If you don't know which keystroke to use in LibreOffice, there's a good chance it's the same as in Microsoft's apps. One advantage of this approach is that it makes LibreOffice more easily accessible to former Microsoft Office users. The suite has always tried to emulate Microsoft 365's apps, right down to Office's menu structure and shortcut keys. The long history of LibreOffice and its ancestors, OpenOffice and StarOffice, helps explain how it looks and feels today. You can also open each of the separate word-processing, spreadsheet, and other apps directly from the Start Menu. LibreOffice’s main menu lets you create or open any kind of document that the suite can create, and displays previews of recent files. But it's much more convenient to have them already at your fingertips with Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, or Apple iWork. You can visit LibreOffice's vast library of third-party add-ons for some of these features, but the add-ons always have an awkward feel. Other things you don't get include built-in translation and research features, a dictation option, or a note-taking app.
Keep in mind that LibreOffice doesn't offer mobile apps or online collaboration, which you get for free from Google Workspace most for-pay modern office suites have mobile apps and collaboration, too. Whatever you use is likely to be more modern and elegant than anything LibreOffice provides.
You don't get anything for managing email, contacts, or calendars, but you probably use something else already.
Those are just some of the features – but of course, our community has grown, we’ve started the Document Liberation Project and we have professional support options for using LibreOffice in businesses. Like what you see? Download LibreOffice and try it out – it’s free! This helps you to pinpoint any issues which may affect your setup. To improve reliability, LibreOffice 5.3 introduced a Safe Mode, which temporarily disables your user configuration and extensions. LibreOffice’s help system has been improved to be more user-friendly, while many guidebooks have been updated too. Impress, LibreOffice’s presentation tool, includes a selection of hand-crafted templates, so you can focus on content rather than design. LibreOffice 5.4 introduced custom watermarks, which can be added to page backgrounds.Ĭalc has benefited from multi-threading support, dramatically boosting performance on computers with multi-core CPUs. This helps you to summarise data sets in complex spreadsheets. (ODF is the OpenDocument Format, the native format of LibreOffice.)Ĭalc, LibreOffice’s spreadsheet, lets you create charts from pivot tables.
Want to create e-books from your documents? With LibreOffice, you can! Click File > Export and choose EPUB, which can be read on many e-book devices.įor improved security, you can use OpenPGP keys to sign and encrypt ODF, OOXML and PDF documents. To activate it, go to View > User Interface > Tabbed.
Since LibreOffice 6.2, we have an alternative user interface option called the NotebookBar. Many other compatibility improvements have been added too. docx format (OOXML), as used by Microsoft Office. LibreOffice Writer, the word processor, can export documents in. We release a new major version every six months – so let’s check out some of the great features our community and certified developers have added in recent years! And, of course, it’s still free and open source:
LibreOffice is the successor project to OpenOffice, which had its last major release (4.1) back in 2014, as you can see in this timeline – click to enlarge.