What I like and don't like about LibreOffice
An erstwhile advanced user of Word and Excel, I switched from MS Office to LibreOffice around four years ago in anticipation of switching to Linux as my primary (and possibly sole) OS.
What I like about LibreOffice:
* It's free -- I can install it on any computer I want without payment or licensing hassles.
* Although it has recently begun offering an optional Ribbon-like "Notebookbar," its default interface is a classic menu. I never cottoned to the Ribbon and suspect it was intended to serve as a vendor lock-in tool.
* Almost all of the features I've tried work as advertised (although some of the more advanced ones come with a distinct learning curve).
* It offers excellent forward and backward compatibility.
* It recovers old and partially corrupted/damaged MS Office documents far better than MS Office itself.
* Whenever something has gone wrong (which hasn't happened very often), the document-in-progress recovery feature has worked flawlessly every time.
* Its native file formats are genuinely open, unlike MS Office's pseudo-open .*x formats.
* When bugs are assigned to paid "volunteers" from outfits like Red Hat, they tend to get fixed competently and in a reasonable amount of time.
What I don't like about LibreOffice:
* It takes a fair amount of sophistication, attentiveness, and work on the user's part to file an actionable bug report. Bug screeners tend not to meet less technically literate bug filers halfway.
* To increase the odds of a bug being confirmed and worked on, the user must sometimes install multiple parallel (~portable) versions of LibreOffice to determine whether the bug is a regression. This can take a significant amount of time as well as a significant amount of drive space.
* It takes far too long for a bug to be confirmed and assigned, even after multiple users have reported it over multiple releases. The reluctance of moderators to confirm can sometimes appear like a deliberate temporizing strategy to reduce the official number of outstanding bugs.
* It can take far too long -- years -- for some confirmed bugs to get fixed, even if they are rated "important" by affected users.
* Writer doesn't have anything comparable to Word's envelope wizard, and getting it to support postal bar codes is a technical nightmare for non-expert users.
* Writer doesn't have Word's collapsible/cuttable/movable outline feature, although the sidebar Navigator does help with document navigation.
* Doing advanced search and replace operations that aren't covered by Writer's AltSearch extension (which should probably have been integrated into Writer itself many releases ago) requires knowing regular expressions.
* Useful third-party extensions are not always updated to remain compatible with current LibreOffice releases.
* LibreOffice's macro recorder is still experimental, buggy, and unreliable. Moreover, last I checked, macro documentation was spread over multiple sources (including the OpenOffice site). This makes creating macros in LibreOffice a serious challenge for ordinary (non-coder) users.
* In Windows and Mac, it's necessary to download the entire updated suite installer in order to update a subset of installed LibreOffice apps ... and it's a really big download. That may not be an issue for users with fast, unmetered, uncapped Internet and plenty of drive space -- it's not currently an issue for me -- but it can be for users who don't meet that profile.
Overall, I'm happy with LibreOffice and wouldn't want to go back. I used OpenOffice for a year ca. 2007/2008, and I can say without reservation that it was not in the same class as MS Office was back then. Today, LibreOffice may be less polished and buggier than MS Office in places, but it's a very serviceable substitute for many, many users.