LibreOffice. Ready for the Enterprise? Definitely!
Why you should be looking at LibreOffice
Programs that go through a name change usually have a lot of ground to make back up for when it comes to popularity. There was once a project called OpenOffice that got renamed to LibreOffice. I happened to be using the software at the time of that name change and I was a bit confused. I went to the website years ago and got the message that went something like, “OpenOffice is now LibreOffice.” I downloaded it with some skepticism, expecting some horrendous re-branding only to find it was exactly the same solid UI and performance I had come to expect from the software suite.
Most people will have heard of this software suite by now. If you use a Raspberry Pi version 4 and above you will know it as the default Office suite installed in the Raspberry OS (yet another rename, it seems great projects have naming doubts early on!). If you need MS Office functionality but don’t want to waste gigabytes of disk space and millions of wasted CPU cycles this is the only option to get.
LibreOffice is small, a full install runs somewhere around 600MB, compare this to several gigabytes for a full MS (Microsoft) Office install! LibreOffice is also FAST and EFFICIENT! CPU and RAM usage are paltry in comparison to MS Office which has become synonymous for bloatware. Part of this performance improvement is concentrating on keeping the UI (User Interface) clean, simple and straight forward without unnecessary bloat.
Perhaps most interestingly, LibreOffice is what an IDEAL office suite should be. Its UI stays constant throughout the years. Its feature set improves and new menu items etc. are added but it is highly stable. There is no learning curve for a user. You could have trained someone in 2014 to use the suite and they would have 0 learning curve using the latest version.
Some people might call this, “Lack of keeping up” but those people would be mistaken. An office suite is supposed to get the job done. For the student it is supposed to allow them to become progressively expert in constructing documents of any complexity with muscle memory as second nature as sending a text message. For the employee or sole trader it is supposed to produce documents of any type, with as little effort as possible, on tight timelines.
All of this is surely apparent to any long time LibreOffice user. What may not be as apparent however is LibreOffice had to replicate MS Office’s very complex macro programming back end to allow as high a level of compatibility as possible between MS Office documents and LibreOffice documents. The designers of LibreOffice, probably out of necessity, decided to replicate these capabilities at the macro level and in so doing have produced an Enterprise masterpiece. LibreOffice uses its own components which are significantly different at the low level but the macros are programmed the very same way, in a BASIC language that is one of the most stable ever created.
To explain the previous statement I need to take a trip back in time with you. Around 15 years ago many enterprises relied on MS Office and its macro capability to handle all sorts of business functions. The Internet was widely available but “net apps” and the widespread complex markup processing available today was not available to most operations without significant added cost. Capabilities available for free today costs many thousands of dollars back then.
The Office Suite came to the rescue. Macro programming is by nature less demanding than programming in a low level language. The UI is available, thousands of functions are available and once one understand the framework on how to control the office suite one can produce applications that would require 100-1000 times more resources if being programmed from scratch.
The entry bar to learning was also low. People would search up techniques on the Internet and apply them in their own custom solution with a simple copy and paste. Developers would have the office suite installed at home and be able to experiment with data easily moved as small files etc. Many of the complex B2B software that exists today had its roots directly tied to office suite macro coding that occurred around 25 years ago.
MS being MS decided to embark on a brutal MS Office upgrade cycle around 15 years ago since MS Office was one of their largest revenue and profit centers. There was a time when new versions were coming out every year and the UI was changing needlessly. Software bloat and rot set in and a product that was ~500MB quickly bloomed into a monstrosity that would take 3GB for a full install with all sort of sub components that needed to be there for some exotic Macro function to work.
As is the case with so much MS software, MS killed their own goose that laid the golden egg. This was probably the plan because “Software as a Service” was being pushed by MS with many users having it rammed down their throats. All one needed was to pay a small monthly fee forever and once didn’t have to worry about anything, just point a web browser and use the product! As so happens with the plans of both mice and men this backfired as running low level macro business components across the Internet caused massive security breeches that MS rushed to fix for well over a decade. It lead to the demise of Internet Explorer (the real one) and cost MS at least well over $2 Billion.
The stranglehold MS had on the small business sector was lost as the “software as a service” model they helped force down people’s throats took off with competitors. So why this history lesson? Well having worked in a Fortune 500 company that used MS Office for a vital department I remember my days fighting to convert them to my bespoke systems while grudgingly admitting to the power this sort of Office Suite framework gave to the average user.
