LibreOffice 4.0

LibreOffice is the full-featured suite of office apps that costs nothing and runs on everything. If you don't want to pay for Microsoft Office  or Apple's iWork, or if you or your office requires open-source software instead of commercial software, then LibreOffice is virtually your only choice. LibreOffice is an offshoot of the old OpenOffice.org suite, now revived as Apache OpenOffice, but Apache OpenOffice is far behind LibreOffice in power and elegance. If you want to leave your documents in the cloud, Google Docs gets the job done in a highly-polished but low-featured way, but LibreOffice is the only free, open-source desktop office suite that's even worth considering. That doesn't mean it's perfect, and it's packed with minor annoyances, so I can't recommend it as your first choice on the basis of its built-in features and conveniences. But if you need an office suite that's cross-platform and open-source, you'll be glad that LibreOffice exists.

One advantage of LibreOffice is that it's the only office suite that runs on all desktop and laptop platforms—Windows, OS X, and Linux. It even runs on eight-year-old Macs that use PowerPC processors instead of the Intel CPUs on current Mac hardware. Versions for Android and iOS are in the works, but they won't emerge until later this year or 2014. Version 4.0, recently released, looks a lot like the long-running 3.x series, but has massive invisible changes designed to let it move into the tablet era and provide a new API for corporate and government programmers to interact with it.

Even if you don't use LibreOffice for day-to-day work, it's worth having for its unparalleled set of import and export filters that let you open almost any document format you're likely to find, especially in government and law offices that have been accumulating documents for decades. For example, LibreOffice is the only non-Microsoft app that opens Microsoft Works and Microsoft Publisher files, and it opens files created by the old WordPerfect for the Mac word-processor that even WordPerfect for Windows can't handle.

A Full Set of Apps

By default, LibreOffice installs a full set of office apps: a word processor called Writer, a spreadsheet called Calc, a database called Base, a graphics app called Draw, presentations software called Impress, and an equation editor called Math. Unlike Microsoft Office and other suites, LibreOffice treats its equation editor as a separate app, but it's also tightly integrated with Writer and the other apps. If you use the menu item in Writer to insert a formula, the Math editing window opens as a pane in the Writer screen.

LibreOffice's word-processor, spreadsheet, and presentations apps look and work a lot like the way Microsoft Office looked before Office 2007 introduced the Ribbon interface. A standard top-line menu leads to all major features, so prepare to open a few drop-down menus before you find the feature you want. Below the menu are customizable toolbars with the usual sets of icons, most of them easy to understand at a glance. If you need an explanatory tooltip, hover over an icon with the mouse. As in Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer displays a live word count on the status bar. Unlike Word, LibreOffice Writer can't split a document into two parts so you can edit two different pages at the same time, and Writer doesn't have Word's writer-friendly page view that shows how a document will look when printed, but without the header and footer displayed on screen. Instead, LibreOffice offers only a print layout view that shows headers, footers, and a gap between pages, or an ugly-looking "Web layout" view where text fits into the current window and doesn't reflect how it will look on the page.