Guides ·
MS Office or LibreOffice for the COA exam?
It is the question every COA candidate asks, usually because they have MS Office on their machine at home and LibreOffice on the machines at the centre.
The syllabus answers it directly: both are examinable. What it also does, and what almost nobody looks up, is fix exactly how the marks are divided between them — and the split is different in the theory paper and the practical.
The official weightings
Straight from the notes at the front of the syllabus:
Theory examination
MS Windows and MS Office — 70%
Linux and open source office package — 30%
Practical examination
MS Office / open source office package — 50%
e-Office — 50%
The syllabus names the preferred packages as MS Office and LibreOffice / OpenOffice / WPS Office. So there is no "which one should I learn" — the exam expects you to move between them.
The 30% is where candidates lose marks
Thirty per cent of the theory paper is Linux and open source. On a 50-mark paper that is 15 marks, and the pass mark is 20.
Put another way: a candidate who has practised only on MS Office is competing for 35 of the 50 marks, needing 20 of them. It is survivable, and it is a bad position to choose voluntarily.
The 30% is also the easier half to prepare, because the questions tend to be recognition rather than technique — what a menu is called in Writer versus Word, which Calc function matches an Excel one, basic Linux file and directory commands from the prescribed list. A few weeks of deliberate practice in LibreOffice covers most of it.
The syllabus page lists what each unit covers, and the question papers page explains the question types and what each is worth.
The practical is only half about office software at all
This is the part that catches people. In the practical paper the office package — either one — is worth 50%. The other 50% is e-Office.
The syllabus describes the practical as one office-package question to execute, and then submission of the output of that question as a draft document in the e-Office application, with the relevant screenshots uploaded in the web application portal where applicable.
So the file you produce is worth as much as the work you did to produce it. A candidate who nails the spreadsheet task and cannot navigate e-Office has scored half.
e-Office is Unit 6 of the syllabus and it has its own vocabulary — receipts and tapals, file creation, note, quick noting, draft, template, referencing, hashtags, initiate action, signing, draft approval, dispatch, link file, park file, close file, reopening a closed file, volume creation. Those terms are worth learning exactly, because that is the language the question will be written in.
What to practise, in what proportion
Working backwards from the weightings:
For the theory paper, roughly two-thirds of your revision on Windows and MS Office, one-third on Linux and LibreOffice / OpenOffice. Do not skip the third — see above.
For the practical, split your time evenly between the office task and e-Office. If you have only ever practised the office half, you have practised half the paper.
Use whichever package you have for the core skills — a pivot table is a pivot table. Then spend deliberate time in the other one on the differences: where the menus moved, what the functions are called, how the file formats behave.
The 1,000 practical exercises cover the office tasks, and the exam page sets out the pattern for both papers.
The short answer
Learn MS Office first if that is what you have, because it is 70% of the theory paper. Then put real hours into LibreOffice or OpenOffice, because 30% of the theory and half of the practical option is open source. And treat e-Office as a subject in its own right, because it is half the practical paper and it is the one nobody revises.
Our COA course teaches both packages in the syllabus's own proportion, and the centres run dual-boot machines so students practise in the same environment the exam uses. Fees · Contact the centre