Thanks @swarfendor437 , I will take a close look at that. I've got to say though that the new Office libre (August '24) says it is fully compatible with Office 365. I've been too busy to check with version I'm running on 17.1 Core. As you know the only issue was Excel spreadsheets... I tried Powerpoint and they worked really well, even the animations were perfect. The only issue was the showed as a weird symbol but I guess that means installing a compatible font.
I don't know when I'll get time to check things out thoroughly because I only got my timetable today! There are 3 courses I've not taught before, so I've got my work cut out to be classroom-ready by Monday! We don't even have a "half term" holiday here, it's straight through to Christmas with one or two long weekends, which are usually spent grading exams and writing reports!
My end goal is to be Linux dependent when support for Windows 10 ends, and be in a position to demonstrate a viable alternative to my colleagues before then.
I'll read up on Calligra Office while I'm eating my dinner. Thanks as always for your suggestions and support.
I was really hoping the upgrade to Zorin 17.2, which included the latest version of Libre Office Calc (I believe), would solve the issue with Excel, but it doesn't.
I've been so busy since getting back into the classroom, and sooo tired that I've not had a chance to really try out a lot of the suggestions made so far. I will get around to it ASAP.
I've purchased several versions of SoftMaker Office and can vouch for its ability to work with and save to share with people who use MS Office.
Also, I contacted them to ask about telemetry and they unequivocally stated that there is none; no data are collected.
LibreOffice had some massive problems on large documents. When creating a business plan for a startup, I ran into many problems, which can be found on the sub-reddit.
Note: I use the standalone version, not the cloud one.
There is one more Office Suite that I have forgotten about, Collabora Office. This is the enterprise version of LibreOffice. Not tried it on GNU/Linux but have used the Android version. Not checked if it is any better for compatibility.
LibreOffice is usually a solid choice, but I've seen some quirks with formatting when sharing files with Microsoft Office users. A while back, I had a similar experience where I used LibreOffice to create a presentation, and when I shared it with colleagues using PowerPoint, some formatting was off, which caused a bit of confusion.For seamless collaboration, you might also want to check out alternatives like OnlyOffice or WPS Office. They seem to handle compatibility pretty well. Plus, if you're looking to get more comfortable with Excel, visit website for some great courses that could help you master those skills before making the switch.
True, but WPS is closed source and a Chinese user posted on their forum they should release the source code for their GNU/Linux version. Wasn't listened to (surprise?) and so left it behind.
I have always noticed slight formatting incongruencies when translating back and forth between LibreOffice Impressions and Powerpoint. The same is true to one extent or another with all PPT alternatives I have tried.
This can be problematic if you're truly needing to be collaborative. But if it the need is to simply handoff a finished presentation or document, I just make a PDF of the file and then it shares and presents seamlessly no matter the software or hardware involved. No matter anything I have encountered at least.
I haven't had any issues with .pptx files in SoftMaker Office. Even links to media worked when modifying PoeerPoints for Music lessons for students with low vision. The pdf solution is an excellent idea and with Okular you could run it as a presentation. Even .pptx files run in Okular provided the backends are installed.
I wanted to jump in here and add that I personally use SoftMaker Office 2024 on Zorin OS. Works great. No problems. Honestly does render Word documents better than LibreOffice does. And that's the truth. Good luck.
P.S.: For PDFs, I use Xournal++ on Zorin. It works well as a PDF reader.
If you absolutely must have 100% compatibility with MS Office then I suggest you use VirtualBox to create a Windows VM and install MS Office. I've done this as I have a few proprietary Excel addins that I need for certain projects.
Some of my PowerPoint files use embedded 3D files (generally .glb files) and there is no other program that I know of that can provide this and the Morph transition.
With what MS is doing at this very moment with Recall, I really can't make the switch to Windows 11 - but I will need Excel! As my boss also does work as a "buyer" and an accountant, I think it's looking as if my only option is going to be a VM, running WX inside Zorin, or Mint.
I'll have to wait until the Christmas or Easter holidays to be able to experiment with that. I'm flat out working at the moment, and already had two "back to school lurgies", leaving me exhausted... the biggest reason I've not visited for a while.
I really appreciate everyone's input: these things are continuously evolving, and I'll try to log i more often to keep up with opinions and advice.
Thank you to everybody who has taken time to help out.
