The learning curve is actually pretty manageable.
Took me an afternoon to be good enough to create lab reports for Uni. Creating your first template takes a bit but isn't super hard. Afterwards you can reuse that and only need to tweak.
This is the Tutorial I used.
For an editor I'd suggest VSCode with LaTeX Workshop. (There's also LTeX which is a great grammar and spelling checker)
I second this, haven't used the tutorial, I just learned by doing in the beginning and than took a course at Uni, which was really good and got me all the way to quickly being able to set up my own templates and quickly get a document done.
LaTeX workshop with vscode is also great, however if you're a (neo)vim user already, give https://www.github.com/lervag/vimtex a try, it's an awesome plugin and works flawlessly, especially when combined with zathura as pdf reader.
I just wrote a book in Latex and it's really easy. You just learn as you go. The only problem was when a publisher required a docx-document. It was possible using pandex, but my end notes were all screwed up.
I'd say 95% Markdown + Pandoc for when I make documents. The other 5% is LibreOffice.
When it comes time to make graphs and charts I really like wasting my time so I always try out something new (or old) to get the job done. Last time I used Pygal.
When it comes to dealing with docs from colleagues, it is all LibreOffice and Zathura.
In what ways do you find it obnoxious? I find that many of my issues can be solved by heavily customizing the UI, but there are certainly some QOL features I miss from excel (not least of which are lambdas & tables).
Same sentiments, especially with Libre Office Calc.
I love that it's got a lot of useful features, to the point that almost everything I used to do with MS Excel and Google Sheets can be done in LO Calc, but stray a bit further out and even looking for documentation can be a huge pain.
It's a combination of limited (if at all available) documentation for less-than-mainstream features, and the help forum user knee-jerk replies of “if you don't like it, go back to MS/Google,” “if you want it so badly go program it yourself”, or even various replies that can be summed up as “don't even bother asking.”
I never would ever entertain asking a question on the various LO help fora because of this.
However, I still use Libre Office since it's useful, and for my purposes, almost as good as the alternatives. It's the vocal userbase's anti-normie stance that usually fuels my hate for it.
LibreOffice, as I've been using it from soon after it was forked from OpenOffice and I'm used to it, and I don't think it's worth it to learn how to use another office suite when the one I use works fine for everything I need to do. I had tried OnlyOffice on another computer and I was positively impressed, but not quite enough to feel I should switch; in the end I only even use a small subset of the features LO has.
Markdown for myself, Google Docs when I'm collaborating with others, and OnlyOffice after puking a little in my mouth for having received a docx or pptx by email.
Depends on the use case. For my own stuff I usually use LibreOffice, for docx compability I use OnlyOffice and for presentations I use Latex with TexStudio.
Libreoffice usually, but I was a dedicated Google docs user for years and I do miss the auto-syncing since it meant I could never really lose my work but I've been trying to reduce my Google usage. I'm travelling at the moment (months long trip) so haven't been able to set up some sort of alternative system without access to all my devices.
Libre Office user for over a decade, recently moved to OnlyOffice and liking it a lot so far. Seems to do better with MS formats than LibreOffice, snappy and responsive. UI is cleaner IMO.
I use LibreOffice. It’s pretty much the gold standard for FOSS office apps.
That being said, I tend to save most of my simpler documents as regular, old-fashioned plain text whenever possible, whenever there’s no formatting to save.
More and more I find myself using Google docs and sheets. It's nice that I can update things from my phone and easily share with people because everyone has a Google account.
For my own use, I tend to go markdown for everything. Then it becomes either a blog post with hugo, or an email with markdown here (a browser and mail client extension to turn your markdown into html in a rich text field, or in an email), or a html doc.
For work, when I have no choice, I use office365. It sucks though, it's not even fully compatible with using the desktop versions of the apps (size of elements, positioning will always be slightly off)
Mostly Markdown too, but I wouldn't call that an "office suite". I rarely use classic office suite software. If I have to, LibreOffice and at work I had to use — surprise — M$ Office.
as the answers reflect: markdown for simple stuff (sou can convert with pandoc) and libreoffice for the more complex stuff and sheets especially (its preinstalled with most linux distros nowadays). documents of formal nature that exceed ~10 pages might work best in latex.
Most people don't know this, but OpenOffice is pretty much dead. It hasn't been getting any real updates for quite a while. LibreOffice is pretty active and is the one you'd want to go with.
