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To my surprise, what used to be called iWork has been my main "Office" replacement for years now. It's good enough, and it's free. I have switched over most of the non-technical people in my life to it, and they have no issues using it (except if they email a .pages document to a Windows user).

I especially enjoy Numbers and the way you can arrange multiple tables on a page. It's a different paradigm coming from Google Sheets or Excel and takes some getting used to, but to me it now makes more sense.

Of course, if I need something "done right", I'll drop down to Affinity, LaTeX, or InDesign. But I rarely have these needs nowadays.

A similar argument could be made for going all in on Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, but I feel queasy knowing that all of my data is in a free Google account, after reading some of the stories here about reaching Google support if something goes sideways.

I tried using Numbers across my Mac and iPad. It has some show stopping sync bugs there which result in it completely destroying documents. Then when you try and recover previous versions you get a lesson in Apple's commitment to things other than the facade on the front of their stuff: not a lot. The document versions thing sometimes doesn't even work and if it does it's so slow it's unusable. Probably backed with some low tier S3 stuff. Also the formula editor is painful at best.

TeXshop on the Mac is however rather nice.

I sometimes wish Claris Works 5 was still around. It was small and fast, did everything I actually needed when writing documents or letters and nothing I didn't need, and had a clean, uncluttered UI that made sense.
I also like the Pages/Numbers/Keynote suite. Of course, I'm not a heavy user of office apps at home, so large or complex documents aren't something I'm encountering day-to-day. If I needed to build such a beast, I would probably lean on the 'old standbys' like LaTeX and the like. LibreOffice is still a great platform and one I reach for if an oddly formatted document comes to me, but it's not something I'm using for crafting from scratch.
> iWork... It's good enough

I would argue it is not just good enough but better than Office for normal consumers. For 99% of my usage and SMEs, Page is insanely better at layout. Numbers are much better for simple chat, formulas and comparison. Keynote.... well i haven't touched powerpoint for 20+ years so I dont know.

The only thing Office is better is when you need slightly complex formulas in Excel or some enterprise that has been using Excel for so long you need to use it to guarantee absolute 100% compatibility. For business Excel usage is still king. And will continue to be for at least another 10 - 15 years if not more.

I agree, but Numbers is sooo slow! When opening a huge file it is unusable.
Would you not say it’s sort of a stretch calling Apple software free, which only works on (anything but free) Apple hardware?
Have used Pages/Numbers/Keynote for years, alongside MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint, and always found the former to have better or nicer workflows for most tasks, and especially for page layouts. (Excel is however superior for very large or complex spreadsheets.) Highly underrated software.
I also use the iWork suite because that's what I have, and I despise Numbers

Pages and Keynote are fine but I can't for the life of me figure out how to do anything with Numbers. It looks beautiful and I want to like it but as you say it's (too) different from Excel, at least for me.

If I'm evaluating a potential application whose core functionality does not require external resources/servers (Dropbox for example) and they don't at a minimum offer some kind of perpetual fallback license (aka the Jetbrains annual subscription model), then I straight up bounce.

Examples of good alternatives

- Pixelmator > Photoshop

- Davinci Resolve > Premiere

- Reaper > Audition

I have no interest in renting my tools.

You actually can still buy Office. It's quite expensive though.

I suppose it always was.

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=2113574&CLCID=0x10...

I would also like to throw in Lightworks into the “very good Premiere alternatives”. If you are ok with exporting 720p, the free version is pretty capable but if you want higher export resolution it cost money.

It has a subscription option, but also a “buy outright” option, and it’s often on sale for half price for the permanent license, ends up costing around ~$200 and it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I think it’s very good, though I am not a professional video editor by trade.

I really enjoy the affinity suite.
Do you have any good alternatives to Photoshop that are open source? And that are not GIMP.

Nothing against GIMP, I just found it too hard to learn coming from photoshop.

I'm looking for a simple editor that can do color adjustments, crop/resize images, and add text.

Isn't it dogmatic to think so. Sometimes it makes sense to rent tools.
While those producing tools for living might not have an interest on keeping offering them free of charge.

Eventually that guy/girl in Nebraska is going to look elsewhere.

Resolve is cool for pro users for others who basically just want to do small edits with straightforward software chrck out kdenlive
I wish everyone would switch to LibreOffice so I can stop having to explain why their documents are formatted weirdly after I edit them
It's probably also related to the geopolitical context.

The US has threatened war at least against Canada, Europe, Panama and China, while clearly eyeing an alliance with Russia, which would in turn threaten many countries bordering Russia. That's a pretty large number of users who don't feel safe using US products anymore.

I am one of those annoying LaTeX people now, so my “word processor” ends up being tmux, NeoVim, and Nix, but I understand that that’s not for most people.

LibreOffice is honestly fine nowadays. I feel like Excel is probably a bit better than Calc, but Calc is still capable enough for most tasks.

The documents look decent enough, it’s easy to use, it’s reasonably fast, and you can’t really beat the price.

I have to admit that a reason that I haven’t touched it much is pretty silly: I like the icons for OpenOffice better. LibreOffice’s icons look too…childish? Hard to explain, and obviously subjective, but I wish I could get import OpenOffices icons into LibreOffice.

