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Group Test: Free Office Suites (Part 3) - LibreOffice

12/5/2012 11:24:40 AM

Description: LibreOffice

A direct descendant of OpenOffice, LibreOffice came into being when the latter project forked in 2010. In many circles, the alternative to MS Office is seen as a straight shoot-out between the pair.

On opening up LibreOffice, now in the capable hands of The Document Foundation, you can easily trace it back to its beginnings. Taking the Writer application as an example, it has all the hallmarks of the basic OpenOffice layout, toolbars, menu options and all. The presentation is similar but just that little bit different. Whereas OpenOffice appears a little dull, LibreOffice just seems fresher and more current.

LibreOffice is widely regarded to have the more active developer (the latest version was released in August and The Document Foundation has expressed that it intends to release major updates every six months). Taking this into account, we start to see some of the differences between the two.

For example, LibreOffice includes a standard template for wiki publishing and an automatic, on-the-fly word count as you'll find in MS Office. Other key features include support for contextual spacing, header and footer editing and, specific to Writer, better support for importing Word docs including revisions and comments. The grammar tool in Writer is better too, with direct links to Wikipedia and generally better dialogue boxes helping out where needed. Testing brought more stable results from LibreOffice than OpenOffice, with the likes of Format Painter still causing problems in the latter.

File formats are improved with LibreOffice too, which includes support for importing from and saving as Office 2007 and 2010 documents, plus you can import from PDF format (including watermark options). The word from the developer behind LibreOffice is that it's slimmed down the lines of code, purging thousands of lines of dead code to make for a smoother experience, which we couldn't comment on, although the testing process was error free and generally a quick, painless experience.

Other features, such as the recent addition of widescreen format in Impress slideshows, ten new master pages for Impress, plus a general clean-up of the UI have worked wonders. Each of the features individually might seem minor, but there are so many of them that it seems silly to suggest going back to OpenOffice once you've tried this.

In the end, whether you choose LibreOffice over OpenOffice might just as likely boil down to if you can be bothered to make the switch. All we can say is that having used OpenOffice for years, we've moved to LibreOffice after testing. The additional features are worth the transition, plus we feel that LibreOffice is the better catered for by its development team.

Compared with the cloud-based competition LibreOffice obviously wins out on the feature front, as well as proving one of the most stable, efficient suites on test. For a product that is just two years young, it is little wonder this has racked up 20 million downloads during its life already. For a desktop MS Office alternative, this is the only option.

Details

Manufacturer:

The Document Foundation

Website:

www.libreoffice.org

Required spec:

256MB RAM, 1.5GB HDD space, Windows XP or later

Quality:

8

Value:

9

Overall:

8

Test Setup

Description: Test result

Test result

The suites were tested on a Windows 7, Intel Core i3 laptop housing 4GB DDR3 RAM. We tested each suite for usability, feature set, stability and productivity, generating various documents, importing files and graphics and exporting to various file formats.

 

 

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