Contract Advantage vs LibreOffice: Which is a better fit?

Justin: Hi, I'm Justin, DevOps engineer, and I give LibreOffice a big five out of five stars. For more reviews like these, please click the link below. Before LibreOffice, like a lot of people, I had Microsoft Office. Everybody has Office, right? It was great except I didn't really care for the price tag. It's less of an issue of getting copy at work because you can always get that, as having a copy personally, and I personally do not want to pay Microsoft indefinitely or pay a very large sum of money for something I need to upgrade every so often, so it was mainly a cost issue for me. Number one reason I chose LibreOffice is because it's free as in beer, so you don't pay anything to download or use the software. That alone is a big advantage over Microsoft Office where either you are paying indefinitely or you're paying very large upfront costs every couple of years. Other than that, I'm a big fan of the open source community and LibreOffice is genuinely trying to help the community at large get great software all over the world that people can use. LibreOffice is active in a number of different charities that I support, and so I wanted to be able to support that myself if I could. Onboarding for LibreOffice is relatively straightforward regardless of whatever your platform is. On my Mac, I went to the website libreoffice.org and got the latest version from there. On my Linux boxes, I was able to get them from the stock package repositories or because I'm in Ubuntu, I could just grab the very latest copy from the Snap Store. So regardless of which platform you want to use, it's pretty straightforward. You get it, make your documents, and you're pretty much on your way from there. If you're considering LibreOffice, you've probably heard a lot of people say, oh, but maybe it doesn't have perfect Microsoft Office document compatibility. I have two things to say to that. The first is compatibility has improved significantly over the years. I haven't used LibreOffice off and on for a number of years now, probably at least 10 years, and I've really seen it grow as a project since then, even back from the OpenOffice days leading up to the LibreOffice split to the present, so there has been a lot of progress made with that. The other thing is if we want to get away from using a proprietary standard, then we need to do our part to make that happen. So, using LibreOffice, being able to save documents and DOC format or ODT format rather than DOT, DOCX is a step in the right direction for cross platform compatibility kind of across the board.