I usually used InDesign for presentations on PC. Switching to Scribus now that I run a linux only office has been trivial.

Specific to LibreOffice - as an academic I've had to create a couple presentations in ppt format recently. It sucks, but it was a requirement of the conference. Anyway - LO Impress still has many of the annoyances of PowerPoint, but head to head it's actually an objectively better, faster program than PowerPoint.

Given the number of people who still right align texts with spaces or tab if they are professionals I think for mist people programs like Word and LibreOffice Writer are overkill
I've commented as much before but what do people even use office for these days? Like I hear individuals complain about the prices and I'm just like I have not needed a real office suite in years. Google Docs has been enough to get by with for free for well over a decade.

Are you... creating and printing documents? Why? I haven't had a real need for a word processor since email was invented.

MS office has been removing features, ruining the UI and adding bloat. No wonder people are jumping ship.
That is great, hopefully it continues.

I am far from a heavy WP/Spreadsheet user, usually Emacs for me, but at work I need to mess with spreadsheets. I use LibreOffice for that and to me there is no difference.

LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, both have been a great since I switched away from Office 365—feeling I get overcharged for a function I will not use—for use with Nextcloud. It is even better to get a $39 ('refurbed' license for Office 2024) if you have to use (MS)Office.
I started using OpenOffice a couple decades ago when I got tired of pirating the market leader. Not wanting to start any religious wars, but I still haven't made the leap to Libre.
It also supports WordPerfect formats, Which MS Office dropped. My wife was in a group email editing documents and someone emailed their edits using WordPerfect format. I loaded it in LibreOffice and exported it in DOCX format and it worked.
I need a Calc which doesn't suck. I don't necessarily need Excel, but the spreadsheet shouldn't be unusably slow at 100x100 cells with simple calculations and a literal couple of V/XLOOKUPs.
I ditched MS office last year (for libreoffice) when MS updated their terms to allow them to hoover up all my content, even that stored only on my computer, to train their AI. Subscription costs (which I'd bought a version several years ago) pale by comparison to the wrongness of that.
I don't mind paying for MS Office. I do mind that every new version seems to be worse than the previous one for doing actual work on a real computer.

I realy feel the PM's at Microsoft consider you a dinosaur if your primary "productivity" device is not your phone.

Yet are the donations also on the rise? I bet they aren't.
Probably too late to this thread for anyone to read this, but the real reason for this bump is Microsoft removing WordPad from the latest versions of Windows 11.
Working on my taxes now with LO Calc. My resume is in Writer, easily exported to PDF. Been using it since it was called StarOffice. Go LibreOffice and FLOSS!
Can you guys recommend an android app which can do simple edits (mostly data entry) on spreadsheet .ODS files stored locally on the device. Right now I use Collabora but UX is not the best and it feels very slow and unresponsive at times. MS Excel requires conversion to xlsx before you can edit and Google Sheets requires to upload to google drive so neither is an option. Any alternatives?
I've been looking into what it would take to "theme" LibreOffice into something more Gnome-ish, less jarring to new users, for some reason there's been many project with that in mind and they all seem abandoned and / or in limbo
Subscription is fine on Office for me. I just pay for the O365 family edition (without copilot) and everyone gets it for about £6.70 a month. However I don't want the signed in cloud version so I just use the moral justification of cracking it with Ohook and disabling all the cloud shit. I'm paying for it so I don't give a crap.

LibreOffice I want to like but I've tripped over many weird bugs and things which have been floating around in their Bugzilla since the dawn of time.

If I have an academic interest, I'll just use TeXlive and LaTeX Workship inside VScode.

I use libreoffice call to open stuff on my Linux box, but the default formula behavior turns me off.

If I type “=“ into D2 then left arrow to C2 then type “*” I would expect when I next press up arrow it to bring me to D1. But in Calc it brings me to C1. In other words it doesn’t reset to the starting cell after each operation.

I guess I can change it somehow, but that’s been enough of an annoyance that I haven’t switched wholly for on google sheets, though I’d like to.

I just use Office 2007 for my personal stuff. It still works, even on Windows 11! Other than slightly better non-contiguous region operations and QoL improvements to pivot tables in Excel, on 365 that I use at work, I don't really miss anything. It also lags a lot less.
I've been trying different office apps that work with MS office!!!

I understand this is a shifting requirement but I just don't work in an environment where I can force everyone to switch.

Currently I find OnlyOffice to be much better than LibreOffice.

Does HN know of any others?

I use livreoffice writer for my legal work on a full time basis. Gets the job done.

Have to send PDFs so it works.

I do not have to do collaborative editing like tracking but I suppose that works too.

Calc is.. slowly improving but it works.

Google docs doesn’t work?
I confess that I've been using a pirated version of office for years and years. When I can no longer use that then I will upgrade to libre office.
LibreOffice is also not spying on users.
I wish they'd make LibreQuickbooks.
Microsoft Office was ok when I last used it 25 years ago. I think it came preinstalled. But LibreOffice is the real thing and that its going to become the standard is good news.
is there a way to plug say Grok or Chatgpt API into LibreOffice writer or sheets? such that it can have write access to the documents?
I don't think I could ever go back to storing my docs locally and not being able to access them from all my devices at all times anywhere in the world, easily.