I use LibreOffice. I was using office 365 on my laptop and I just got sick of microsoft (especially after that incident where it took them six months to give me back access to my outlook account essentially rendering many services on my old PC useless) so I started looking up alternitives to Word.
My family had been using KingSoft which is a hot buggy mess so I chose LibreOffice instead. It was one of the first open source apps I chose after leaving Microsoft and I haven't looked back. If I had to pick a problem it's that 365 was way better at correcting mispelled words but other than I love LibreOffice!
Are any office suites as good as MS Office for referencing and citations? One of the things that keeps my wife stuck on windows/macOS is the need for a good Office suite for university
At home a combination of Emacs with org-mode and iWorks, I use the icloud version on Linux. I have an annyoing issue with LibreOffice and that is why I have stopped using it. The issue is that sometimes (often) the last five lines of the document is not saved.
I personally have found SoftMaker's TextMaker to be best word processor, with a backup/fallback being Libre Office. It's got a great UI, good features, and overall is just a good experience. Honestly, the whole office suite is quite good. I definitely like it better than WPS. It's also nice that you can just purchase a one-time license and have support for 3 years, for a fairly reasonable price, tbh. Yearly subscriptions are also available if you prefer that route.
There is a free (as in beer) version, called FreeOffice you can try. It's what convinced me the full version was worth it. My backup is LibreOffice, and while some years ago the difference was stark, LibreOffice has come a long way in terms of support and feature set. So it's definitely come a long way.
I would advise you to consider switching to LibreOffice from Open Office, if nothing else though. Open Office has not received a major update release in close to a decade now, and LibreOffice is truly the successor to it, as it's actually forked from it.
Generally Libre Office but I'm trying out markdown with lowdown as my translator. I'm not impressed with it to say the least and niether groff nor latex are something I can put a lot of time into. Either way, groff is a bit archaic but I prefer it to latex's syntax (yes I know Rmarkdown is a thing).
I don't know if it counts but I've been using pandoc for the entirety of my college life so far which includes creating presentations and writing papers. For collaboration with other students, we would usually use Google Docs. It's pretty much the standard nowadays.
99.9% of customers use Microsoft Office, so I have QEMU windows for this purpose.
For own work/at home I find I mostly get by with textfiles/markdown and odd LibreOffice spreadsheet.
Why QEMU? I've found it's performance an compatibility quite lacking compared to VirtualBox, or since you're using it anyway to run nonfree software: commercial products like VMware Player/Workstation
I was using Only Office for compatibility. Switched to WPS, it feels a little bit more compatible to me. I've tried opening my docs in Microsoft 365 and everything was perfectly aligned . Encountered some problems when using text boxes, but the blame's on me for that one
Mostly just markdown for notes and logs and stuff. For spreadsheets libreoffice and collabora (selfhosted). Sometimes google docs, but only when other people use it and I need to work with them.
I hardly ever use any Office. Docs and PowerPoint are legacy from typewriter age. I use wikis or git markdown in git repos. But if i need to use an office suite, it is google.
I recently switched to only office. I.get a lot of .docx files cos of uni, and I found only office to have the least amount of bugs. Most of the files I got were broken in libreoffice due to reasons I wish I could understand. For note taking I just simply use neovim and write in a markdown file. For presentations I do the same and use marp to generate the slides from my markdown.
Honestly, I rarely use office suites these days. Mostly either wiki pages or Notion. I still use Google Docs for collaboration sometimes and LibreOffice for the rare docx or odt.
I was using LibreOffice on everything but for some unknown reason it just flat out stopped working on my machine so I installed OnlyOffice and honestly I much prefer it.
What makes you prefer OnlyOffice over LibreOffice? I like how OnlyOffice seems to decrease possible format errors, so I tend to open docs in it after putting them together in Libre.
The main thing for me is that it actually works still :P
Other than that I think I've just got so accustomed to the MS Office ribbon interface now that I start to get lost in the interface a little (95% of the time I use office type products it is at work where we don't have a choice - at home I mostly just use markdown for my own notes and documents).
Obsidian for notes, Libre Office and sometimes (please don't punch me) Google Docs/Sheets. Oh and LaTeX with nvim for docs that need to look real nice.
OnlyOffice. FOSS, great MS compatibility, more modern than LibreOffice, local apps and runs in web with Nextcloud with great document collaboration options.
Usually OnlyOffice though I keep LibreOffice installed as a backup as sometimes I've had weird compatibility issues with the former (very few and far between but still)