- Pros Free, open-source office application suite, packed with features and power, and able to open and save files in almost any current format.
- Cons Clumsy, outdated interface; work-in-progress quality means that some Microsoft Office files import with errors.
- Bottom Line By far the best free office application suite, but not yet good enough to replace Microsoft Office except where free or open-source is required.
The LibreOffice suite includes a word-processor (named Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a a database (Base), and apps for presentations (Impress), math (Math) and drawing (Draw). Unlike Microsoft Office, it omits an Outlook-style mail, calendar, and contact-management program. The most widely-used LibreOffice applications—Writer, Calc,, and Impress—look and act a lot like Office 2003, with the old menu-and-toolbar interface that Microsoft abandoned in Office 2007 and 2010. This is a mixed blessing. If you're familiar with Microsoft's menus, then you can find most LibreOffice functions almost with your eyes closed, which is good. It's also good if you want to create documents in the new Microsoft formats (DOCX, XLSX, etc.) but you don't want to learn Microsoft's new Ribbon interface. What's less good is that many of LibreOffice's dialogs, like many bad old Microsoft dialogs, offer minimal explanations, and if you want to use advanced features like the LibreOffice macro system, you'll spend a lot of time scouring help files for guidance, and sometimes the Help button leads only to an empty page. If, like me, you've worked with Word 2007 or 2010 for a while, you'll wish LibreOffice would add the "live" wordcount feature in those Word versions instead of making you use a menu to bring up a wordcount in a message box.
An Alternative to Microsoft Office
Almost any document that you can create in Word you can also create in Writer, and most worksheets that you can create in Excel you can also create in Calc. Writer lacks many of Word's convenience features, such as easily-created "building blocks" that you can reuse in multiple documents. Writer lets you edit different parts of the same document in two separate windows, but it lacks Word's elegant split-window feature that lets you edit two parts of the same document in two panes of the same window. Writer doesn't have Word's ability to display a document with its actual page format, but also hide headers, footers, and white space at the top and bottom of the page, so that a sentence that begins on one page doesn't jump across a few inches of page borders before ending on the next page. Writer only lets you view full-page layout or a "web view" that doesn't match printed output at all.
The Calc spreadsheet now can handle up to a million rows, just like Excel, but lacks the dazzling graphics and advanced data-manipulation tools that Microsoft built into recent versions of Office. I've learned to rely on Excel's built-in feature that uses color gradients to indicate high and low numbers in a range, and its minature "Sparkline" charts-in-a-cell to get a quick look at data trends. Calc has only a primitive conditional-formatting feature that requires laborious effort to achieve less-useful effects. When you want to get quick multiple views of your data, Calc's DataPivot lags behind the user-friendliness of Excel's Pivot Tables, but is beginning to catch up, for example with the ability to use named ranges to select data. The Impress presentations app gets the job done, and includes a vast toolbox of distracting animations, but don't expect anything like PowerPoint's video editing or photo-editing features.
Specifications
- Type
- Business, Personal, Enterprise, Professional
- Free
- Yes
- OS Compatibility
- Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux, Mac OS, Windows 7
- Tech Support
- Forum.
In an Office-centric world, the main advantage of LibreOffice is that it's more compatible with Microsoft's document formats than anything else, and in some ways even surpasses Microsoft Office itself, because it opens Microsoft-format files that Office can't open at all, such as files created by Microsoft Works or by twenty-year-old versions of Word and Excel. It also imports files created by Lotus WordPro that you probably can't open with anything else, and opens files created by WordPerfect for the Macintosh that can't be opened in WordPerfect for WidnowsWindows. It also imports the latest Microsoft Office formats with generally impressive fidelity. Almost every Word 2010 document that I threw at LibreOffice opened with its content and formatting intact, even if the the original document was large and complex.
Excel worksheets fared less well, and some complex ones, especially those that contained pivot tables, simply caused Calc to crash. Even with the Excel 2010 worksheets that Calc successfully opened, I noticed some odd problems. For example, I have some worksheets that I created in Excel 2003 but later converted to Excel 2010 format. When I opened these in LibreOffice, some simple sums displayed as the error code "#NAME?" instead of the sum, and the formula that generated the sum had simply disappeared. There seemed to be no reason why some sums in a worksheet displayed correctly while others displayed as this error code. This problem occurred with at least three of my test files, so if you plan to open your Office files in LibreOffice, you should be wary of this sort of gotcha.
Advanced users will be impressed by LibreOffice's powerful and mature macro language, which I use to accomplish repetitive tasks like reformatting imported files, and which supports a feature that ought to be in Office but isn't—a feature that lets you use a menu to attach a macro to an object so that (for example) a pop-up explanation can appear when you move the mouse over an image. The macro language is conceptually similar to Office's VisualBasic, but, unfortunately, they're different enough to force you up a steep learning curve when you start working with LibreOffice macros, even if you have a lot of experience with Office's macros. You can learn the essentials by recording macros with the built-in macro recorder, but you'll need to hunt down the well-hidden option that enables recording and adds "Record macro" to the macro menu. You'll find this option under Tools, Options, LibreOffice, General, where you add a checkmark next to "Enable experimental (unstable) features"—not exactly the obvious place to look. This option also makes it possible to edit a mathematical formula in the formula itself, rather than by modifying control codes. (And if you're looking for the formula feature in the Writer word-processor, you'll find it under Insert, Object, but only if you've also installed the suite's Math module.)
LibreOffice for Early Adopters
LibreOffice is a work in progress, but its new management has been adding speed, reliability, and convenience at a far more rapid pace than the old regime that produced OpenOffice.org. New releases now appear according to a fixed schedule, as in other open-source projects like Ubuntu Linux. This means that some new versions may not be as finished as the designers want, and, when this happens, the download page warns that the new version is for "early adopters," while most users should continue to download the previous version. Unless you or your organization requires open-source software, I can't recommend that you ditch Microsoft Office for LibreOffice—yet—but I certainly think you ought to give it a try. You may be pleasantly surprised by the power and convenience you can get in a desktop application that costs you nothing at all.
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