LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite consists of programs for word processing, creating and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 115 languages.
As its native file format to save documents for all of its applications, LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), or OpenDocument, an international standard developed jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). LibreOffice also supports the file formats of most other major office suites, including Microsoft Office, through a variety of import and export filters.
LibreOffice is available for a variety of computing platforms, with official support for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux and community builds for many other platforms. It is also available as an online office suite called LibreOffice Online, which includes the applications Writer, Calc and Impress. LibreOffice is the default office suite of most popular Linux distributions. It is the most actively developed free and open-source office suite, with approximately 50 times the development activity of Apache OpenOffice, the other major descendant of OpenOffice.org.
LibreOffice is offered by The Document Foundation in a free and open source “Community” edition officially intended for personal use. This is the full suite, not a cut-down edition. Enterprise-supported editions of LibreOffice can also be obtained from TDF’s corporate partners.
The project was announced and a beta released on 28 September 2010. In the nine months between January 2011 (the first stable release) and October 2011, LibreOffice was downloaded approximately 7.5 million times. The project claims 120 million unique downloading addresses over four years from May 2011 to May 2015, excluding Linux distributions, with 55 million of those being from May 2014 to May 2015.
LibreOffice—now at version 7—is one of the best-known open-source office suites. Open-source software has real appeal for government offices, financial firms, and other privacy-conscious users, because they can examine the source code for any vulnerabilities themselves. LibreOffice is also notably one of the few desktop-style office suites that costs nothing to use yet has a feature set that rivals Microsoft 365’s. What holds back LibreOffice is its unwieldy interface and occasionally buggy performance. It also doesn’t offer any collaboration features or web-based versions of its apps.
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More Information On Libre Office Suite
LibreOffice for Andriod and iOS
Is LibreOffice as good as Microsoft Office?
Is LibreOffice ready to replace Microsoft Office?
What is LibreOffice like to use?
How’s it compatibility with other office suites?
Who is LibreOffice for? What can we take away from this?
What are the three benefits of using LibreOffice?
How do I open a ODS file in Excel?
What You Get for Free | Libre Office
LibreOffice includes a word-processor called Writer, a spreadsheet editor called Calc, a presentation app called Impress, a vector-drawing program called Draw, a database program called Base, and a math-formula editor called Math. That’s a good set of tools for free.
You don’t get anything for managing mail, contacts, or calendars, but you probably use something else already. Whatever you use is likely to be more modern and elegant than anything LibreOffice provides. Keep in mind that LibreOffice doesn’t offer mobile apps or online collaboration, capabilities you get for free from Google Workspace and that come with most other for-pay modern office suites. Other things you don’t get include translation and research features, a dictation option, or a note-taking app. But unless you’re willing to go online to Google for those features, you’ll have to pay Microsoft for them.
An Open-Source Approach Libre Office Suite
The long history of LibreOffice and its ancestors, OpenOffice and StarOffice, helps to explain how it looks and feels today. The suite has always tried to emulate Microsoft 365‘s apps, right down to Office’s menu structure and shortcut keys. One advantage of this approach is that it makes OpenOffice more easily accessible to former Microsoft Office users. If you don’t know which keystroke to use in LibreOffice, there’s a good chance it’s the same as it was in Microsoft’s apps. For instance, Alt-equals acts as the Autosum key in Calc, just as it does in Excel.
One disadvantage of this approach is that that almost every interface feature that has even been in Microsoft’s apps remains in LibreOffice’s, long after Microsoft radically reduced and simplified its interface to reduce clutter and overlap. What’s worse is that some of the most useful features in Microsoft’s apps never arrived on LibreOffice, partly because features seem to get added to the suite only when someone volunteers to add them.
Interface Issues From the Start For LibreOffice
One reason to choose LibreOffice, especially for large organizations, is its consistency; LibreOffice uses the same interface and offers the same features across every platform it supports. LibreOffice defaults to the familiar toolbar-and-icon menu structure that millions of users learned from older versions of Microsoft Office. Microsoft abandoned this convention years ago in favor of the new Ribbon interface, and LibreOffice now offers a similar option, too.