Just about every computer in an office cubicle has it, students around the world are offered discounts for it, and most colleges teach its applications in their technology and business departments.
Microsoft Office has been the office suite that has dominated the market since the 1990s. While some market share reports show Google's office suite as the market leader, many people still say Word document to refer to a word processor document, Excel spreadsheet to refer to a spreadsheet, and a PowerPoint to refer to a presentation. These terms speak to the ongoing world-wide dominance of Microsoft Office and the applications that compose it. Everyone thinks Microsoft when they need to do work, particularly if they are using a Windows computer.
Why would anyone with Windows use anything else? Microsoft Office is the only office suite that is needed. Other office suites are created for the Windows platform, but why. They only live in the shadow of the Redmond, Washington giant.
LibreOffice is one of these office suites. It can be installed on Windows, but Microsoft Office looms over and takes up the lion-share of the market. LibreOffice does not receive even 1 percent of the market share for office suites. Though it is the primary choice of most Linux users, and it is the most feature-rich suite for those using mac OS, Windows users have a more popular and arguably a more powerful choice.
The Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice, publishes a table that compares LibreOffice to Microsoft Office, listing major and minor advantages each suite has over the other. LibreOffice supports more human languages, with user interfaces and editing tools, than Office, and it can work with more file formats than Microsoft Office and its applications can. Each application also has various formatting features and capabilities that its Microsoft counterpart does not.
These advantages and capabilities have never attracted enough users for LibreOffice to gain a larger share of the market. Some of them may offer users a better experience for certain projects, but most Windows users who would benefit from them and do not necessarily need Microsoft Office still will not switch. They rarely think of any other tool that can do the job of Microsoft Office, even if it is better or their needs.
LibreOffice, however, is a necessary product to the Windows community in general. It does not need to be on every computer, running Windows, but it should be on at least one computer in every corporation, school, organization, household, etc. This is because LibreOffice’s key strength is preservation.
The documents that compose the suite can open many text, spreadsheet, presentation document formats used by office suite applications that were on the market, from the 1980s to present. This means that old documents can be opened and migrated to a modern format, such as DOCX and ODT (OpenDocument Text). LibreOffice is a useful tool for recovering an organization's old reports, spreadsheets, and other documents. This may be important to organizations and others with old documents that have never been migrated to modern formats.
Another strength of LibreOffice for Windows is its ability to preserve older computers and give them more functionality than they currently have. This is because users can easily acquire and install versions of LibreOffice for older vesions of Windows.
The latest versions of Office only work on Windows 10 and 11. Older versions of Office 365, that run on Windows 7, cannot be downloaded and installed. If an office or individual does not own DVDs of older Office versions, the discs will need to be purchased from Ebay or a similar online store.
Current versions of LibreOffice, however, still run on Windows 7 and later. Version 5.4, which runs on Windows XP, is still available to be downloaded from the Web. Simply download the EXE installer file and run it on the computer to install it. There is also no need to register the suite through the Web, like an installation of an older version of Microsoft Office would require.
The Windows versions of LibreOffice don't even need to be installed. There are portable app versions of them so they can be downloaded to an external drive and ran without needing to be installed. This way LibreOffice can be taken from computer to computer and used. These types of apps are known as portable apps because they can be can be run without installing them. These apps are designed to work on Windows.
This allows people and organizations to hold on to older computers, that they believe are necessary to keep. They hold onto to older computers for various reasons.
One reason is that they have old versions of software that work great for their needs. However, that software may not run well on newer versions of Windows. Many applications work well in compatibility mode for Windows 10 and 11. However, there are some applications that do not run or run as well as they do on Windows XP or 7. This is why an old computer is kept.
LibreOffice provides an office suite that can be used on these computers. These computers have older versions of various kinds of applications that are favored to their newer versions, or the software was discontinued and doesn’t run well on the latest versions of Windows. LibreOffice adds an office suite, as another useful tool, to old computers that are kept because of favored applications that are installed on them. The suite may be able to enhance the usefulness of the old hardware and used alongside the favored applications.
Another reason is that the owner intends to use the old computer for some type of project or purpose. The computer could be used as a audio player or a dedicated email machine. It could be used as a computer that is used to archive old documents. LibreOffice allows an office suite to be used on it as well.
While LibreOffice is not nearly as popular as Microsoft Office, it has a few major and minor capabilities that the popular suite does not. One of the most important major advantages is its ability to preserve and migrate older documents, so they are in a modern format. It also keeps older computers with older versions of Windows useful. Computers and software evolve overtime, and most of the time the changes are improvements. However, important and favored features are often left behind. An easy way to perform a task in a video editor or finance management application is taken away in the latest versions. The newer version of a game isn’t as fun. Keyboards on newer laptops don’t type the same way as those that were on laptops made 15 years ago. There are many reason why users want to hang on to a piece of the past.
The open-source suite, supported by the Document Foundation, can migrate software, and the latest versions of the suite runs on older versions of Windows. This can uncover important information that was lost to time and progress, and it can keep older computers as useful tools for years to come.
LibreOffice is a necessity for every software toolbox.
Comments