Pros & Cons
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- Free and open-source
- Offers desktop apps for Linux, macOS, and Windows
- Can import and convert almost any legacy document
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- Less stable on Macs than rival suites
- Extremely limited collaboration features
- Confusing and overstuffed interface
LibreOffice Specs
| Desktop Apps | |
| Free Version Available | |
| Mac App | |
| Open Source | |
| Opens/Saves Microsoft Formats | |
| Records Macros | |
| Windows App |
LibreOffice, the best-known open-source office suite, should appeal to financial firms, government offices, and other privacy-conscious users because they can examine the source code for vulnerabilities themselves. It also costs nothing to download, has a highly competitive feature set, and offers desktop apps for Linux, macOS, and Windows. However, its unwieldy interface and occasionally buggy performance remain sore points. Our Editors' Choice winners are Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, both of which provide top-notch user experiences and stability.
What Does LibreOffice Include?
LibreOffice bundles a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet editor (Calc), a presentation app (Impress), a vector-drawing program (Draw), a database program (Base), and a math formula editor (Math). You don't get anything for managing email, contacts, or calendars, but you likely already use a different app for those tasks. If you need translation and research features, dictation support, or a note-taking app, you need to look elsewhere.
Pricing: Totally Free
You can download the latest stable version of LibreOffice for free from its website. If you want to support the app, you can submit a donation or buy the software from the Microsoft Store ($4.59) or macOS App Store ($8.99). It's unclear why the macOS version costs more.
Other no-cost office suites that aim to replace Microsoft Office exist, but most aren't as transparent as LibreOffice. Some examples include the limited free versions of SoftMaker and OnlyOffice, both of which also offer commercial versions.
Microsoft 365 and the free Apple iWork are the only desktop-based suites that fully compete with LibreOffice. However, you have to pay for at least Microsoft 365's Personal level ($9.99 per month) or have a Mac, respectively, to get the most out of them. Google Workspace has an equally competitive feature set, so long as you don't mind working fully in the cloud. Unlike Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's options, LibreOffice doesn't provide mobile apps or native collaboration features. Third-party extensions can help remedy these shortcomings, but they don't work nearly as seamlessly as competitors' standard features.
What’s New in LibreOffice?
If you’ve used LibreOffice before, you won’t find many surprises with the latest version. Here are the highlights:
- You can now open any LibreOffice document in read-only mode.
- Writer shows a tooltip with the word count of a section when you hover over its heading in the navigation pane. It also adds an advanced layout feature that prevents hyphenated words at the end of a page.
- Calc gets useful new functions for controlling text and layout, along with support for visual connectors.
- The suite now lets you import and export documents in the Markdown language format.
LibreOffice always opts for incremental upgrades, unlike Microsoft 365, which sometimes makes massive interface changes between releases.
Interface and Ease of Use: Heavy Inspiration From Microsoft
LibreOffice has always tried to emulate Microsoft 365's apps, right down to the menu structure and shortcut keys. That's a good move for approachability, and you can choose between a tabbed interface that resembles Microsoft's current ribbon or a traditional menu-and-toolbar look that was common before. Many features work similarly across the two suites, too. If you click inside a page header in either, for example, you see a little box that indicates you're editing it.
One disadvantage of this approach is that almost every interface feature that has ever been in Microsoft's apps remains in LibreOffice, long after Microsoft radically simplified its own apps. Worse, some of the most useful features in Microsoft's apps never made it into LibreOffice. (This is understandable given that it's an open-source project from volunteers.) For example, you won’t find fully developed translation features or an equivalent to Microsoft’s Quick Action Toolbar, which you can configure with the features you use most.
(Credit: PCMag/The Document Foundation)LibreOffice's apps have consistent interfaces across platforms, even if they're not especially elegant or rock-steady. By default, the apps greet you with a top-level menu, two icon-packed horizontal toolbars, a ruler, a vertical toolbar with icons that lead to panes with formatting menus, a gallery of shapes and diagrams, and a navigator panel. You can at least turn off any of these modules from the View menu.
Speaking of the View menu, the User Interface submenu lets you switch between the traditional top-line and ribbon-style tabbed menus. But if you switch to the latter, it's not intuitive to switch back. Instead of doing so via the View menu, you must open the three-line hamburger menu at the upper right of the program by default. Another inconvenience is that, unlike with Microsoft 365 and SoftMaker Office, you can’t reclaim screen real estate by hiding the ribbon-style tabbed interface.
I've noticed a couple of other issues, too. For example, although LibreOffice gives you a Search Commands box, it finds commands only by their exact name on the menu. This is fine if you remember the name of the specific option you need, but Microsoft 365's equivalent is more intuitive. LibreOffice offers an optional, spacious sidebar pane that makes it easy to find the most common commands, but confusingly, you don't get the same options here as in the traditional dialog boxes. Both LibreOffice and Microsoft 365 have cramped Options menus.
(Credit: PCMag/The Document Foundation)Like other advanced office suites, LibreOffice lets you record macros to automate repetitive actions. However, you have to enable this via the Options > Advanced menu. Even then, macros aren't as flexible or as easy to manage as in Microsoft's apps.
LibreOffice offers some unique features, but they're often difficult to use. The suite's handling of document redactions is one example. You can apply redactions to a document (images or words you identify) when you export it as a PDF, which is handy. However, the suite opens a graphics-based image of your document in Draw before exporting it as an image-style PDF (meaning you can't search the text). Oddly, if you want to select text to redact manually, you have to draw boxes around the text in the Draw program.
Writer: Not Yet on Par With Word
The Writer app works a lot like Microsoft Word, but Word offers plenty of conveniences that might be worth a subscription. For example, Word lets you split the window into two panes, so you can work on different parts of a long document at the same time. This isn’t the most popular feature in Word, but you likely won’t want to give it up once you’ve used it.
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(Credit: PCMag/The Document Foundation)Writer lets you view documents in print mode, in a web-style view with no page formatting, or in a collapsible outline view. Recent versions finally catch up with Microsoft 365 and Corel WordPerfect by adding a toggle for the white space at the top and bottom of the print view. However, this option sometimes hides some of the text in footnotes. Microsoft Word doesn't cut off footnote text and adds a no-clutter, read-only view that helps you concentrate on the text.
Writer, like Word, includes a Master Document feature that lets you edit different sections or chapters of a long document in separate files and combine them into a single document, with updated versions of the files automatically appearing. In Word, this feature has always been problematic, and I’ve had bad experiences with corrupted master documents. Based on my testing, Writer handles this feature more reliably; I’ve never had trouble with it.
By default, Writer produces somewhat ugly documents in the free Liberation Serif font. You can change the default font to any on your system, but Microsoft and Apple's word processors opt for more attractive fonts by default.
Calc: Improved Spreadsheet Performance
LibreOffice’s Calc can’t match the sheer power of Excel or the frequency of its feature updates, but it's still reasonably capable. For example, although Calc now offers the Microsoft-invented SparkLines (miniature line charts in individual cells), it doesn't natively support web-linked data, such as current stock prices. (You can try to add the latter functionality via the Financials-Extension, which isn't listed in LibreOffice's official directory.)
(Credit: PCMag/The Document Foundation)Recent updates make Calc feel nearly as snappy as Excel. The latest version still takes a few seconds to open complex XLSX files that Excel opens instantly, but the waiting time is much shorter than before.
Calc displays functions in a clear outline rather than the linear format used by Excel and most other spreadsheet apps. Only WordPerfect Office offers the same convenience, though its spreadsheet program isn't otherwise very capable.
Impress: Behind the Present Times
The Impress presentation app lets you save presentations to online services for easy remote viewing, but otherwise, it has a relatively ancient feature set—think PowerPoint circa 2000. Don't expect fine-tuned transitions or even minimal controls over video inserts; you can't even add online videos.
Other Apps: A Few Useful Extras
LibreOffice’s Draw app is an adequate vector-based drawing app that supports the OpenOffice, SVG, and a few other formats. It won’t replace Adobe Illustrator or any other full-featured drawing app, but it gets the job done.
The Base database app can create and manage databases using the Firebird or HSQLDB engines, and can also access external databases that use MySQL or other common formats. It can connect to Microsoft Access databases, too, but not can't create them. Its main utility is that it can serve as a data source for other apps in the suite.
Unlike most other office suites, LibreOffice provides a Math app for creating and running formulas. This can be convenient for quick work, but I still prefer how Microsoft more elegantly embeds math modules in its apps.
Cloud and Sharing: An Emerging Option for Online Work
Microsoft, Apple, and Google make it easy to share and collaborate on documents, worksheets, and presentations, but LibreOffice supports collaboration only via the Calc spreadsheet app. When two or more collaborators make conflicting edits during the same editing session, a Resolve Conflicts dialog lets you sort out which change to keep. Rival suites make things easier by including an autosave feature and offering options to open an unmerged copy of your edits.
LibreOffice doesn’t offer online versions like Microsoft, Apple, or Google, but the Collabora Online platform is an alternative that uses the LibreOffice technology stack as its foundation. I briefly tested a demo version of this platform and found the browser-based apps impressive. Online performance wasn't as fast as competitors, but it's good enough. I look forward to the continual improvement of this experience.
Document Compatibility: Best in Class
One unique advantage of LibreOffice is that it’s the only multi-platform office suite that can open just about any document format from the past three decades. That's invaluable if you work in a lab, office, or school with legacy documents that someone created decades ago. LibreOffice even opens ancient Microsoft Word documents that Word itself won't open without some obscure security setting changes. Documents from older versions of Apple's Pages are even fair game, but not from the latest version.
(Credit: PCMag/The Document Foundation)For comparison, Corel WordPerfect is equally flexible at opening old documents, but it's Windows-only. SoftMaker Office also supports a wide range of formats, though its full set of import filters is available only in its Windows version.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: The Document Foundation)
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a free, open-source document suite available for all major operating systems, but it doesn't work as smoothly as competitors and lacks robust collaboration features.