ffutures | Freeoffice?

You're viewing

ffutures's journal
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: site light

Anyone here use Freeoffice for Mac? I need a decent word processor etc. for my Macbook Pro (2015), apparently Libre Office is no longer compatible, and I'd prefer not to get involved in the Microsoft morass. My Windows box is my main platform for word processing etc., and Libre Office is fine on that, I just need something compatible for occasional use on the laptop.

Freeoffice appears to be free, but I'm worried that there might be snags or hidden costs that aren't mentioned on their site. Anyone know anything?

https://www.freeoffice.com/en/

Later - seems OK if a bit limited - no spreadsheet or drawing app - but it'll do for basic word processing.

Later later - I forgot to say that FreeOffice also says 10.15 as the minimum, but unlike LibreOffice it installed and seems to work properly on 10.13.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

autopope

It appears to be a renamed version of SoftMaker Office, which I used (on non-Mac platforms) about 10-20 years ago. Another German office suite in the same vein as StarOffice (which became OpenOffice and then was forked to create LibreOffice). It was solid, but not as feature-rich as StarOffice.

Interesting that they've gone free for noncommercial use.

From:

ffutures

I'm going to double-check LibreOffice since their site says nothing about incompatibility - I may have downloaded the wrong version or something when I last tried it - but if that fails I'll give freeoffice a shot.

And as if by magic I notice that LibreOffice wants OSx 10.15 and I'm running 10.13, which was probably the stumbling-block last time.

Edited Date: 2025-08-18 06:14 pm (UTC)

From:

history_monk

Older versions of Libre Office available here: https://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/

From:

ffutures

I saw that, but it doesn't look like those are complete self-installing packages and I'm not sure of the date of the last compatible release. For my purposes FreeOffice will probably do anyway - I've had this laptop for a year or so without needing to do serious work on it.