Chapter 9

The Pi as a Productivity Machine

THE FLEXIBILITY OF the Raspberry Pi makes it a good choice as a low-power, general-purpose desktop computer. Although it will never reach the same level of performance as a standard desktop or laptop, its low cost and environmentally friendly power consumption help to make up for any problems with occasionally sluggish performance.

The Raspbian operating system, available from the Raspberry Pi website, includes the popular LibreOffice productivity suite as standard. This provides equivalents to all the tools you would expect to find in a commercial product such as Microsoft Office: a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation tool, and even applications for creating diagrams or mathematical formulae. Alternatively, you can use many of the same cloud-based software through the web browser that you would on any other computer.

Using either of the methods described in this chapter—locally installed applications or cloud-based services—the Pi can be used as a day-to-day machine for office and school work, while not harming its usability as a platform for programming and experimentation.

Using Cloud-Based Apps

If you use your Pi connected to the Internet the ...

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