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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    LibreOffice

    Score9.4 out of 10
    N/ALibreOffice is a free and open-source Office Suite from The Document Foundation, presented as the successor to OpenOffice.org. The suite includes Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).

    $0

    free and open source under the Mozilla Public License v2.0

    Microsoft Powerpoint

    Score7.9 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft PowerPoint is a presentation software designed to allow users to create slide-based presentations including video and images, as well as slide transitions and animations.

    $139.99

    Pricing
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Powerpoint
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    One Time Purchase
    $139.99
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Powerpoint
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Powerpoint
    Considered Both Products
    The Document Foundation
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    Chose Microsoft Powerpoint
    Microsoft Powerpoint does a better job with graphic tools, slide layout design, bullet animations, slide themes, spell checking, AI integration, HTML export, PDF export, Posters and other classroom visual aids. Although opensource alternatives make it a challenge to justify the …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    89%
    Would buy again
    8 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    59 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    8 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    57 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    89%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    57 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    7 Answers
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    38 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    8 Answers
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    46 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Powerpoint
    Small Businesses
    Google Workspace
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Adobe Presenter
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Google Workspace
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Microsoft Powerpoint Online
    Score6.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Microsoft 365 Business Premium
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Adobe Presenter
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Powerpoint
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (29 ratings)
    9.0
    (55 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    6.1
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.3
    (6 ratings)
    8.5
    (4 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Powerpoint
    Likelihood to Recommend
    The Document Foundation
    LibreOffice is a good alternative to MS Office. I like it better than Google Docs. It's compatible with MS Office applications. However, many of the features or functions are difficult to find even when utilizing the help menu. The website isn't too helpful either. My greatest disappointment is that I paid for the premium version a year ago but never received the features that were supposed to be available with a premium subscription. The upper right-hand corner of the app shows the subscription type and date of expiration of the subscription. I have premium yet every time I try to access a premium feature it requests me to pay. I have contacted LibreOffice several times over the year and they never responded or provided a refund. I can only recommend the free version because even with a premium subscription, which mine is supposed to expire on 10/22/21 (the date of this review is 08/04/21), I have yet to be able to utilize the premium features I paid for last year. I would not use this as my primary app for Word processing which is where I am experiencing the majority of the blocked features issues. Even with a paid premium subscription, I am unable to create labels. It's asking me to pay again. I think LibreOffice has greater potential but a user must get the features they paid for. I hesitate to call the company a scam but I can say I have contacted LibreOffice numerous times over the past year about the ongoing issues and have not received a response at least once. Along with the features and subscriptions issues that needed to be addressed, another area of improvement is their website. It is very difficult to locate information. Even when using the search field the instructions often do not match the app. I am not sure how often they update their online guides but I have never found it to be helpful. I have also found it very difficult to impossible to download templates. I usually get weird links with garbled codes and no template when trying to download a template. I'm not sure if it's an issue with their site or not but since they don't respond to inquiries I cannot determine a possible cause for the problem.
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    Microsoft
    The learning curve with Microsoft Powerpoint is not too steep, and most everyone can create really nice-looking presentations. The thing I like most about the new advancements in Microsoft Powerpoint comes to formatting. If you are creating a newsletter, don't get bogged down by all of the annoying formatting rules and issues you would have if creating in Publisher or Word. Microsoft Powerpoint makes it very simple. You can add text boxes and move them anywhere on the page. The templates are a nice touch, but they could use more, as most of these are outdated. I believe there are many free websites for downloading more templates.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    The Document Foundation
    • The text word processing (Writer) has come a long way and, if you are able to install your corporate fonts, there is basically nothing LibreOffice cannot handle. It works very well with document reviews and comments, and it can save in a variety of formats, making it compatible with the likes of Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
    • The spreadsheet software (Calc) can also handle most of the common tasks you may need, link various sheets, and perform some automated functions quite well. It is, I must say, somewhat less complete than the word processing side (Writer).
    • The Draw program allows you to do organizational charts and basic publications very well. It was a deficit in the past, but not anymore.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • Insert Photos from my computer and from the web with ease.
    • Auto arrangement of graphics and texts is made available through suggested formatting.
    • Spell check as I type is very valuable to me. It autocorrects many words. I like for my presentation to be accurate.
    • The ability to change any font or any size of font is very valuable to me.
    • The ability to cut and past from Microsoft Word is valuable to me. It also allows me to import tables I have already created in Word.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    The Document Foundation
    • Name brand office suites vendors such as Microsoft and Google have online portals where documents can be saved and shared for automation/integration. LibreOffice would do well to expand into this space.
