Many academics rely heavily on MS Word and its track changes tools. If you are undertaking a PhD, one of your considerations should probably be what tools your supervisor(s), collaborators and external reviewers/examiners, are used to. These are potentially situations where otherwise minor formatting inconsistencies arising from translating from LibreOffice may be important. Likewise, most conferences will expect presentations in MS Powerpoint format. In the discipline of psychology, the vast majority of refereed journals require submissions, with stringent formatting requirements, to be in MS Office format.
While I personally believe in open-source software, running LibreOffice on a Linux machine, I feel obliged to point out some issues which you really should consider. Well, M$O Word is better in this respect. It is search and replace in text documents. Just plain old good menu-based interface (oh, if you miss ribbons, turn on the side bar and enjoy).įor the sake of objectivity: there is one thing that I miss in AOO/LO. Tons of extensions let you finetune AOO/LO to your needs. At first, it may seem cumbersome, but as you learn, you realize that styles are great, they let you change a document in virtually a couple of mouse clicks. This is handy when you need to write/edit texts in specific fields of science/medicine/technology with lots of specific jargon. Not just adding words to custom dictionaries, but editing main dictionaries. I can (relatively) easily switch between variants (for example, with or without ё for Russian, modern or pre-1917 for Russian, taraškievica or nakromaŭka for Belarusian, Brazilian or European Portuguese, etc.). I can run spellcheck on languages that M$O does not even know (Esperanto is an example). Both Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice (AOO and LO respectively hereinafter) are rock stable as compared to M$O.
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