LibreOffice (Open Source Office Suite on Window, Macintosh, and Linux)
March 27, 2018
LibreOffice (Open Source Office Suite on Window, Macintosh, and Linux)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with LibreOffice
I choose to use LibreOffice because of a few reasons. I like to support the Open-Source Community - yes LibreOffice is free. You can however make a donation to the project if you choose to show support for their efforts in continuing the project and making it better and better. I also like LibreOffice because it works across platforms. It will run Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. I use Windows and Linux both and they have the same product on both platforms; [this] is a big plus to me. For mobile devices, it is my understanding that they have a viewer for Android and the ability to edit on Android is still an experimental feature. Hope to see a full Android version someday. So, if you like LibreOffice and want to see it more robust on mobile devices, I would suggest letting them know and by making a donation for supporting the efforts.
- LibreOffice is a full suite of office use solutions. Those include: Writer (to work with documents - .doc, docx, and even .pdf). Calc which is a full-featured spreadsheet tool, Impress which is to do presentations and slideshows, Draw which is as it sounds - a drawing tool, Math for working with formulas, and Base which is for working with databases.
- There are templates for a number of items that you may need to create from time to time.
- It works well with most items created in Microsoft Office and the other way around.
- There a number of extensions that can be installed to be used to make it work for a specific purpose. Such as Code Highlighter so that code will be colored based on the syntax. I believe that plugins support some 350 or so programming languages. This is just one of the many extensions available. I just happen to like this one personally.
- When saving a Word file (document) you have to be careful to save it as an MS Word DOCX file or it will by default save it as an ODT file.
- I would like Draw to be more feature rich. But, for documents, it is very sufficient. So, I guess I can't expect it to be PhotoShop, since that it not its real purpose. But, some of those types of features sure would not be frowned upon :)
- As far as ROI, well, it is open source. So, it should have an instant ROI.
- It does everything I need it to do, so it meets all my needs. And the fact that it works across platforms is a plus.
I have followed and used many various office suites in the open office range of open source offerings. I still occasionally download and try one of the others just to take a look. But, I always end up making LibreOffice my choice to go with.