LibreOffice is an excellent office suite that contains everything you need for your home office. It is free and open-source, just like OpenOffice. In fact, LibreOffice is the result of the independent continuation of OpenOffice. “The Document Foundation,” an offshoot of the OpenOffice.org community, chose this path to keep this office suite independent. LibreOffice provides several applications to provide you with a feature-rich office suite. These applications are Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing). Altogether, these different productivity tools give you the same options you would find in Microsoft® Word.
And if you are worried about messed-up files, I can tell you that I tested many complicated Word and Excel files without any issues. The graphics and tables in my Writer files looked just like those in the original Word files. And the many formulas in my Calc spreadsheets worked the same as in Excel.
Support of many document types
Even though LibreOffice uses ODF (Open Document Format) as its native format, a wide range of document formats are supported. From a business point of view, the most important formats are probably those from Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), and PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx). But besides these Microsoft document types, you can export your work in many other formats, including PDF, which is also widely used in business.
Extensions and Templates
Even though LibreOffice already comes with many features, you can easily expand the feature set with extensions. In addition, there are many templates available that you can use to automate your tasks. To see what kind of extensions and templates are available, go here.
A short history of LibreOffice
The origin of this office suite is StarOffice by Star Division. Star Division was later acquired by Sun Microsystems, which changed the name to OpenOffice. After the Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems, Oracle discontinued OpenOffice as its product and donated it to the Apache Foundation. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and is now used by millions of people.
