I need it for doing CVs and job applications and that’s literally it.
If you want something that looks amazing but takes a little extra effort to learn, LaTeX is great.
If you want intuitive, LibreOffice should do everything you need.
I’d recommend typst, easier than latex, nice tooling, and has enough templates to get started
I’ll have to give that a try. I’ve been doing a lot of markdown work recently, so it already looks intuitive.
+1 to LaTex. It excels at carefully laying out a short document for maximum clarity. Perfect for a CV or resume.
It’s worth mentioning that LaTex can signal to employers that the candidate might have a very advanced degree or equivalent nerd experience, of some kind.
There is a perception that most LaTex users encounter it while doing advanced science work or getting an advanced degree.
Though the initial learning curve can seem a bit intimidating if you’re used to something like word, which does everything for you with a single button.
Especially for things like picking which packages to use, or how to make a functional document from it.
If that’s it, Libre Office.
Also if you’re using windows and avoiding acrobat try Sumatra for reading pdfs. FOSS is the way. Libre draw also does document signing for pdfs
Thanks mate! I’ve downloaded it but I’m really struggling with the layout any tips? it’s so different looking to word
I find it’s exactly identical to MSWord, but from the mso97 days before the Ribbon bollocks. I used o97 Word because it was like win3.1 Word … word-perfect? It’s been a while.
But, TL/DR, LOWord is like Classic MSOffice from when it didn’t suck. This will not help you adjust, but hopefully the knowledge that you’re going back to a better era of UX could help blunt the pain.
Go carefully, and have your favourite vice handy to goose the positive reinforcement loop.
Thanks mate
You can switch to the “Tabbed” interface for something more similar MS Office: https://books.libreoffice.org/en/WG252/WG2521-UserInterfaceVariants.html#toc6
Thanks I tried that yesterday but I don’t get given those options on libre
Hmm, that’s weird. Are you on a semi-recent version of LibreOffice? I believe, it got shipped with version 6.0.
And just to be sure, you are checking here, right?:
Yep there exactly. I’m in the UK if that matters
I can’t imagine the country matters.
Do you just not have the “User Interface…” menu entry?
Libre is terrible, too. Download OnlyOffice.
I’ve been using LibreOffice’s Writer for several years. And I’ve been happy with it.
Google Docs, if a cloud-based service is not out of the question and if you can live within Google’s parameters of “free”.
LibreOffice, otherwise.
Libre Office. I’ve been using it for decades.
Same, and Star Office before it (and Applix before that). All on Linux (and other Unixes).
Same. Started with StarOffice 5.0, which was a complete train wreck.
I’m sorry.
LibreOffice
Or if you can spare $10-20 you can get a gray market Office key
What’s a grey market office key
If I understand it correctly, Microsoft sells discounted keys to organizations as part of their Volume Licensing for businesses.
Some places on the internet take advantage of that, and sell the keys individually.
Oh thank you
More likely it is a key purchased with a stolen credit card. Do not use gray markets
Highly unlikely. The grey market keys are clearly for large companies. You couldn’t purchase thousands of keys with a stolen credit card.
Take this blog post from Factorio a few years ago, they much rather you pirate the game than use gray markets. (Second header)
K. We aren’t talking about game theft, we are talking about a specific known issue that Microsoft has talked about. Thanks for linking to an unrelated article?
Gray markets are just full of stolen stuff. To think something else is just fooling yourself.
Anyway, keep using it if you want but they are not “I am so smart for finding it cheaper” but rather “I don’t mind support illegal activities”
all words are free. i just used thirteen of them and paid nothing.
I used fourteen words and got arrested for hate speech, so I think your theory has a flaw and I blame minorities
No it’s not minorities it’s trans people they somehow caused it by sneakily sneaking in a bathroom
You are paying with time and you are DYING. Hell, i am typing right now! That means that I’m also DYING RIGHT NOW!
proceeds to crash out
If you’re in windows , search for power shell, and paste this in it
irm https://get.activated.win/ | iexI recommend the data approach since you can just change layout on the fly and not have classic word processing mess up:
This looks great; will play with it. I wonder if it’s got versioning.
