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.
LibreOffice’s main menu lets you create or open any kind of document that the suite can create, and displays previews of recent files. You can also open each of the separate word-processing, spreadsheet, and other apps directly from the Start Menu.
In contrast to the elegance of Google’s and Microsoft’s apps, LibreOffice Writer greets you with a cluttered interface. There’s a top-line menu, two icon-packed horizontal toolbars, and a ruler, plus a vertical toolbar with icons leading to panes with formatting menus, a gallery of shapes and diagrams; and a navigator panel. You can turn off any of these modules from the View menu, but this nearly incomprehensible muddle of features at the very start is all too typical of LibreOffice’s interface, which tries to satisfy everyone in a way that ends up frustrating them all.
In the View menu, you can find the User Interface submenu that lets you switch from the traditional top-line menu to the aforementioned ribbon-style Tabbed menu. Unfortunately, when I switched to the Tabbed menu, LibreOffice made it almost impossible to switch back. The User Interface menu wasn’t on the View tab anymore; it took me a long time to discover, by chance, that this menu had moved to a completely new submenu.
The most commonly used menus in LibreOffice’s apps are clear and spacious, especially the ones in the sidebar pane, but the Options menu is cramped and often incomprehensible unless you’ve been using the software for years.
LibreOffice Writer, shown here in its Mac version, offers multiple options for formatting text, including a traditional dialog box and an optional sidebar.
LibreOffice Writer’s default document font is the startlingly ugly Liberation Serif. If you want to change the default font, don’t look to the Text or Character menus. You’ll need to find the Styles menu and scroll down to the Manage Styles submenu to make this change. By contrast, Microsoft Word, SoftMaker Office’s TextMaker, and Corel WordPerfect let you select a default document font directly from their font menus.
One other advantage of Microsoft Word is that it lets you work on documents in a print view (with the option to hide the top and bottom margins), as if they were saved to the web, in outline form, or in a read-only view that helps you concentrate on the text. Plus, you can display multiple pages side-by-side rather than on top of one another. LibreOffice lets you view documents in print mode, with margins at the top and bottom; in a web-style view, with no page formatting; and, as of the 7.1 update, in a collapsible outline view.
Contents
Hit-or-Miss Features
LibreOffice offers some unique features, but it implements many of them in clumsy ways. LibreOffice’s handling of document redactions is one example. It’s possible to apply redactions to a document when exporting it as a PDF, but, to accomplish this, the suite opens a graphics-based image of your document in its Draw program and then exports the PDF as an image-style PDF, which can’t be searched for text. The suite can automatically redact words or strings of words you enter into a menu, too. But if you want to manually select text to redact, you have to draw boxes around the text in the Draw program instead of using typical text-selection methods. LibreOffice, however, makes it easy to embed the code for an original document into a PDF created from it. This way, someone else can edit the exported PDF in LibreOffice without going through the step of converting it to another format.
LibreOffice includes an extensive gallery of clunky-looking graphics in late twentieth-century style. They get the job done, but go elsewhere if you want stylishness.
LibreOffice does offer some other convenient features. For example, the Function menu in the Calc spreadsheet editor displays functions in a clear outline form, rather than the linear form used in Excel and most other spreadsheets apps. Only WordPerfect Office offers the same convenience, though in an otherwise low-powered spreadsheet program. Then again, Calc doesn’t support web-linked data like current stock prices.
Unlike the clunky graphic features elsewhere in the suite, LibreOffice’s charts are clear and elegant even when displaying complex data.
Advanced users coming to LibreOffice will be surprised to find that recorded macros aren’t supported unless you enable them in an Advanced tab that’s buried in the Options menu. Even then, macros aren’t as flexible or easily managed as in Microsoft’s apps.
The Impress presentation app lets you save presentations to online services for easy remote viewing, but otherwise it seems limited to a relatively ancient feature set. Don’t expect fine-tuned transitions or even the most minimal controls over inserted video; you can’t even add online videos. The Base database app can connect to Access databases but can’t import or create them.
Performance and Compatibility
I hoped the new version of LibreOffice would be less crash-prone than older ones, but it still sometimes choked in testing when I tried to open or import a file. It usually works on the second attempt with the same file, so this is more of an annoyance than a dealbreaker. If you can’t open the file on the second try, you can start LibreOffice in its Safe Mode to gets things working again. I’ve also used Safe Mode to restore the suite’s default interface when I changed it in ways that were too confusing to use.
LibreOffice’s apps do have impressive power, however. LibreOffice’s Calc, for example, is the only non-Microsoft spreadsheet app that successfully opens the monster Excel worksheet I use for testing. LibreOffice’s Writer breezed through 2,000-page Word documents with speed and aplomb.
Because LibreOffice can be unstable, and because you might want to undo your changes to its options, a separate Safe Mode icon brings you to this screen, where you can reset or restore your configuration.
LibreOffice supports just about any document format from the past three decades. This is a major advantage over every other document suite for anyone who has to work with files created decades ago in obsolete word processors or spreadsheets. It even opens documents from older versions of Apple’s Pages, though not from the current version. If you work in a school, office, or lab with legacy documents, LibreOffice can be invaluable for this reason alone, even if you don’t use it for everyday work.
LibreOffice’s closest rival in this respect is the Windows-only Corel WordPerfect Office suite, which also opens almost any legacy document. Oddly, that office suite can’t open documents created by the last, unofficial release of WordPerfect for the Mac, unlike LibreOffice.
For the Open-Source Crowd
LibreOffice is an impressive achievement that keeps improving with each incremental release, and everyone who has legacy documents lurking on their hard disk ought to have a copy. However, LibreOffice still suffers from a clunky interface (despite some improvements), crashes more than it should, and does not offer any online editing options. Unless you have security requirements that demand open-source software or your organization needs apps that work on Linux, macOS, and Windows, you should pay for Microsoft 365 or use Google’s apps instead. I’m glad LibreOffice exists, but I’m never glad to use it for long.