I think LibreOffice needs a general refresh of marketing and product for simplicity. The LibreOffice website, you have to dig in to see what features are provided. The product itself has a lot of bells and whistles but as you mentioned it is hard to discover.A feature that isn’t noted but is quite cool is LibreOffice Base’s ability to connect to remote databases and create forms on top of those. Basically a better Access.

Its also slow and laggy compared to office products somehow. Has that classic open source jank.

It doesn&#x27;t matter. Most people go with the defaults. If your default is ugly, your app is uggly.

Libreoffice comes with a few different themes and icon sets. Have you tried them out?

It&#x27;s easy to make something look nice when you drop &quot;being useful&quot; as a requirement.

&gt; so uglyI think this is a common issue with open source software, except when it comes to GNOME&#x2F;GTK&#x2F;Libadwaita apps. For some reason, GNOME apps almost always manage to look good.

You know, I did kind of think that until I sat down to use it and realised compared to MS office it’s like a glass of ice water in hell.I do actually think on Mac if you just use the minimal toolbar buttons and the menu bar buttons it looks pretty presentable. Not good but not the worst. And on Linux&#x2F;GTK it actually looks super nice

Its reminiscent of Wordperfect 6 for Windows.

The problem with LibreOffice is that interface is so ugly. And no, I am NOT asking for the ribbon, which I think is a horrible idea.

Interesting. I just searched for &quot;banned from google docs&quot; and some people seem to either be questioning whether it happened to them or if it is possible.I never considered that possibility.I guess my other question is word processing programs usually have a target format of paper ... is that how you&#x27;re still using it?

I do. Although I have no love for Office, it allows me to keep all of my data locally seamlessly.With online-only tools, I&#x27;m one unfair ban away from losing all my data.

MS Office isn&#x27;t single user? It supports real-time collaboration, including in the desktop apps. Though that does require you to keep the files in onedrive or sharepoint.

Excel on the desktop isn’t going any where.

I guess i just live in a bubble where everyone uses org mode or other nerd tools to do that

Bro I just wanna write my CV and do my dad’s taxes I don’t wanna collaborate with 100s of my favourite redditors while leveraging AI

Are people still using single user desktop office suites?It makes me wonder if there&#x27;s some kind of light decentralized thing that can be used with a convention oauth style front end

AT THE current rate of things, its probably more dangerous they&#x27;ll install fancy keyloggers.

One of the biggest dangers you have with Microsoft if you&#x27;re not in the USA, the US government can turn off your access for shiggles.

Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.documentfoundation.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;15&#x2F;guide-to-migrating-from-proprietary-formats-to-odf&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.documentfoundation.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;15&#x2F;guide-to...</a>

LibreOffice says Microsoft Office exploits you, offers free ODF migration guide