By @CNET
Publication Date: 2026-04-30 10:01:00
It took some convincing, but at the start of this year, I 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 distracting and unhelpful, but really, I just wanted to save some money. And LibreOffice is a free alternative that has everything I need.
LibreOffice has roots that trace back to 1985, with the release of the word processing program Star-Writer I. In 2010, the independent, nonprofit 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…