Microsoft recently started earning more money from Office 365 subscriptions than it does by selling one-time licenses for its Office software. Meanwhile, the folks behind LibreOffice continue to develop a free and open source alternative that you don’t have to pay a penny to use.
LibreOffice 5.4 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and it brings a new standard color palette and a number of improvements across the board.
Among other things, LibreOffice 5.4 should render imported PDF files better, file format compatibility has been improved, and there’s support for embedding videos in PDF files exported from Writer and Impress (the LibreOffice equivalents of Word and PowerPoint).
Other updates include support for pivot charts in Calc (the spreadsheet app), the ability to remember your last-used settings when exporting Calc files in CSV format, new context menu items for working with sections, footnotes, endnotes, and styles in Writer, and improved performance for LibreOffice Online (which is designed to be installed on a server… LibreOffice doesn’t maintain its own Google Drive/Docs-type cloud service).
LibreOffice 5.4 will be the last major 5.x release. It’ll officially be supported through June 11th, 2018, and there will likely be a few more point release (like LibreOffice 5.4.1, 5.4.2, etc) to fix bugs. But the next major release is expected to be LibreOffice 6.0.
Hey, cool, another Libreoffice update!
Maybe it won’t be a terrible, unusable, crashing mess anymore 🙂
PS, if you value your sanity: Stick with MS or Google Docs.
Yes MS with continue to make a bundle off Office but it keeps getting worse while LibreOffice keeps getting better.
No kidding. One of the computers at my work has the latest Office on Win10. Not only does the new Office have a hideous, flat, stark white interface, but it is totally unintuitive. I’ve used computers since the 80’s and it took me longer than ever to figure out how to print!
What, the big printer icon didn’t clue you in? You must be some special kind of a special need person.
I miss the competition of the 80’s and 90’s, but these alternatives can’t get people to sign in even if they can get it for free. That tells a lot.
It’s not bad software. Microsoft office is better by virtue of a larger install base and more features, but, I would be content using libreoffice for personal use.