Some thoughts about LibreOffice vs. Microsoft Office

I usually prefer using LibreOffice over Microsoft Office because it’s free / libre software and I can use it on Linux. However, while writing a seminar paper, I noticed one feature that LibreOffice Writer is missing and that made me use Microsoft Word for the paper: literature index.

I need to make references following the IEEE style. While it’s pretty easy to create a literature index and select whether it should be IEEE style, APA or one of the many other styles, literature indexes in LibreOffice are a pain. Or at least it’s even more un-intuitive than in Microsoft Word.

I like LibreOffice and usually recommend it as a great alternative to Microsoft Office. It’s a product of people spending their free time. It’s awesome! But sometimes it’s visible in its features, that LibreOffice is used way less than Microsoft Office.

If some huge cooporations would decide to use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office and donate the same amount of money to LibreOffice, which they would have spent otherwise on Microsoft licenses, or even better pay some developers to work full time on LibreOffice, I think it would get much better than Microsoft Office.

And what I really hope for: An open source alternative to OneNote. Unfortunately, I don’t have the free time or the necessary knowledge to program desktop applications, otherwise I would just sit down and program something myself.

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