By @CNET
Publication Date: 2026-01-16 11:01:00
It took some convincing, but earlier this year, I finally ended a years-long relationship with Microsoft 365. I’d like to say I ditched the office suite for some nuanced reason, like I don’t want Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot because I find it unhelpful and distracting, but my motivation was far simpler. I wanted to save money, and I found a free alternative called LibreOffice.
LibreOffice can trace its roots back to 1985 with the release of the word processing program Star-Writer I. In 2010, the independent, non-profit German foundation The Document Foundation officially launched the free, open-source software suite LibreOffice. Since then, the foundation said government offices around the world have saved money by migrating to the office suite.
In addition to being free and open-source, LibreOffice offers other benefits, like more document privacy than Microsoft 365 or Google Docs, but there are also some drawbacks, such as no native cloud access to those documents. Here’s…