    • Memory handling in large spreadsheets (i.e., 60k rows or more) seems a bit quirky on my Macbook Air. It might just be a memory issues, but scrolling with the trackpad behaves strangely (i.e., cell selection jumps around unexpectedly).
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    Microsoft
    • 3D objects that can be manipulated in slideshows by presenters
    • AI tool to cleanup presentations
    • AI tool to create graphics
    • AI tool to create photo-realistic images
    • AI tool to create vector art
    • AI tool to create videos
    • Blender 3D object importer
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    The Document Foundation
    We use it consistently and have a lot of documents in the OpenDocument format so it will be necessary to use LibreOffice or a compatible product such as Openoffice in the future to be able to open these files. Because the license fee for Libreoffice is zero it is not very costly to keep using it - the costs are mostly for keeping it installed on the office PCs and regularly updated, and solving employee issues with the user support.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    The Document Foundation
    Most people can quickly start using Writer or Calc or Impress for basic tasks even if they see Libreoffice for the first time, because the interface is similar to older (97-2003) MS Office or other software. Some features are less intuitive than in recent MS Office and some power users of MS Office need to re-learn some things before being proficient in Libreoffice.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    It’s great overall! I can think of a few improvements that would make it a 10, for example: better Smart Art graphs, automatic distribution of columns and rows in tables, and being able to more easily save templates for graphs. For example, if I could determine that a same brand name in all graphs would have a specific color, it would be great
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    The Document Foundation
    Libreoffice is a desktop app not requiring any server part so it is always available when the PC is working normally. Installing it on another machine if one PC fails is very quick and easy. This is a non-issue.
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    Microsoft
    I've never had any issues with its availability. As it is installed on my machine, it's ready when I need it, online or offline. Creating large slide decks with complex elements like video and audio doesn't affect its stability. The only limitation would be the capability of your own computer, as far as I can tell.
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    Performance
    The Document Foundation
    For big/imported tables or text documents with images loaded from the internet it is sometimes getting very slow, RAM and CPU intensive, and sometimes even hangs due to some memory leaks or other bugs. This is a long-term problem and is still not resolved perfectly.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    The performance is very strong. It loads reasonably quickly. Large presentations load relatively quickly too, given their complexity, and once loaded each slide is readily available. It's easy to scroll up and down through your slide deck and go to the slide you want. Videos, pictures and music all load on demand, controllable by clicks.
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    Support Rating
    The Document Foundation
    Support is not officially offered. However, you can find answers to any usage questions or trouble-shooting online easily, typically starting with a Google search. (I believe that all forums / tips for OpenOffice apply equally to LibreOffice, and vice versa.) While Microsoft Office, for example, officially includes support, I find that typically you end up going to a Google search in any case. So, this is not really a downside. However, in all these cases, you end up doing a lot of figuring things out for yourself.
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    Microsoft
    I have never had to use the actual support. Most of my questions are "how to" questions and there is a rich internet full of users sharing their tips and tricks with this application. Sometimes I find the answers on Microsoft support site but often I don't
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    Implementation Rating
    The Document Foundation
    Generally easy to perform, issues are how to ensure regular automatic updates on Mac OS X. Fortunatly we have only a few machines with OS X run by management and we can do these updates manually occasionally. Windows updates are quite easy with the support of third party software such as Ninite or Chocolatey, and Linux updates are super-easy thanks to the package manager (apt-get).
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    The Document Foundation
    As noted previously, LibreOffice blows Google Docs (G Suite) out of the water in terms of singular application quality, and comes close but misses the mark as a drop-in replacement to Microsoft Office. We currently are evaluating the latest release of LibreOffice to see if we can replace Microsoft Office with it entirely as we've had more time to fill in the holes that were left when losing out on Outlook and OneNote and all of the integrations that come with Microsoft Office.
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    Microsoft
    Adobe Illustrator is an excellent software but it's not easy to use for [everyone without] having any training or previous experience in working with illustrator. Microsoft Powerpoint is very easy to use and it's fantastic as it saves time more than illustrator. Another thing is it takes small space while illustrator takes a significant amount of space in the business machine
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    Scalability
    The Document Foundation
    With more users using it in the company there are more cases when a simultaneous editing of the same document is needed and this feature is lacking in Libreoffice even though the files concerned are shared and synced by some solution (we use ownCloud). Google Docs or MS Office365 via Sharepoint/Onedrive offer a better function for this.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    Scaling up use of Microsoft Powerpoint would be a simple case of buying further licences. The software is intuitive and therefore training demands from scaling it to more departments or more individuals would be relatively straightforward. Google Slides may be easier to share among those organisations that use Google's suite of apps, however.
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    Return on Investment
    The Document Foundation
    • A lot of ROI because their license price, 100% of return.
    • Sometimes we lose time finding how to do things, lowering a little bit of productivity.
    • We need to spend on training for employees because most people only know how to use Microsoft Office
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • Helped reduce time we spend modifying and sharing back and forth different versions.
    • Saved us the frustration of having to work with an online program with limited functionalities.
    • Macros make it easy to share data in one excel file and automatically update presentation.
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    ScreenShots