LibreOffice

LibreOffice is the most widely deployed European office suite by a wide margin and the one that asks least of you: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base and Math, free, installed locally, working entirely offline. There is no account, no subscription, no cloud component and nothing transmitted — which makes the data protection assessment for it about as short as such a document can be.

That is precisely why public administrations keep choosing it. Several European cities and government departments have standardised on it, and the reasoning is consistent: documents produced by a public body should not require a licence from a foreign vendor to open in twenty years, and open formats plus open source is the only arrangement that guarantees it. ODF is its native format, and Microsoft formats are read and written well enough for everyday exchange.

It is developed by The Document Foundation, a non-profit incorporated in Berlin, funded by donations and corporate contributors rather than by licence sales — so there is no upsell path and no tier above the one you have. The trade-offs are real: OOXML fidelity is good but not exact, so a heavily formatted DOCX can shift, real-time collaborative editing needs Collabora Online on top, and the interface looks its age next to a subscription product.

What LibreOffice does well

• Complete suite — Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base, Math
• Free, offline, no account and nothing transmitted
• Non-profit foundation in Berlin, no upsell path
• Open formats guarantee long-term document access
• Widely adopted by European public administrations

Where LibreOffice falls short

• OOXML fidelity good but not exact on complex layouts
• Real-time collaboration requires Collabora Online
• Interface looks dated next to subscription suites
• No first-party cloud or mobile editing story

Standout feature. A document you can still open in twenty years without asking a vendor for permission.