Are you Still using Microsoft Office? Time to Move On. An Alternative.

many of you are forced to use Microsoft Office at work probably 99% of you and some of you may be using Google docs for some of this but Microsoft Office is now in Microsoft 365 which means you're in the cloud which means Microsoft can read your documents then you're using one drive with it so that's great they can read your other documents in there or maybe you think you can choose Google Docs instead since you don't need to do much okay more Cloud Google can read that too and then for some of you it gets worse you push your document through grammarly so the AI can scan it for you as well and they can read your document or others will use chat GPD and have them read your document or make it nowadays you're being funneled into putting all your documents in cloud services which can scan your content are we understanding the theme Here third parties can read your documents how can we accept this in a privacy channel it's time to rethink your approach and come up with a better answer that is free stay right [Music] there I wouldn't suggest that you use Microsoft Office even if you had some desktop version of it from the past I haven't used Microsoft office in 10 years but we need to find a substitute and I really don't understand why alternatives are not more popular there are several non-big Tech Alternatives like libery Office Apache open Office collabora online WPS office free office cigra office suite Polaris Office only Office Word Perfect Zoho workspace today I'm going to recommend only one no need to search all over I use lib office I've used lib office writer for the last 10 years and this is the replacement to Microsoft Word I have made many documents on it 10 years worth I've used Liberty office in press which is the equivalent to Microsoft PowerPoint I've used Liberty office calc to make spreadsheets which is equivalent to Microsoft Excel I frankly only discovered libary office draw while I was researching this though it is installed on my computer and lastly I had no idea that Liberty office base was a database app that can make databases like Microsoft Access I didn't intend for this video to be a tutorial on how to use libery office I'm sure there are other creators who've already done that but let me first introduce you to libery office and the organization that supports it you likely want to know if it will be around for the long run and just exactly what the history is you'll want to know if the software is buggy and if there's anyone doing development work on it it started off with a German company called star office and this goes back to 1985 right near the beginning of the PC Revolution so the original started off right around the appearance of Word Perfect which many of you would have forgotten about but that was even before Microsoft Office the biggest players back then were word perfect and Lotus 123 then of course Microsoft Office took off and the super popular apps of the 80s like word perfect and Lotus 123 started to fade So eventually I imagine products like Word Perfect Lotus 123 vizy Cal and star office lost market share in 1999 Sun Microsystems bought star office at that time sun Microsystems was already owned by Oracle then Oracle revived the product as openoffice.org and just to tell you how much effort was put into it there were a 100 developers on Oracle side doing this their idea was to make an open source product and then use that base code to create a commercial product then some developers decided to Fork the product from openoffice.org and created lib office I recall that many of the original developers actually were from Oracle anyway there was a big dispute about this move and Oracle pulled back there was a backlash and no one wanted to deal with openoffice.org anymore eventually Oracle donated the openoffice.org project to the Apache Foundation where this product currently exists as Apache open Office So in theory the biggest open source projects for office suite software is Apache open office and liy office both of which originated from openoffice.org but the reality is that most of the deel velopment Community migrated to Liberty office and it is the most popular open-source office suite today liy office is maintained by the document Foundation which is a nonprofit company based in Germany and it is funded by donations from Ordinary People and corporations there are big corporations in the advisory committee of the document Foundation like Google I'm sure Google wants to make sure they have fingers in the office suite world since that's probably how they're doing the office suite work on Google workspace and Google Docs the point is that the development on libery office continues I don't know how many developers are working on Liberty Office Products but lib office has a version for Microsoft Windows Linux and Mac OS and there are readers that you can install on mobile phones to read documents the product Suite is huge and it has to maintain compatibility with Microsoft Office so I assume that there are a lot of developers again as I mentioned earlier libery office is a complete Suite so let's talk about the individual applications in the suite if you're doing basic word processing libery office writer can read Microsoft Word files doc or doc X its native file format is odf but you can export to Microsoft Word format or you can export as a PDF now don't expect the menus to be exactly like Microsoft Word it is a different product so the options are different or called differently however you will find that for persons not doing complex formatting like writing a formatted book that it is pretty straightforward it's pretty user friendly and for 99% of the users you will not need to do anything complicated after all most people just use these to compose letters resumés instructions reports user manuals that's probably the most complex I've had to use it for is to make user manuals with integrated images and I actually forget that I am not using word I couldn't even remember how different it was on word because for most users you're not formatting complex documents daily so you have to search for features on word as well some people have complained that if you use word to make the document that's some of the complex formatting features don't exactly convert well into libery office some people complain that the UI looks more like Microsoft Word in 2003 I don't know about that it does look pretty similar to The Standard desktop Microsoft Office before Microsoft 365 but I'm not missing anything on the other hand if you're working in an office where everyone is using Microsoft Word obviously you're going to get Microsoft Word for free anyway if you're the boss though you may think to save your money and use libery office