Microsoft Office is one of the most widely used office productivity suites in the world. It’s native file formats have become industry standards, (particularly the .docx format for documents and the .xlsx format for spreadsheets). And many users are quite happy with it.
But there are also millions of people who continue to use Office only because they must to do so for their job or business, or because they exchange files with others who use the Microsoft file formats, or because they simply don’t think there’s a viable alternative. If you’re one of those folks, I have good news for you. But first, a few words about the history of Microsoft Office, and the reasons you might want an alternative to it.
The Evolution (and De-Evolution) of Microsoft Office
Although it’s hard to imagine now, Microsoft was actually a late comer to the office productivity software market. Back in the 1980s, when almost all PCs ran on the MS-DOS operating system, WordPerfect was the dominant word processor and Lotus 1-2-3 was the 500 lb. gorilla of the spreadsheet world. Microsoft Office was widely seen as a less polished product, and simply not quite ready for prime time.
However, through a combination of actual product improvement and the advantages Microsoft enjoyed due to its virtual monopoly on the operating system market, Office steadily improved its features and quality. And crucially, it slowly but relentlessly captured market share. Today, Office has more users than all other similar suites EXCEPT for Google Docs. And since Google Docs is exclusively web-based (an unacceptable limitation for many users), Office continues to dominate the market for business and professional users, as it has for decades.
Most users were relatively happy with this state of affairs until the release of Office 2007. That new version brought two important changes. First, new file formats were introduced – the .doc document format was replaced by .docx, and the .xls spreadsheet format was replaced by .xlsx.
Second, and much more significantly, Microsoft removed the familiar drop-down menus and replaced them with a monstrosity called the Ribbon. Features are now accessed through an inconsistent collection of buttons, drop-downs, icons, labels, hieroglyphics, and other controls. The Ribbon has many different tabs (only one of which is visible at a time), and the features are distributed among the tabs in a manner completely different from the way they were organized on the old menus. Experienced users suddenly had their productivity cut substantially, as they had to spend more and more time searching for features they’d previously accessed quickly and easily.
Microsoft’s justification for the change, which they’ve stuck to all these years, is that they continued to get requests to add features that were already in the product but which users couldn’t find, so they decided to change the user interface to something allegedly better. In particular, they insist that the Ribbon was designed to aid discoverability of features. That claim could be seen as funny, if I one forgets about all the pain the Ribbon has inflicted (and continues to inflict) on tens of millions of users. In fact, it’s hard to imagine an interface less “discoverable” than the Ribbon.
Using the old menu system, a user could visually scan the text entries on a menu in a second or two and, by moving the mouse across the menu bar they could display all the other menus in quick succession. Sub-menus could be instantly displayed by hovering the mouse over them. With the Ribbon, the process of finding features is much slower, more difficult, and more haphazard. Since each Ribbon tab uses a tossed salad of text, icons, buttons, etc., scanning is much slower – some items are clearly labeled and require only a glance, while others must be clicked to open up additional controls. The items are arranged in multiple rows, which further slows a systematic search. And when you’ve finished with one tab, you’ve got to move your mouse yet again to switch to the next tab and resume the same painful hunt and peck in the hope of finding the feature you’re looking for.
Beyond the challenges of locating the features you need, an entirely separate problem is the amount of screen real estate the Ribbon consumes. In the last decade, computer screens have gotten increasingly wider and shorter, particularly on laptops. So when you replace a row of drop-down menus (which consumes virtually no vertical space) with the Ribbon, you substantially cut the space available to see the document you’re working on, and end up having to do correspondingly more scrolling.
The Two Schools of Thought
If you’ve only been using Office since 2007, or if you only use a few of its features, you’re much more likely to be content to use the Ribbon. And to be fair, many users are quite happy with the new interface; some even prefer it to the old one. If you’re in that camp, I’m happy for you, and you probably don’t need to be reading this article.
But if you’re among the millions who are sick and tired of their daily struggles with the Ribbon, you really should consider switching to the LibreOffice suite. LibreOffice is open source software, which means it’s developed and maintained by a team of dedicated volunteers. It includes all of the important features of Microsoft Office, but with traditional drop-down menus which are very easy to use and scan. It reads and writes both the old and new Microsoft file formats (as well as many others), and you can choose the default format for each application. If your system drive (usually the C: drive) is short on space, LibreOffice can be installed to a different drive. The icing on the cake is that it’s completely free to download and use.
You can find out more about LibreOffice, and download it, at https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice. When you download, make sure to choose the last stable and well-tested version (as of 8/15/24, that is version 24.2.5). Later versions that are not well-tested, or which are described as being for “early adopters”, are likely to have more bugs.