An example is in order. This department dealt with many multiple 1M record sets on average. These record sets were broken into monthly periods so there were many 100K sub record sets to work with. The company had these on spreadsheets. A spreadsheet is nothing but a database table that is a whole lot easier for end users to work with and that a user can easily execute all sorts of complex operations on without a lick of knowledge of SQL!
The department heads loved having their data “under their control” and not under the control of the IT department’s enterprise database servers. It took me a while to realize that I was the punching bag between both departments as I came from the IT department and had to liaison with the business heads. I am very thankful for this experience however as few “hard core” developers ever get the chance to see the coin on the other side. Today with technologies like JSON this differing point of view might seem obvious but JSON still requires a parser to operate on the data and parsers vary vastly in capability. Office suite spreadsheets had a standard set of tools. You KNEW a user could conduct those operations on the data once they had the office suite installed and it was as simple as clicking a few menu items. No Internet connection necessary.
So to the average user reading this article what does this have to do with them? Well let’s say you wanted to create a PDF, it’s as simple as clicking print on most word processors and selecting that file type. However, let’s say you wanted to generate a report, with individual graphics per record and various fonts and formatting from 1000 records consisting of 10 data fields each and you wanted some financial processing done on those records. This would pose more of a challenge. You would have to type your request into Google and be greeted by the multitude of “free offerings” available to fulfill your task. Although nothing is truly free and your email and other information the vendor could mine about you would be added and sold on a backend market. This is all legal since none of us will read the 21 page legal notices we agree to every time we sign up for a service! We just look for the line “We value your privacy.” or “Your information is safe with us!”.
Well, we all know how the world works now so we would acquire our “web service” product or if we’re lucky a downloadable version and go about our merry way. That is until we needed something kind of like what we had already but our software couldn’t do it. Then its back to Google and another online product. This could go on until we have 5 or 6 products that we just “had to have” to do our “thing” be that content creation or some business function.
Still it doesn’t sound bad with 100-300 M/bit download speeds and 1TB SSDs being the norm these days. Who cares right? Well what happens when the vendor you choose all of a sudden changes your “free tier” to a paid one! It might just be $10 a month but now you’re paying for something when it was free before! Then another vendor closes operations (this happens). So now you’re in a rush to find another and you just decide to take a paid one because it is easily available, that’s another $10 a month!
Spending $20 a month might not be a lot for some people but for others it can be painful. That money could be spent somewhere else. Wouldn’t is be awesome if you had a toolkit that was easy to program and would allow you to do ANYTHING you might need with this data? That toolkit is LibreOffice. It is 100% free and 100% stable so the effort you spend learning to do these things will stay for decades and not be lost on the next version update!
This is why the title of this article is “LibreOffice. Ready for the Enterprise? Definitely!” Enterprises need all sorts of weird stuff done to their data. Today many of us are “One person Enterprises” as we do content creation, customer tracking and a host of tasks that were previously done by big business! Think I’m exaggerating? Ask any mildly popular YouTuber or Patreon creator how they manage their fan information!
Most would probably use the built in tool but if you can manage your user base more effectively you can grow more effectively! Run more complex surveys, find out what paying customers want more of, etc.! All of these things can be done with LibreOffice and the tool suite. Treat “Calc” (the spreadsheet) as a portable database. Split your users into the categories you want and run whatever reports you can dream up. All without being an IT professional!
There are many “free” or “cheap” online tools that market these services but they are prone to becoming more expensive and disappearing all together. If your Internet goes down at some inopportune time wouldn’t it be nice to still be able to work? If you’re on a long flight you can pop open your laptop and get 8 hours of work done no problem. When you design something you control it. You can add features a vendor doesn’t have.
I would strongly advise everyone to give LibreOffice a try. At a ~300MB download and a ~600MB install it’s so tiny you will not even notice the space. It can run effectively on just about any modern computer, including single board computers like the Raspberry Pi 5! Put a Raspberry 5 on a large portable battery bank and have a pair of HD display glasses and you have a mobile workstation you can take anywhere, good for at least 2 hours of continuous work before needing to recharge.
The website is : https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/
Feel free to donate a buck or two if you like the software. Unfortunately the project no longer takes crypto donations but they may re-enable this in future. I am harassing them on this. Great free software deserves our support. If you’re as old as me in the IT game you remember when the only game in town (MS Office) cost $500 ($499 to be exact) for an “Enterprise” copy! What is past is prelude so support free software and use it to make your own commercial ones then donate to the free guys. This is what is called, passing the love around.