So for some in the corporate world, your defacto computing suite is Office. And for students in college, most institutions with 365 email, also push Office 365. The problem here, is that when you graduate or leave a company, you need to own Office. And for Mac or Windows, this can be a costly subscription.

Here is where a “donate-ware” office program that is a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, formulas and database come to mind as Libre-Office!

I use this for my mac and windows computers at home. While I am entitled to a Windows 365 access from my work, I like to keep all work separate. Thus the solution for me, is Libre Office. Now, others I know, have express similar use of another free office application called appropriately, Open Office. I’m not familiar with Apache’s Open Office and not used it. But its likely I will download a version to try, and compare.
In the meantime, Libre Office was somewhat of a lucky use for me. A emeritus lost some files and had only backed up to floppy disk (yes, floppy) of these waaaayyy back in the days of Word Perfect. And his texts were in German. The accomplishment of being able to read the floppies via a working USB drive was encouraging but even more, Libre office not only opened but imported and saved as later Word files, keeping the German text intact! A life saver and I encouraged donating for this alone!

Currently Libre Office (for Mac) is as version 7.6.4 with newest version at 24.2
I used it for documentation and opening older files I come across like Excel, that I used to keep items I sold on ebay on. Looking back is… interesting.

Libre Office downloads