Google Docs vs LibreOffice

The last word no longer belongs to Microsoft

- IAN EVENDEN

OFFICE SUITES are a hard thing to get excited about. They represent actual work, which nobody likes, rather than messing around or playing games, and they’re also nothing special to look at. There’s not even an exciting war going on, such as that which once took place between Microsoft and Lotus/IBM over spreadsheets. No, the office front is a very quiet one.

These comparisons, between Google’s cloud-based suite and The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice, are of features in free software. If you need Microsoft Office, ensuring 100-percent compatibility with Office users and the other premium features you can only get with a 365 subscription, then you need it, and no alternative suite is quite going to be right for you. This is going to affect mainly professionals and those who need lots of cloud storage—OneDrive plans work out cheaper than Google Drive and bundle Office 365 with 1TB of storage, while Google Drive offers more storage in its free tier, at 15GB versus 5GB. For everyone else, a free suite will probably suffice. This even goes for us here at Maximum PC, who consider ourselves relatively professional, but spend much of our time in Google Docs when not using Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES