Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on Linux

Your Word, Excel and PowerPoint files will open on Linux. Nothing needs converting.

Microsoft doesn’t make Office for Linux. It shows no sign of starting. What you get instead is a choice of three tools, and most people end up using two of them.

The three options

Office on the web is Microsoft’s own. Sign in at office.com with the account you already have and Word, Excel and PowerPoint run in the browser for free. Because it’s the real thing, a file that passes through it comes out the other side exactly as a colleague on Windows expects. It’s thinner than the installed programs, with complicated macros, some mail merge jobs and the more advanced chart and pivot options missing or simplified. It also needs an internet connection.

LibreOffice is already on your computer if you installed Mint. It’s free, it works offline, and its help pages confirm it opens and saves .docx, .xlsx and .pptx along with the older .doc, .xls and .ppt. Coming from Office, the first hour feels like stepping back a version or two, since the commands live in menus where you expect a ribbon.

ONLYOFFICE is the one that looks like Microsoft Office, ribbon and all. It treats Microsoft’s formats as its own, so a document edited there and sent back to someone on Windows tends to survive the round trip well. It has less depth than LibreOffice once you get into long documents and heavy spreadsheets.

Use LibreOffice for anything that lives on your own computer. For a file that has to go back to an office running Microsoft 365, use ONLYOFFICE, or the web version when it has to be perfect.

What goes wrong

Letters, budgets, school assignments and ordinary slide decks open looking the way they should. Trouble starts at the edges, in a tightly formatted CV, a newsletter with text boxes placed just so, a spreadsheet that runs on Excel macros, or a document with tracked changes from five people.

Fonts are behind most of it. The typefaces Windows supplies, Calibri among them, belong to Microsoft and don’t come with Linux, so another font stands in. Line lengths change by a hair, and a two-page CV becomes two pages and one lonely line. Macros written for Excel are the other regular casualty, and if your household accounts depend on one, test that file during your USB trial before you commit.

Sending files to people on Office

If the other person only needs to read it, send a PDF. LibreOffice has Export as PDF in the File menu, and a PDF looks identical on every computer ever made, which ends most formatting arguments before they begin.

If they need to edit it, save it in Microsoft’s format. LibreOffice saves in its own OpenDocument format unless told otherwise, and it asks each time whether you’re sure. You can settle that permanently. In Tools, then Options, then Load/Save, then General, there’s a setting called Always save as, and LibreOffice’s help says it exists for exactly this case, where you always exchange documents with other people. Set it once for text documents, once for spreadsheets and once for presentations, choosing the Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats, and the question never comes up again.

Working on a shared document at the same time as somebody else is the one thing neither desktop suite does well. Use Office on the web for that, or Google Docs, both of which behave on Linux exactly as they do anywhere.

Outlook, OneNote and the rest

Same pattern. Outlook and OneNote both run in the browser with your existing account, and Teams does too. Your OneDrive files are reachable at onedrive.com, though the folder that syncs by itself doesn’t exist on Linux.

A Microsoft 365 subscription you’ve already paid for keeps working, since it covers the web and phone apps as well. Whether to renew it is a question for three months from now.