Hey, no worries. My eldest who has Lupus is a Teaching Assistant, and just back at work this week and ironically the youngest who had no contact also went down with the same virus infection. With regard to VM, I highly recommend that you use virt-manager and not virtual box. When I was in lockdown I was running Feren OS with Windows 7 Pro 32-bit as a .vhd in Virtual Box. I actually worked from home from lockdown until I retired and in December 2020 I moved from FerenOS to Devuan 3.0 as it did not have systemd. I was using Plasma 5.27 on both Feren OS and Devuan 3.0. I installed virt-manager on Devuan 3.0 and imported the .vhd of Windows 7 Pro successfully as a .qcow2 image. The difference between VB and virt-manager was astounding, it looked and felt like running Windows on bare metal. Then in January 2021, Windows 7 reached end of life. I was pleasantly surprised how well upgrading from W7 to 8.1 Pro went, and was able to install the educational licenced Office 365, for which I only needed Outlook for a shared mailbox. I also needed Windows for a Braille Translation program whose GNU/Linux variant ran on Feren OS but not Devuan. This resulted in me having to search for a 32-bit version of Okular. I found one which had a Spanish installer but once installed, the interface was in English. Another bonus for me was Remmina Remote. About a month before I retired I searched on line on how to use Remmina to access a Windows Server. In Windows VM's I'd had to rely on I.E., and Edge to access the private web page of the school. In order to access the shared drive on the school server after login authentication downloaded a small file called 'cpub.exe'. I copied this downloaded file to a thumb drive, mounted in virt-manager. I then shut down the VM and the thumb drive now became automounted in Devuan. I launched Remmina and pointed it to the 'cpub.exe' file. I could now enter my credentials and domain name once and could not only access the shared drive on the server, but also my personal Z:\ drive which effectively would have been my WX school Desktop! And using Remmina only required one login, compared to Windows which required three separate logins to reach the shared drive, one of which reported an invalid certificate!
Before I forget, the other plus with virt-manager and using two screns, my mouse cursor would move seamlessly from Devuan screen to the VM screen on the right. In VB you have to use Right Ctrl to bring the mouse focus back to the host screen.
The idea is that the entire OS is a series of specialised VMs, spun up from whatever OS you want for a particular task or application, with coloured borders to indicate your trust levels in each individual thing. It's designed for both security and privacy by splitting up everything you do into small, separate chunks.
This does, of course, mean you need a fair amount of storage and decent hardware to run it compared to a normal desktop linux OS.
A valid point. My rig is 16 Gb RAM and I allocated 8 Gb for the Windows VM. I recommend that the Minimimum amount of RAM you need would be 8 Gb physical RAM with 4 Gb RAM allocated to any Windows VM. I only ever allocated 2 Cores out of the 16 my AMD Ryzen 7 Processor has, so a quad core processor is also the minimum CPU requirement. One other point regarding VM, if you only intend having one VM image running virt-manager you are fine. However, if you intend to play around with creating additional virt-manager images you need to create a large folder within /home as the default location of images for virt-manager is /var which can fill up quickly. Lastly, CPU Virtualisation isnct always enabled by default in the BIOS so may need enabling.
Having just read how The Guardian uses Qubes, and how it has to be configured means I will be sticking with virt-manager. One last piece of advice is once you have created an VM image you are running happily, keep a copy on an external hard drive, and backup data regularly to large capacity thumb drive, then back that up to say large WD Elements.
@Ultrabenosaurus , that looks very interesting indeed - thanks! As soon as I get a break I'll check it out.
I've decided to stop dual booting on this machine (not the one I use for work, that's just WX at the moment). I tried to revive one of my bosses old HP laptops last weekend. It wasn't showing any WiFi options at all. After trying many different solutions, I finally went to HP to download a driver for it, as tests showed the card was functioning, only to discover that HP have stopped supporting anything that isn't Windows 11 already! Then I went to Microsoft to try doing some updates, hoping a driver would be installed that way... it completely bricked the machine - after updating it never restarted and nothing I could do would start it again.
I don't know if that is a deliberate policy by MS to force people into either buying a new computer, or just bad luck, but the chance of it happening to this machine is too great, especially if HP has stopped supporting WX.
I'll delete the partition with Windows and be able to try out a VM and Qubes, as I'll have all the space I need.
Thanks again @swarfendor437 - will be trying out your suggestion too.
showed as a weird symbol but I guess that means installing a compatible font.
