Libreoffice

Free Office Software

Libreoffice (LO) is free Office Software. The best known Office Suite is Microsoft's commercial offering "Microsoft365" including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access (MS365). It is the industry standard. Libreoffice provides close equivalents to all these components, completely free, and has been around forever.

Libreoffice 7.5 icons

Brief history

Openoffice (previously Staroffice) was developed specifically to challenge Microsoft Office and the code was open-sourced. But Sun Microsystems demanded contributor agreements to code-writers who felt their freedom was limited so the project was forked to Libreoffice which shed all ties with big business and allowed full development by the Open Source community.

Disappointingly, despite continuous development, LO always trailed behind MS365 in both function and quality and people chose to pay for MS365 in their droves. I regularly downloaded LO and tried it in parallel with MS365. Every time some basic function of the software irritated me and after a couple of days I deleted it.

Your money

MS365 is a subscription package currently £60pa for a single personal package, £80 for a family (2-6) package. LO is free. OK, perhaps not so much money in the grand scheme, but being free comes with no sign-ins, no ties, and a warm feeling that you are supporting the FOSS community's sterling efforts.

Libreoffice 7.5

Quite simply version 7.5 of LO is brilliant and I can't fault it. It now kerns and renders text as well as MS365 (was a bugbear of mine), it is fully compatible with every MS365 file, it has a variety of very functional interfaces for you to choose from, and it loads quickly. So it's staying on my computer. For me LO has come of age. Time to drop MS365.

I note that LO has some star features of its own that you do not get with MS365. You can export a document as an epub (the standard eBook format). And LO can create, modify, and edit pdf files (although with some limitations).

Highly recommended. You can download it from the Libreoffice Website