MS Office isn't free, and not everyone has a license — knowing the free alternatives, and exactly where they match or differ, is worth ten minutes.
Free, open-source, and installed on your computer just like MS Office is. Writer, Calc, and Impress correspond directly to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Both can open and save .docx/.xlsx/.pptx files, though very complex formatting can shift slightly moving between the two.
Free, run entirely in a web browser, and save automatically and continuously to Google Drive — "forgot to save" isn't possible. Multiple people can edit the same file at the same time, which neither MS Office nor LibreOffice do natively.
| Microsoft | LibreOffice | |
|---|---|---|
| Word | Writer | Docs |
| Excel | Calc | Sheets |
| PowerPoint | Impress | Slides |
This section teaches MS Office because it's still the most common in offices, colleges, and job listings — but every skill covered here (formatting text, writing formulas, building slides) transfers directly to any of these alternatives. Only the exact menu locations differ. Comfortable in one, comfortable in all three.
In practice, the choice is often per-task rather than once-and-forever: Google's tools for a document several people need to edit together in real time, MS Office or LibreOffice for offline work or a document with heavy formatting a browser handles less gracefully, and whichever one a school or employer already standardizes on when the file needs to match everyone else's exactly.