Best Linux Microsoft Office Alternatives

Welcome to another video from ExplainingComputers.com. For some people, a fundamental problem with Linux is that it cannot run Microsoft Office. One solution is to use the online version of Office which is currently called Microsoft 365 for the web. However, the Microsoft Office web apps have cut down functionality In this video, we're therefore going to look at four Microsoft Office alternatives that can be installed in Linux and specifically LibreOffice, FreeOffice and its paid sibling SoftMakerOffice, OnlyOffice and WPSOffice. All of these can open and save Microsoft Office files and offer good functionality. So, let's go and take a closer look. Right, here we are in Linux Mint where we're going to start by taking a look at LibreOffice. This is open source, pre-installed in many Linux distros including here in Linux Mint and includes a word processor, a PowerPoint alternative called Impress, a drawing package and a spreadsheet called Calc. There's also a database called Base although this is often not pre-installed so you may have to look for it in your software center and install it from there. And if you want to learn how to use LibreOffice Base, I've got a dedicated video. But for now, let's open up the LibreOffice Writer word processor which is very widely used and a solid standalone alternative to Microsoft Word. The default interface is menu based as we can see although if you want to, you can go to View and User Interface and select a tab mode which if we apply it here in Writer, we can see is a bit like the Ribbon in Microsoft Office although personally I'd always stick with the standard toolbar and traditional menus. Now, in this video, our key focus is going to be on fidelity or how well each Office suite can display a document compared to how it appears in Microsoft Office. If you only need to work on your own documents in Linux, then this is completely irrelevant. But if you need to open existing Word documents or you're going to work on documents but are also going to be edited in Word, then document fidelity is absolutely critical. And whilst good, it's not perfect here in LibreOffice. To demonstrate, let's open up a Word test file which contains some text and images from one of my books. And over in Windows, I've got the same document open in Word. So, if here in LibreOffice Writer we zoom to an entire page view and do a comparison, we discover that even by the end of the first page, the documents no longer match. And by the time we get to the end, things are very different indeed. So, clearly LibreOffice Writer does not provide perfect Microsoft Word layout fidelity. Now, it's important to note that document fidelity is font dependent, so cannot be achieved unless you have exactly the same font files installed in Linux as you do in Windows. I've covered this in many previous videos, including my recent one on Ubuntu tips and tweaks. And so, almost certainly as a minimum, you'll want to install the standard Microsoft core fonts and I'll include a link on how to do this in the video description. Next, let's launch LibreOffice Impress via PowerPoint alternative. There it is. And again, we'll load in a test file. And if we now bring in a Microsoft PowerPoint comparison and play the presentation and then step through the presentation, we can see that fidelity is now very good indeed. And I say now very good indeed because this was not always the case in the past. Finally, let's run up the Calc spreadsheet. There we go. And again, bring in a test file, which, scaling aside, looks identical in Excel, although there are sometimes fidelity issues. LibreOffice Calc is also not as sophisticated as Excel, although it's fine for personal and basic business use. And indeed, Calc is generally agreed to be the best free spreadsheet for power users that runs natively in Linux. Next, let's turn to FreeOffice, which is free, along with SoftMaker Office, which is a paid version with more functionality. These are proprietary applications, have a reputation for excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office files, and are available via their respective websites. Included, as we can see here down in the menu, are a word processor called TextMaker, a presentations package called Presentations, and a spreadsheet called PlanMaker. If we launch TextMaker, the word processor, the default interface looks like this with a ribbon, so very similar to what you get in Microsoft Word. However, if we go to File and Options and Appearance, not only can we scale the DPI of the document, we can also change the size of the user interface, like that, as you can see. We can turn on what's called Touch Mode, which basically makes icons and menus readable by people with normal human eyes. And then, most importantly, we can change the user interface. The default is this one with a ribbon. There are various other ribbon options we can apply if we wish to, but I'm going to go here for a classic menu style like that, which I think is so much better. This is now a very nice word processor indeed. If we bring in our test document and go to View and select Full Page, it initially appears to display the same as in LibreOffice, although if we scroll down to the end, Fidelity is not the same. And if we compare to the original in Microsoft Word, it's different again, not just by the end of the document, but also back up on the first page. And so the word processor in FreeOffice does render documents differently to the one in LibreOffice, but still does not have perfect fidelity with Microsoft Word. If we go to the PlanMaker spreadsheet and bring in our test file there, things do match very well indeed. Meanwhile, if we bring up the presentations package and do the same thing, again, Fidelity is good, although if we play the presentation and skip through it, we do discover that whilst layout fidelity is good, transition fidelity is worse than in LibreOffice. Overall, FreeOffice is a very nice suite and a good Microsoft Office alternative if you don't need a database. However, some important features are missing. For example, if we go back to TextMaker, it's worth noting if we go to View that there's no full-screen mode. And also, if we go across to Tables, we cannot sort tables or text. And more broadly, we can't add footnotes or endnotes. So if you require these, you'll have to use the paid version called SoftMaker Office. And this is available itself in two different versions, SoftMaker Office NX and currently SoftMaker Office 24. And the difference is if you want to subscribe, you'll want SoftMaker Office NX, which is available with either a monthly or yearly subscription. But if you want to purchase outright, you can go for SoftMaker Office 2024, which offers a perpetual license, showing for me here in UK at about £120. It's also worth noting that if you opt for SoftMaker Office 2024, you don't get included AI tools. But if you choose to subscribe and get SoftMaker Office NX, then AI tools are included. So let's use the magic of filmmaking to upgrade our system to a 30-day free trial of SoftMaker Office 2024. And here in the word processor, if we now go to the View menu, we can see we do have full screen available, which as a writer, I think is absolutely critical. And if we go to the Table menu, we can