I replaced my entire Microsoft Office subscription with free open-source apps

I’ve been paying for Microsoft Office for years without thinking twice about it. It was the software I was taught in school, saw being used in offices, colleges, and everywhere else. But that subscription cost has been adding up, and I’ve been paying money for features buried in Word and Excel that I don’t even use.

So I decided to cancel my subscription and replace Microsoft Office with free, open-source alternatives. I had already done this when I replaced Adobe apps with open-source alternatives, and what I found surprised me because not only are these tools saving me money, some of them are actually better for me than Microsoft’s offerings.

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LibreOffice Writer

Microsoft Word

I’ve used Microsoft Word for everything from quick notes to my entire journalism school dissertation. However, it’s overkill for a majority of the tasks I…