Collabora Office 4+

I’m using this on an ipad and love the fact that the interface looks and acts very much like LibreOffice, though there does seem to be one major flaw. As far as I can tell, the “save” button does nothing at all, and you need to “save as” and replace the existing document or rename it every time you close the app if you don’t want to lose your changes. Not sure what the rationale is behind that one, but I’ve tested it a few different ways and so far it seems the “save” icon/button does nothing but provide false assurance that you won’t lose your work and is more likely to cause problems than anything. As an editor though, the interface itself seems fine. May update my review as I use it more.

If you try to use this app in the natural way you would use any other app, you will quickly lose all of your work! Like, if you click “new, document” and type up a text document, the most obvious button to push is the check mark at the top left. You think it has saved your work, so then you click the back arrow at the top left. But is your work saved? No! Not only is it not saved but it is permanently deleted! Let’s try again, type new document, go to hamburger button top right, now you click on “save.” Surely now it is saved and it is now safe to click the back button at the top left? Wrong again! Your work was NOT saved and it is completely lost again! The only way to save your work is to find “export” and export it has something like a .doc or .pdf. I recommend doing this first thing, before you start typing. If you do this first it will save correctly. A good app would make it nearly impossible to accidentally lose your work. With this app, losing your work is the default, if you are not extremely careful. The right way would be, when clicking “new document” it should prompt you to type a title for the file and select what type of document/file it is going to be. That step would take care of the exporting first thing and then it would be saved before you even start writing

This app crashed three times successively as I attempted to read a midterm paper I had written a few years ago in DOCX format. This was my first introduction to Collabora Office and the very first document I attempted to read. For comparison, I opened the same document in Google Docs and was able to read every word flawlessly. Not one hiccup. Bothering with this app was an absolute waste of my time, and I don't like my time being wasted. I uninstalled it immediately. If you are thinking about installing Collabora Office, I would caution against it and suggest looking elsewhere. 2/5 stars. And that's being generous.