see that sort options do now exist. And if we go to Insert, we could insert footnotes and endnotes. And indeed, there are lots of other features now available not included in FreeOffice. And if you want to see all of these, you can visit this page, which I'll link in the video description, which shows all the different features. There's quite a few things which are blank here over on the left in FreeOffice compared to the other versions. And you might have noticed we've now got two versions of SoftMaker Office NX being displayed, the universal and the home version, which is cheaper. And it is worth noting here as a final point, that if you do buy a license of some kind, it can be used on up to five computers. In my view, the best local office suites that run natively in Linux are LibreOffice and those from SoftMaker, as we've just looked at. However, as I included at the start of the video, there are also two others that are worthy of note. The first of these is OnlyOffice, which is free and open source, although paid enterprise versions are available. As we can see here, under Products, there's a strong focus on collaboration and other online functionality, which is enabled via a cloud service called DocSpace. This is primarily a commercial service that uses OnlyOffice editors, although a free community version that can be self-hosted is also available. Over under Download, there are OnlyOffice and DocSpace versions for enterprises, as well as to sell as a branded offering, although here we'll focus on the desktop and mobile apps, where, as we can see, these are free for desktop devices. And if I click on Linux, we discover OnlyOffice desktop editors available in a variety of package formats. And here I've downloaded an app image which can be run without installation once you've made it executable. So let's go to that file. Here it is in this folder over there, and we will run it up. And if we select our Word test document, we soon arrive in the document editor, which can only be used like Microsoft Word with a Ribbon interface. At the end of this, we also find an AI option where we can, for example, click on Summarization, which gives us the opportunity to add and select AI models. So we could, for example, go down there like that and pick what we wanted to use. Lots of different things are available if you want to have AI in your Word processor. If we just zoom things up a little bit like that and compare to our test document in Microsoft Word, we can see that Fidelity fails very rapidly as OnlyOffice appears to have turned on automatic hyphenation, even though it's set to off in the document. So obviously, if we switch to a full page view and compare to Word, the document does not match at the start and it's got no hope of matching at the end. And indeed, it doesn't match at the end. Now, I just want to pause to make it clear that my test file is very straightforward. Let's just come back to something like that. This text here, this body text in this document is just 10-point Verdana at 1.5 spacing. And so I'm finding it really surprising how inconsistently we've seen this formatted by different Word processors, particularly Word processors claiming good Word compatibility. Anyway, back with OnlyOffice. Let's bring in our Excel test file. Here it is like that. And again, I think I'll just zoom it up a little bit for comparison. There we go. And comparing to Excel again highlights poor Fidelity. And we can see why here. It's because there are issues with the column widths which are clipping this heading and indeed part of these candidate names. This said, if we go back and bring in our test PowerPoint file, here it is. And we bring it up and step on through. Here, the comparison with PowerPoint is excellent or at least excellent if you don't mind it changing the color of the text. Greetings. Let's now take a look at WPS Office which is proprietary software from Kingsoft Office Software. This said, a free download is available. Here on this system, it will be a dev package or an RPM package, although there are paid versions. So we'll just take a quick look at those as well. We can see here the pricing. If you want a paid version, it is a subscription on either a one-year plan or a three months plan. And if you wonder what you get in the paid versions, it's mainly AI features, loads and loads of AI features, more online storage space. And you may also notice you don't get advertising in the paid plan which implies you do see advertising in the free version of WPS Office. This said, I've been testing it out and I don't see any advertising. And what I understand from reading around is you get advertising in the mobile apps but not in the PC apps. Anyway, let's take a look at the package and rather naughtily, on installation, here in the menu, WPS Office added an entry here in the categories. There really shouldn't be individual programs there. And it also added itself in under Office. So I don't like it for doing that. That's really not a nice thing to have done. Anyway, let's just run up WPS Office Writer. Here it is. And we'll bring in our standard test document. Here we go. And the interface here is ribbon-based as we can see. Although it sort of isn't because what you can do here is to wrap up the ribbon like that as you can in many packages. And if we click over here on menu right on the end, we get a file menu. But if we click over here, we get a full menu, which I kind of like. This is a pretty good hybrid of having a ribbon-based system and a menu-based system. It's also worth noting that here in the free version of the package, if we click on view, there is a full screen mode. That is nice to see. We can come out of it by pressing Control, Alt and F. There we are. And you know what's going to happen next. We'll go to view and we'll go to full page and we'll bring in Microsoft Word and guess what? It doesn't match on the first page and guess what? It doesn't match on the last page either. I don't know. This is very disappointing. In the old world of doc files, there seemed to be a lot higher chance of good document fidelity. But for some reason, we don't have it now in the world of docx. Anyway, let's try out the spreadsheet package with our test file. And here fidelity, let's just bring it up and have a nice look, is very good indeed. We will compare to Excel. Oh, look, it matches. I was about to say we knew it would. It didn't properly in the last package, so it's good it does match here in WPS Office. And finally, we'll do the same thing for our test PowerPoint presentation. Bring this up and step through. And there we are. Fidelity is very good indeed. As we've seen, no Linux alternative to Microsoft Office provides absolute fidelity, which can still only be guaranteed by running Microsoft Office itself in a virtual Windows machine, as I've covered in other videos. This said, all of the applications we've looked at do work well. And following my testing, I've decided that when consumer ESUs for Windows 10 come to an end in October this year, I'll be installing a Linux distro on my laptop running Softmaker Office. But now that's it for another video. If you've enjoyed what you've seen here, please press that like button. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. And I hope to talk to you again very soon.