Cool, thanks for linking this, I was just looking for something like this!
Libreoffice
Hardcore nerds use TeX but if I understand your question, you probably want LibreOffice. I’m unfamiliar with OnlyOffice so ok, maybe that’s good too.
Libre office was too clunky for my usage. OnlyOffice is FOSS, lightweight, and cross-platform to mobile.
Your best bet is either LibreOffice Writer, or OnlyOffice’s word processor. Another one I tried was Abiword, which is an old word processor.
Both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice (Writer) would work. The main differences are that OnlyOffice has all the tools (documents, presentations, and spreadsheets) while LibreOffice separates them. LibreOffice also has an additional two tools: Draw (kind of like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape) and Base (database stuff).
Generally documents that are exported to and from MS Office will be better when working with OnlyOffice. If you aren’t doing a bunch of formatting that is absolutely critical (or no formatting at all), I wouldn’t worry about using LibreOffice. LibreOffice, for me, works well, but sometimes page break can happen a line or two earlier/later depending on how images, tables, headings, etc. are rendered, which is slightly annoying. In “Impress” (presentations), whenever I made one object transparent, ALL objects became transparent when viewing from MS Office, which was strange. That’s my experience, and it seems that other people have had similar formatting problems with LibreOffice too.
Another thing that’s different is that, on Windows, LibreOffice doesn’t look very nice. On Linux, it looks fine (I selected “Tabbed”), but on Windows, I’m not sure if they’re using some other graphical package or something, but the top toolbar is all squished together with no wiggle room, even if you select “Tabbed”. One other thing, LibreOffice uses Qt so it will work with those themes in Linux (e.g. In KDE Plasma, which is what I run, LibreOffice will match with the system theme!)
For a Linux-specific thing, it seems that LibreOffice doesn’t really like Wayland much, and was chugging and running at a jogging snail’s pace (certainly not a fast snail, this one), so I had to manually set the shortcut to run LibreOffice in XWayland or something like that anyways.
One thing I like about LibreOffice is that there’s a few more plugins available than OnlyOffice. For example, LanguageTool has a LibreOffice plugin but don’t think there’s one for OnlyOffice. LibreOffice also has like a bazillion different settings to change how everything is rendered, you can change the order of the items in every toolbar and menu, I think Writer has a basic Java IDE built in too? Basically, LibreOffice is more customisable and configurable than OnlyOffice, and by a lot. OnlyOffice tries to be a little simpler than LibreOffice and I guess is more “dumbed down” with fewer buttons and settings?
TLDR: LibreOffice has five separate programs, OnlyOffice has three in one. Files exported from OnlyOffice generally render with correct formatting on MS Office (and vice versa), the same may not be true for LibreOffice depending on the content of your documents. LibreOffice Windows isn’t nice (but looks better on Linux), LibreOffice doesn’t play nice with Wayland, LibreOffice has more plugins, options, etc.
Ahhhh I really struggled with Libre earlier I’m old and neurodiverse and can’t handle the layout. Does only office have a similar layout to word?
If you use Windows, yeah, LibreOffice doesn’t look all that nice. Setting it to “tabbed” view mode makes it a bit better (try that first)
but the icons are still pretty small with little padding (on Windows at least. On Linux it is perfectly fine, so I use LibreOffice!). OnlyOffice will be more padded and has bigger icons than LibreOffice in Windows, yeah. I think it would work.
That’s so helpful thanks so much! Have a lovely weekend
I uninstalled Libre for OnlyOffice when it was impossible to get a normal full-sized scroll bar. Haven’t looked back.
+1 for Onlyoffice. I tried both it and Libreoffice. Onlyoffice UI is both closer to how MS word looks, and supports word documents better. (Eg text format remains the same in onlyoffice, while in liberoffice it’s flying off the edges. At least in my experience)
That’s great thanks
OnlyOffice is a bit less featureful and doesn’t support some languages that Word and Writer do
