Welcome to the next post in my blog series Breaking Up with Big Tech. In this episode, I tackle one of the most vexing tasks: ditching Microsoft Office. Why vexing? Because after decades of daily use, I had assumed it would be a long and punishing process. But much to my surprise, it was a remarkably smooth transition.

Microsoft Office has been a mainstay on my computer for over 30 years. It is widely regarded as a tech standard for publishing. Or so I thought. LibreOffice has been quietly available as an Office alternative since the late 2000s. And when Microsoft decided to screw its customers by turning Office into a subscription model (with a terrible AI that nobody asked for), LibreOffice opened its arms like a bosomy mother.

LibreOffice is an open-source office suite with all the familiar products. It has Writer (Word), Calc (Excel), Impress (PowerPoint), Base (Access), and Draw (Visio). It even has a dedicated formula editor called Math.

And the most astounding part? It’s completely free!

This is usually when I narrow my eyes and ask, “What’s the catch?” As a general rule, when something in tech is free, then the user is the product. Look no further than the social media model. They make ungodly amounts of money by harvesting and selling user data. Google is even worse. They offer the whole enchilada for free (email, office, storage, maps, messages, etc.) in order to harvest data for their money-printing advertising service.

LibreOffice does none of this. They are a non-profit organization that does make money, but they do so through donations, sponsorships, and enterprise software. It’s not about appeasing shareholders. They actually believe in the FOSS model (free and open-source software), so the money they make gets funneled back to supporting the product.

General user? Free.

Big corporation in need of enterprise tech? Pay.

As it should be.

Now that my wariness was soothed, it was time to see if the software actually lived up to the promise. Even though I despise Microsoft, I readily admit that replacing Office is a Herculean task. When it comes to publishing, paperback files have a ton of fiddly formatting. If I can open them with LibreOffice and retain half of that effort, I would consider it a win.

So I took a deep breath, booted up LibreOffice Writer, an opened one of my paperback files. Then my jaw hit the floor because it retained almost everything. On top of the text formatting (all perfect), I also got the headers, footers, numbering, margins, alignments, measurements, and page breaks. I even got the PDF encoding and font-embedding. Color me shocked.

The “almost” was mostly due to translation quirks that were easily remedied. For example, vertical alignment is handled differently. In Office, it’s part of the individual page settings. In Writer, you create a container first (text block or table cell), then vertically align the contents. No big deal. Once I understood the difference, it only took a few minutes to repair the file. At that point, I could export a print-ready PDF with the exact same formatting. Hurrah!

I couldn’t believe it. I thought for sure that I was tackling a giant learning curve. I was fully prepared to spend months un-learning Word while absorbing Writer. Nope! I was up and running immediately. The dev team understands that users are afraid to leave their comfort zones, so they make the transition as painless as possible. In fact, you can set up Writer as a fully functional Word clone. It even allows you to save the version of Word you want. Default DOCX as 2010-365? No problem.

Gotta hand it to the Libre team. Super impressive! (slow clap of respect)

From here, I plan to create a new generic template for all of my paperbacks and hardcover interiors. This will ensure that my old Word files don’t carry over some unwanted artifacts. It may not be necessary, given how well Writer translates Word. But for my own peace of mind, I would rather create new files and make a clean break.

Are you ready to ditch Microsoft Office? I say go for it! LibreOffice makes the task all but effortless. There are countless user videos that show you how to optimize the experience, which I highly advise watching before diving in. A tiny thing I found that made my life a lot easier was the ability to toggle menu systems. Remember the intuitive menu structure that Microsoft killed in favor of the tab strip? You can have that back in LibreOffice. I damn near cried when I saw it.

As a massive bonus, LibreOffice works on all operating systems. It was designed for Linux, but they offer versions for Windows and Mac. I’ve been testing the Windows version, which works flawlessly for my needs. This makes me even more excited for the next step: ditching Windows for Linux.

And there you have it. I am officially done with Microsoft Office, which ends a three-decade relationship with a product I once loved. Thank you, LibreOffice. In all seriousness, you have been a shining light in this nightmare of enshittification.