for free most spreadsheets follow the original UI introduced by visy Cal and Lotus 123 in the80s so this is not a UI invented by Microsoft Office for standard spreadsheet use which I do use regularly I often forget that I'm not using using Excel I do have to hunt options in menus because like Microsoft Word it is a different application but it works as expected and I have not been left searching for features that are missing there are missing features for those that do complex spreadsheets and that is the Excel macros or VB script Excel macros are a plus and a minus aside from introducing incompatibilities when the user doesn't use Excel macros have been a big source of malware as they can do dangerous things like delete files so I personally don't use Excel macros and thus everything works as it should once you find the equivalent function in Liberty office Cal some people have said that the CSV import feature of Liberty office Cal is better than Excel I use CSV import a lot and frankly it's worked 100% of the time so I don't know if this is different than Excel the native file format Liberty office is ODS but you can export in XLS and xlsx format if you want Excel compatibility normally you're not going to be sharing the editing of a liberty office impress document with someone using Microsoft PowerPoint but if you do then there will be the typical issues like differences in formatting or differences in themes one of the biggest differences can be the the availability of fonts Liberty office may have different fonts than PowerPoint and of course it could cause an incompatibility in the presentation file however other than that I think you'll be able to do the same kinds of things on Liberty office and press as you would on Microsoft PowerPoint like the other apps in the suite don't expect the UI to be the same they are but just in a general level obviously each product would have their own templates and Graphics library and fonts it looks pretty good to me as far as being able to make a good presentation impress files can be exported to PPT or pptx format so they can be viewed with Microsoft viewers but the native file format is odf one of the features in libary office that could be used to supplement liy office impress is libary office draw because draw can make finer graphic documents it is really good for more detailed documents like flowcharts and organizational charts I'm not familiar with anything equivalent on the Microsoft Office front maybe there's something there now I would have probably thought of using Microsoft 3D paint which is a little different and is not part of the office suite maybe if you folks know more about what's equivalent Microsoft Office you can let me know in the comments uh beyond my experience here I have not tried libri office base before just from opening it it does look a little like Microsoft Access which I have also not used in a long time generally it looks like a more basic UI from what I remember Microsoft Access was a lot prettier making a Microsoft Access compatible databases usually within the realm of office use not for personal use so it's really unlikely that someone will be using libery office base instead of Microsoft Office in an office where everyone else else is using Microsoft Access nowadays I would imagine that for real office use someone would actually use a real database that may be free like MySQL or Maria DB I think the dates of Microsoft Access has come and gone long ago amazing though that the Liberty office people even duplicated a Microsoft Access compatible application just goes to show the size of the development team required here the liy office suite is is free it is included in many dros of Linux there are viewer apps on Android and iOS but if you're going to use this perhaps you might think of donating to Del libery office the document Foundation we need this kind of project to keep going Microsoft has gone to the cloud on their office suite Google always did this in the cloud since the beginning but the cloud-based documents are dangerous for privacy especially if the host come company is already known for collecting data which Microsoft and Google both do maybe not dangerous for a cloud version of liy office since data collection is not their cup of tea but something to always be aware of I'm a happy Liberty office user and like I said I've used it for over 10 years and on all platforms Linux Windows and Mac OS so I didn't have to compromise at least for my kind of use you can download the application at Liberty office.org enjoy I created a company to offer solutions to privacy instead of just talking about problems the first important product is the the Google Phone we were marketing the Brax 2 phone since last year but that is now sold out right now we have different models of pixel phones which are using calx OS first of all the pixels are very high quality phones and you will really enjoy them with galx OS which is very user friendly most things you expect to have on a phone will work with minimal fuss and Tech skills there is no Google on these phones and there is no Google ID so they are invisible to Google most apps will work just fine as long as they're not Google these phones are around $400 so much cheaper than a regular phone I started a VPN service byes VPN years ago the thing about a VPN and services that you have to trust the provider of the service so some of you choose to trust some unknown Corporation with some unknown affiliation here's a VPN service coming from someone you know my face is attached to this service me and my staff support it directly definitely no logging and we do not block email check it out we have worldwide coverage and we do not scam you with auto renewals I created a bmail product from us the request of a stealthy email solution the main claim to fame of our email product is that there's no made data we do not record IP addresses and ensure that IP addresses do not appear on your email headers thus this provides you with a quiet way to gain privacy by not revealing where the messages come from you get to use any of our seven domains some of which are very obscure and you can create unlimited aliases sign up quickly to use short usernames which will be very popular for use with aases you can also use Web Mail as no setup is required to use it just a normal browser will be fine all these products are on the store on my app brme sign up on there don't worry you will not be asked to give any personal information like email to sign up thank you for watching and see you again [Music] soon

Channel: Rob Braxman Tech

Views: 338,438

Keywords: internet privacy, tech privacy, privacy, de-googled phones, libreoffice, openoffice, apache openoffice

Id: LnXZKphq-XM

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2023