I guess I’m the only here, but after years of running LibreOffice, I still miss MS Office.
Don’t get me wrong, I can do everything I need in LO, but MSO is still better imo.
Nothing is like Excel and it’s macros (I know, old school, but I can’t get macros as complete in LO). And I miss Word’s “page layout” where you can just center a text to a page vertically. Details, but still things I miss.
I’m a bit like you! I’m studying to become a High School science teacher, so I’m not in a technical program. My computer serves mostly as a typing machine. I switched 2 years ago and it wasn’t all smooth, but I’ll share some of the things I encountered and what I did.
First problem I had, cloud sync. I used to be a a big OneDrive user and I wanted to sync everything with my drive as I used to be. There isn’t a very good program for syncing OneDrive. I bought a licence to InSync and it made it work flawlessly. Seriously good software! (nowadays I host my own Nextcloud server, but don’t start with that, it’s a lot of job for not a whole lot).
Second problem was getting used to LibreOffice. Compared to Office, LO isn’t formated around pages, every text you write is considered “one big text” and then it calculates where to put its page breaks and everything. What does it change? Not a whole lot, but technically speaking, it’s not as good as a formatting tool as Word is. Doesn’t really matter if you aren’t a formatting freak like I am, but it took me a some time to get use to it. To get better with it, I recommend you to practice styles on it (text style and page style).
Third problem, collaboration. I didn’t find a very good solution to it. What I do is I ask all my colleagues to write their parts online (Google Docs, MS Office Online,…) then once everything is done and perfectly written, I download it and open it in LO and do the final formatting. So I’m always the one doing the formatting. It’s important than when you give it back to your teachers, give it in a .PDF format. (Btw, unrelated, but look into Zotero, it’s a life saver)
And a general tip and trick I could give you is to keep close a Windows/Mac machine (not with you at all times, but just something you access fairly easily if you plan in advance). There were a few times a professor mandated that we submitted the work in MS office format, and I didn’t want to risk it not being right, so I did it in LO and polished it in Office. That and I was asked to use a very specific, Windows only software, so having it was very useful.
If you have other questions, don’t hesitate to ask!
Something that people should keep in mind is that the fees were lower for those “out-of-province” students in Québec than in their own province.
This fee raise basically brings it on par with what they would pay in their on province. One of the reasoning behind this law is that Québec shouldn’t be subsidizing other provinces way too expensive university system.
If you are living in Québec, university fees are quite cheap, and this doesn’t change.
The French vs English aspect is widely talked about, but not a whole lot is mentioned about the actual price hike.
I tried it in the past, but many other advanced functions I use in LO and MSO aren’t available. It’s been a while though, I should probably give it a try again.