Microsoft 365 Family runs $100/year and most home users open Word, Excel, and a slide deck a few times a month. LibreOffice handles the same files, runs locally, and costs nothing.

What you gain

• Writer, Calc, and Impress with full .docx, .xlsx, .pptx support
• Runs offline, no subscription, no telemetry by default
• Available on Windows, macOS, Linux, with portable builds
• Macros and scripting via Basic or Python

What you give up

Heavy Excel files with pivot tables, Power Query, or VBA macros may not round-trip cleanly. Real-time co-editing isn’t comparable to Office 365 web. Track Changes works but the markup looks different to colleagues sending you reviewed docs.

The math

LibreOffice is free. Microsoft 365 Family is $100/year, Personal $70/year, plus per-app one-time licenses around $150 each. Over five years a household saves $500 and keeps the files locally.

Who should switch

Home users, students, and anyone who mostly writes letters and tracks budgets. If your office mandates Excel macros for shared models, keep Office on a single machine and use LibreOffice everywhere else.