What is LibreOffice?
Published by Anisha B
Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. The word ‘free’ in “free software” refers to freedom, not to price; the price paid for a copy of a free program may be zero, or small, or (rarely) quite large.
LibreOffice is Free and Open Source Software, available for everyone to use, share and modify, and produced by a worldwide community of hundreds of developers, and used by millions of people around the world. Its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your creativity and enhance your productivity.
LibreOffice is the default office suite of most popular Linux distributions. It includes 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. It is as secure as any other word processor such as OpenOffice or Microsoft Word.
LibreOffice also includes several applications that make it the most versatile Free and Open Source office suite on the market :
Writer (word processor) :
Writer is a feature-rich tool for creating letters, books, reports, newsletters, brochures, and other documents. You can insert graphics and objects from other components into Writer documents.
Calc (spreadsheet) :
Calc has all of the advanced analysis, charting, and decision making features expected from a high-end spreadsheet. It includes over 300 functions for financial, statistical, and mathematical operations, among others. You can also open and work with Microsoft Excel workbooks and save them in Excel format. Calc can also export spreadsheets in several formats, including for example Comma Separated Value (CSV), Adobe PDF and HTML formats.
Impress (presentations) :
Impress provides all the common multimedia presentation tools, such as special effects, animation, and drawing tools. It is integrated with the advanced graphics capabilities of LibreOffice Draw and Math components. Impress is compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint file format and can also save your work in numerous graphics formats, including Macromedia Flash (SWF).
Draw (vector graphics) :
Draw is a vector drawing tool that can produce everything from simple diagrams or flowcharts to 3D artwork. Its Smart Connectors feature allows you to define your own connection points. You can use it to create drawings for use in any of the LibreOffice components, and you can create your own clip art and then add it to the Gallery. Draw can import graphics from many common formats and save them in over 20 formats.
Base (database) :
Base provides tools for day-to-day database work within a simple interface. It can create and edit forms, reports, queries, tables, views, and relations, so that managing a relational database is much the same as in other popular database applications. Base incorporates two relational database engines, HSQLDB and PostgreSQL. It can also use dBASE, Microsoft Access, MySQL, or Oracle, or any ODBC compliant or JDBC compliant database. Base also provides support for a subset of ANSI-92 SQL.
Math (formula editor) :
Math is the LibreOffice formula or equation editor. You can use it to create complex equations that include symbols or characters not available in standard font sets. While it is most commonly used to create formulas in other documents, such as Writer and Impress files, Math can also work as a standalone tool. You can save formulas in the standard Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) format for inclusion in web pages and other documents not created by LibreOffice.
Advantages of LibreOffice :
- The key difference between LibreOffice and Microsoft is that LibreOffice is an open-source, free suite of office products while Microsoft Office is a commercial office suite product package that requires users to purchase a license. Both will run on multiple platforms and both offer similar functionality.
- No licensing fees : LibreOffice is free for anyone to use and distribute at no cost. Many features that are available as extra cost add-ins in other office suites (like PDF export) are free with LibreOffice. There are no hidden charges now or in the future.
- Consistent user interface : All the components have a similar “look and feel,” making them easy to use and master.
- Cross-platform : LibreOffice runs on several hardware architectures and under multiple operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Extensive language support : The LibreOffice user interface, including spelling, hyphenation, and thesaurus dictionaries, is available in over 100 languages and dialects.
- Integration: The components of LibreOffice are well integrated with one another.
- No vendor lock-in : LibreOffice uses OpenDocument, an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) file format developed as an industry standard by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). These files can easily be unzipped and read by any text editor, and their framework is open and published.
- Open source : You can distribute, copy, and modify the software as much as you wish, in accordance with the LibreOffice Open Source licenses.
- You have a voice : Enhancements, software fixes, and release dates are community-driven. You can join the community and affect the course of the product you use.
- All the components share a common spelling checker and other tools, which are used consistently across the suite. For example, the drawing tools available in Writer are also found in Calc, with similar but enhanced versions in Impress and Draw.
- You do not need to know which application was used to create a particular file. For example, you can open a Draw file from Writer.
What makes LibreOffice better than others :
- LibreOffice beats Microsoft Office in file compatibility because it supports many more formats, including a built-in option to export documents as an eBook (EPUB).
- Better support for formats: LibreOffice has built-in support for ODF and many other file formats. As a rule I never save any of my files on non-standard formats like docx. All my files are stored either as ODF or .txt, and LibreOffice does a much better job at dealing with ODT files.
- You can use it on Linux: Microsoft Office isn't available for Linux and it had been a second class citizen on macOS for a very long time. If you are someone like me who hops between macOS, Windows and Linux then LibreOffice is your only choice.
- Take control of security: No software is bug-proof. But because LibreOffice is fully open source technology anyone can submit a patch for a LibreOffice vulnerability. When there's a bug in Microsoft Office, users have to wait for Microsoft to patch it. That’s true with any proprietary product.
Features :
- LibreOffice can use the GStreamer multimedia framework in Linux to render multimedia content such as videos in Impress and other programs.
- LibreOffice has a feature similar to WordArt called Fontwork.
- LibreOffice uses HarfBuzz for complex text layout.
- LibreOffice supports a "hybrid PDF" format, a file in Portable Document Format (PDF) which can be read by any program supporting PDF, but also contains the source document in ODF format, editable in LibreOffice by dragging and dropping.
- LibreOffice also ships with a modified theme which looks native on GTK-based Linux distributions. It also renders fonts via Cairo on Linux distributions; this means that text in LibreOffice is rendered the same as the rest of the Linux desktop.