Question For Those Who Use Both Microsoft Office & LibreOffice

[guimaster]

Greetings,

I am wondering if it is both possible and reasonable for a person to use LibreOffice to learn MS Office. If someone were to purchase a "Teach Yourself Excel" or "Teach Yourself Word" program - or just take some free course online - would they be able to use LibreOffice to learn everything? I mean, are the interfaces similar enough that a person could easily transfer what they're learning about Excel into Calc? Or do the programs do things completely differently? I know that Office 2013 looks quite a bit different. But if someone knows the "technical" stuff; what they are trying to accomplish and how to do it in one suite, can that ability be easily transferred between the two? If you know one you can easily adapt to the other? Opinions?

Thanks

[Cheesemill]

The GUI's of LibreOffice and Microsoft Office (2007 and later) are completely different so I wouldn't recommend it for a beginner.

[Frogs Hair]

I agree with the second post . Everything is in a different location.

[Mr. Shannon]

You might be able to learn LibreOffice and then transition your knowledge (with much effort and time) to MS office. But trying to learn from MS Office material in LibreOffice would be nearly impossible.

[Dr. C]

It is the wrong approach. A much better approach is to learn Libre Office on its own well, with a focus on learning the concepts behind a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program etc., rather than how to do things by rote. At this point one will actually be ahead of most Microsoft Office users. One can then easily learn the interfaces for Microsoft Office, WordPerfect etc. afterwards.

By the way my experience in working with people who work with Microsoft Office all the day is that many just learn the bare minimum to get their work done and that means using less than 10% of the features of Microsoft Office. I have done training on Microsoft Office and I was surprised by how many people for example attempt to simulate a right or centre tab by using a combination of left tabs and spaces. This kind of thing is one of the reasons why many Microsoft Office documents do not transfer properly to Libre Office and vice versa. One way I found to expose this kind of error was to open their Microsoft Office documents in a 100% Libre GNU / Linux such Trisquel under Libre Office. The properly formatted Microsoft Office documents converted fine. The badly formatted Microsoft Office documents almost always became a mess.

[HermanAB]

I have found that most people who complain about compatibility between word processors do not have the same fonts installed. Since different fonts take up differing amounts of space, the resultant mess is inevitable.