Superficially, the two suites appear almost identical, and LibreOffice even carries over its version numbering from the last release.īehind the scenes, however, the Document Foundation and its volunteers have been hard at work, cleaning up the code, fixing bugs, and adding features. Like, LibreOffice includes a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation maker (Impress), a drawing and diagramming program (Draw), and a database manager (Base).
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Meanwhile, buzz has been building around LibreOffice, a fork of the code by a consortium of former developers known as the Document Foundation. Oracle eventually donated the code to the Apache Foundation, which promises a new release this year.
But if you told me that I had to use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office, I wouldn't complain, and I'd get some satisfaction from thinking about the money I'd has long been one of the top competitors to Microsoft Office, but the open source productivity suite's future was clouded in 2009 when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, which had maintained since late 1999. If you can afford to buy Office 2013, and you don't require open-source, cross-platform applications, then don't hesitate a moment before choosing Microsoft Office. The price-free-is certainly right, and its annoyances are mostly the kind that you can work around. The lesson here is to make certain that you've got rid of all fancy effects in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations before importing them into LibreOffice.Ī Steal at the Price LibreOffice has all the features that anyone is likely to need in the real world, although it falls short of Microsoft Office in advanced features that only specialist users are likely to need, such as split-screen editing and the kinds of massive worksheets that Excel can handle.
PowerPoint slideshows imported moderately well, though fancy animation effects were ignored and some text to which I had applied animation effects got imported with some letters missing. Fortunately, when I restarted Writer, it offered to recover the document, and restored it in perfect condition. Some vastly complex worksheets that I use for testing caused LibreOffice Calc to crash when I tried to open it-and when Calc crashed, it took down Writer with it before I was able to save the document I was working on. Calc imported real-world Excel worksheets equally smoothly, and even reproduced much of Excel's graphics-rich conditional formatting. All my Word documents imported with formatting mostly intact, though I needed to make some minor adjustments to margins and spacing to get all the page breaks in the right places. MS Office Compatibility LibreOffice does an impressive job of opening Microsoft Office documents with reasonable fidelity. Many of LibreOffice's menus have a button labeled "Standard," which baffled me until I figured out that it restores all the settings on the menu to the original defaults. You can fix this by going to Tools/Auto-Correct Options and clicking the "Localized Options" tab-not exactly an intuitive choice. I eventually discovered that I should go to Tools/Options/LibreOffice/Advanced instead.īy default, LibreOffice Writer automatically inserts curly "typographic" quotation marks when you type a double-quotation mark, but not when you type a single-quotation mark, so your documents get an ugly mix of curly double-quotes and straight-up single-quotes. Unfortunately, the "Java" menu that this message told me to go doesn't exist. Even worse, whenever I open the Options menu, LibreOffice displays a message telling me to go to Tools/Options/LibreOffice/Java" and select the Java runtime environment that I want LibreOffice to use. The Tools/Option menu is a confusing array of more than forty separate pages, with no search box to help you find the page you want. LibreOffice still has a lot of work to do.
Indifferent Interface Microsoft and Apple put a lot of effort into making the user interface in Office and iWork easy to navigate.
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