LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite for Linux, Mac, and Windows computers. The project split off from OpenOffice.org a few years ago, but in many ways LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) have been under development for more than a decade.
Now LibreOffice 4 is ready to download, and it comes with a number of new features including support for themes, improved collaboration tools, and an Android app that lets you control presentations.
LibreOffice includes apps for word processing, creating and editing spreadsheets, presentations, and databases. You can find a detailed list of improvements in the release notes, but here are some highlights:
- Import ink annotations from DOXC and RTF documents
- Import floating tables in DOCX files
- Open large ODS and XLSX spreadsheet files more quickly
- Increased size limit on uncompressed ODF documents to 4GB
- Multimedia preview improvements in spreadsheets
- Addition open source font families
- Import filter for Microsoft publisher publications
- Suppor for Firefox Personas in LibreOffice (for themes)
Members of the LibreOffice team are also working on a version of the office suite that will run on Android devices. But for now the best thing LibreOffice has to offer Android users is a mobile app for controlling presentations.
Despite several improvements, it still has big problems with compatibility to Microsoft Office formats. It failed to load some of my docx files, others had missing elements, or violated format. Still no worthy competitor for FreeOffice, or even SoftMaker Office, with these two office suites I never had any of the described problems, they open Microsoft Offile files without any loss, they are well equipped, and really fast. Both are light-years ahead of any luny open source attempt at cloning MS Office.
You’ve been cutting and pasting this precise post to every LO release announcement you can find today.
I have been consulting with business for year, every one who has converted to LO has not noticed the change. They love it, and they love the whole concept.
Next, they convert to Linux, and they love that too.