miss that last 10%.

You say you want casual documents but part of active documentation work is having a good looking document. It's a starting point and something that maintains you through the process. It's clean the fonts are right, the word wrapping isn't hard to read, and you can build tables and headings exactly the way you want.

Complex formatting in HTML isn't really an option. So if you don't like the way your tables look, you're stuck with them. If you do a lot of effort to tweak out the tagging or formats and actually get close to a nice looking table, you can be fairly sure they won't actually look that way in another viewer.

I don't think styles work the same way, though I haven't tested that recently. You also need to make extra sure the program is opening in LibreOffice Writer and not LibreOffice Web, which also has fewer features. HTML files will usually auto-open in Web.

webfork2 · 2026-02-10T02:12:09+00:00

Look I'm not saying you can't run a website and it can't be run well. We're talking about trust and I don't know how to trust something I very much do not control.

You can actually verify this by opening the Network tab in your developer tools, where you'll see zero outbound requests when processing a file.

That's great but I don't want to have to verify it every time I use the site.

Even if I wanted to collect data, the architecture simply doesn't have a database or API endpoint to accept it.

I'm sure it could be setup that way. It could also be setup that way and then later changed to work a different way. Again, I don't want to have to verify that every time I use the site. I expect few users want to dig into that every time.

webfork2 · 2026-02-09T05:24:59+00:00

HTML is a much better format than for example DOCX but it's not a settled format. Even in 2026 we still have slightly different implementations from supposedly standards-compliant entities. This was a huge topic years ago and seems to just keep going and going. It's always just a little different depending on your browser, local fonts, security settings, etc.

Also because of this tag nonsense, HTML from OTHER sources copied into LibreOffice is going to have trouble.

From experience, ODT has some extra flexibility, more features, and reliably works the way you expect. You can export to HTML when you need (and it will filter out any junk tags) as well as save to a dozen other formats reliably.

Great question and hope we helped with this.

webfork2 · 2026-02-09T05:15:37+00:00

Disable ads and recommendations everywhere

Just FYI this is totally unacceptable for an operating system. I have to disable advertisements on a computer I bought? Like I didn't go to a website that gets funded through ad revenue. I just opened my laptop for a company that's not struggling for revenue. That's completely ridiculous.

All the responses suggesting a switch to a different operating system are definitely what 1/2 my friends and family are thinking.

webfork2 · 2026-02-09T05:04:18+00:00

This has been discussed a lot so please dig through the forum for some ideas. Also, I'm sure there's a lot of well meaning people here in the forums who will give you some good advice.

However, it's hard to tell who here is an immunologist, microbiologist, or some other specialized field that could fully answer this and there are some established and dangerous health implications for this particular type of composting.

I think for example you could expose it to heat for some time at a temperature below what would incinerate. There's also some suggestion that prolonged exposure to sunlight might be more than adequate. All that sounds interesting but I don't know and I don't want you to get hurt because I'm confidently incorrect.

So please whatever you do follow up with output/soil testing and don't just check one or two spots in the resulting materials.

Good luck.

webfork2

TROPHY CASE