LibreOffice

Kommentare: I've used LIbreOffice since its beginning in 2011 and prior to that I used OpenOffice. LibreOffice is, for me, a superior alternative to MS Word as I have no concerns about vendor lock-in.

Vorteile: LibreOffice is very intuitive because it is based on rather traditional menu structures that make it easy for users to find features. It offers most of the features that MS Word offers, and most of the time implements them in an easier to understand fashion. LibreOffice can import documents from MS Word and does so usually flawlessly. To avoid compatibility problems with MS Word, I advise using .odt format to create and edit your documents and only convert to .docx when necessary to send a copy to someone who uses MS Word. This will avoid most corruption problems. LibreOffice is available in portable format. You can run it from a USB flash drive on any computer. This was extremely convenient for me when travelling and doing research- I could use any convenient computer and run my own complement of portable-apps including LibreOffice. LibreOffice appears to be very efficiently coded- check out the size of the installation code (around 200mb) compared to MS Office 2013 (nearly 800bm). The Document Foundation, which supports the development of LibreOffice, is dedicated to open standards to avoid proprietary vendor lock-in. The software is free to download and use- this is essential for grad students working on a budget. Open source software helps ensure that people have access to excellent software tools irrespective of their capability to pay.

Nachteile: Sometimes it cannot import MS Word documents that have special formatting.
It's more difficult to find quick solutions to formatting complex documents. It appears that the majority of professional instructional materials focuses on using MS Word.

Vorteile: LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice in 2010 and has since become the premier open source office suite. It has many pros:
-- open source license and thus is free. Most importantly, it is created by a community of developers who believe good quality software should be available to everyone, not just those who can afford it. Most of the world's population cannot afford a license of MS Word, nor do they have access to the internet. Open source software ensures that disadvantaged populations have better access to good software. Additionally, the open standards used by LibreOffice ensure that user's data will remain accessible and not locked into a proprietary format from which it cannot be extracted. - standard menu. LibreOffice has smartly chosen to continue using standard menus rather than "ribbon menus" which many people find confusing because they change based on the task being performed. Few studies have proven that ribbon menus offer any productivity advantage whatsoever. - easy to use. All of the features of LibreOffice are quite easy to use and plenty of third-party documentation and tutorials exist online. - rapid development. New versions of LibreOffice are released every six months. - LibreOffice has plugins for use with Zotero, an open source reference manager. This makes it an indepsensibe tool for university students and researchers.

Nachteile: - because it is under rapid development, the "FRESH" releases of LibreOffice sometimes crash. The "STABLE" version is, well, more stable, but I've still had it crash or freeze on me, although its unusual and no more often than MS Word crashes. - While LibreOffice can open and create MS Word documents, sometimes the formatting is not exactly the same.