Advise request, what "MS Office" suites do you use?
 

I am curious to know what you guys use for writing, spread sheets and maybe presentations on Linux.
I do have MS Office on my windows box but would like to have an alternative on my Debian box.
I do not plan on moving documents back and forth between windows and Linux. And if I do, I would not be worried about formatting.

LibreOffice, hands down.

It can save in MS formats, but I've found that, if the formatting is really complex (I do a news letter that's full of text boxes or "frames," for example), that feature can be problematic. For simple documents, such as letters, that feature works quite nicely.

LibreOffice, hands down. On my Linux partition AND my Windows partition.

I mostly use OnlyOffice, with LibreOffice or WPS Office kept around in case I need to do anything complex (onlyoffice GREAT for simple, not so great for complex).

Libreoffice. I am forced to use Microsoft office on my work laptop and I cuss it constantly. Libreoffice isn’t perfect but it does what I need and doesn’t frustrate the heck out of me.

OpenOffice
 

OpenOffice, only because it was the first linux alternative I tried and I have never had issues. I have never even tried any of the others.

You really should consider making the switch to LibreOffice. The development pace of OpenOffice is archaicly slow, with even simple security patches taking 6+ months to roll out, and feature parity it's now several YEARS behind LibreOffice which was initially forked from it.

I agree with Timothy Miller. I used OpenOffice until it fell into the hands of Oracle after Sun Microsystems went belly-up (I even have a book about OpenOffice from the olde days). Oracle couldn't figure out how to monetize it, so they passed it off to Apache. I have a lot of respect for Apache, but an office suite was kind of out of their ballpark.

I followed the fork to LQ and have not looked back.

Well.....
 

Well, now I guess I'm going to have to give it a try.

I'll add another voice recommending LibreOffice. But if you are starting out completely new, I would highly recommend taking a look at Calligra first. It is different but it is different in ways you will quite likely find better.

LibreOffice has far better support for old M$ formats than M$ Office itself. So if you have old files around, then it should be on your computer even if you use something else for new documents. I use LibreOffice for new documents exclusively because of its OpenDocument Format support, which M$ Office still lacks (among other problems M$ Office has).

Just a note on OpenOffice, when it went to Oracle through part of the large purchase of Sun, Oracle decided to kill it through neglect and after some months (a year?) of frustration nearly all of the developers and most of the rest of the community split off and formed LibreOffice. Then the rest of the community followed. A few weeks ago, LibreOffice wrote an open letter about that to what is now the Apache Project's group. OpenOffice was great in its day but has been more or less abandoned for a decade.

Due to its StarOffice (1985) heritage LibreOffice predates the M$ suite (1988) by about three years.

Thanks you all for great replies.
I will give LibreOffice a try.

SoftMaker Office (Free & Commercial), previous version 2018.
I always found it swifter than the others, with the exception of Gnumeric for spreadsheets. Using a Hammer&Nail approach to make Basic programming available or anything resembling OLE manipulations (or COM if you prefer), makes me uneasy. I know that it works, but I do not even want to know, how.

So, if automation is needed, it is ME who automates, using OOXML or ODFs with the tools that are made for that. And what can I say... SoftMaker Office is still swifter. Plus, I know, how the automation works.

Edit. In the meantime, when automating Text-Documents – from word-processors – is frequently needed, I would prefer the AbiWord format (abw), as it is much simpler than OOXML and ODF. For your info: LibreOffice reads Abiword !

For writing, I use MarkText and Typora.

I use OpenOffice because LibreOffice seems to be designed for wide-screen monitors these days, and I use a portrait mode for word-processing.

I has been using OpenOffice (or better OpenOffice.org as it is the correct title) since 2007 in my home mswindows computer (I was jus learning what Linux is, at the time). Later, with a newer computer I chose to try LibreOffice, mostly because I found many good comments all over the web (including Linux Questions forum). I use it till now. I find it is pretty compatible with the ms format documents, as I often need to read or write content for my work at home, especially during the lockdown periods where I have to work at home.

As it concerns the ms format compatibility, I only had a few problems with the feature of additions/changes made by several users on the same document. Some other minor problems concern some format details but I think it mainly depends on the installed printers. At work I can use several printers over the company's network. At home, I don't have any printer installed (in truth, I own an old HP laserjet 6 and an older Star ZA-15 wide dot-matrix printer but I doubt I could find toner or ink cartridges now! the ultimate nostalgia? )

In the past I used and loved Ami Pro and Word Perfect, but both projects are dead since long. :rolleyes: