LibreOffice: The Best Office Suite Available that is Free and Open Source

LibreOffice, (is an open-source office suite if this is your first time) which has long battled Microsoft Office, will take on Google Docs and Office 365 in this incarnation. You may wan to ask, do we really need another online office suite? YES

LibreOffice's supporters like me will say yes, because it will be the only one that fully supports native Open Document Format (ODF). The new LibreOffice release has improved its looks and added even more inter-operable features.

(ODF is an Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and ISO document standard. It's designed both to be open and to not have any ties to a proprietary company. Over the years, it's also become the standard for the United Kingdom for all its official, sharable documents. While both Microsoft and Google support ODF, neither are committed to it the way LibreOffice is. 

The programme was created by IceWarp, an open-source groupware company, and Collabora, a software company which offers LibreOffice support. IceWarp will be supplying the funding while Collabora, and the open-source community, will provide the technical chops and labor. "It is wonderful to marry IceWarp's vision and investment with our passion and skills for LibreOffice development," said Michael Meeks, VP of Collabora Productivity. Meeks developed the proof of concept back in 2011 and will oversee the development of LibreOffice Online).

 

For you, maybe the Microsoft's Office 2016 for Windows is perfect for Windows 10 users, but for the me, LibreOffice 5.1, the full-featured, open-source office suite, is a better choice. The good thing is that the latest version of open-source LibreOffice can work on Linux, Mac, or Windows operating system (OS).

LibreOffice 5.1

This new version offers a reorganized user interface. Unlike Microsoft Office, which long ago embraced the annoying ribbon interface, LibreOffice has stayed with the tried and true menu-based interface that any Microsoft Office 2003 user will recognize at a glance. 

What The Document Foundation, LibreOffice's parent organization, has done is to reorganize the menus for Writer, Calc, and Impress (LibreOffice's word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program). They are designed to provide faster access to the most-used features. 

LibreOffice 5.1 has also added integration with remote servers. The supported servers include: Alfresco, FTP servers, Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive, and WebDAV. This means you can create, edit, and save files to these cloud and Internet services easily as if they were on your PC hard drive or local area network. 

To access your files, you just need to set up a remote service. Once that's done, you can easily access your remote files with the File Menu's "Open a Remote File" and "Save to Remote Server" choices. If you keep a lot of work papers on cloud services, this makes LibreOffice more useful than ever. 

The new LibreOffice also comes with improved document format support. Besides its support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2, LibreOffice 5.1 also boasts improved compatibility with Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format, Microsoft Office's default file format. Technically, Microsoft's OOXML format is an ISO standard. Technically. 

In practice, no version of Microsoft Office, including Office 2016 has ever used the "strict" version of the standard. Instead, Office saves documents using a "transitional" version of OOXML by default. As the Document Foundation's Italo Vignoli points out, this is a transition that's been going on nine years. The Document Foundation says this standard tends to change with each new release of Microsoft Office, often in big ways, making it a challenge for LibreOffice to keep up. So, if you think only Microsoft Office can fully support Microsoft Office document formats, think again. 

LibreOffice also boasts improvements for importing old Microsoft Office documents in binary formats: DOC, XLS, and PPT files. It also does a better job of importing RTF files and Microsoft Visio projects. The program also supports importing Microsoft Write (.wri) documents and Apple Keynote 6 (.key) presentations, and Gnumeric spreadsheet files.

LibreOffice 5.1 has also been improved "under the hood," thanks to the work of hundreds of volunteer developers. Besides better file and cloud support, the change you're most likely to notice is that LibreOffice is far faster than before. Want to see for yourself? LibreOffice 5.1 is totally free, runs on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows and can be downloaded today.