LibreOffice 5

LibreOffice starts up with a gallery of templates or recent files. You can narrow the list of templates from the pop-up menu shown at the left.

One sign of LibreOffice's long ancestry (it got started as an Office clone called StarOffice) is the list of obsolete file formats it can open. When was the last time you saw a document in T602 format?

LibreOffice supplements its old-school menu-and-toolbar interface with an up-to-date sidebar that gives easy access to formatting features.

LibreOffice's new version integrates features that used to be in separate apps, so that you can now access the drawing tools from the Draw app in the Writer word-processor.

Charting in LibreOffice has gotten better-looking with each new version, with more elegant default fonts and subtler colors.

Calc's function browser now narrows down the available choices as you type the name of the function that you're looking for.

The clunky old presentation templates in LibreOffice are still there, but slightly improved, and have been supplemented by slightly more stylish ones. Many templates are now designed for twenty-first-century wide screens instead of the old 4:3 proportions.

Throughout LibreOffice you'll find traditional, overstuffed drop-down menus. If you don't like Microsoft's Ribbon interface, you'll feel at home, but there are lot of items to browse through if you don't know exactly where to look.

LibreOffice's options menu tends to be cluttered and sometimes incomprehensible, but on the whole it's not much worse than Microsoft Office's similarly packed options screens.

All the various options in LibreOffice's Safe Mode menu (shown here in the Mac version) did nothing to solve the problem of frequent crashes in my macOS-based LibreOffice setup.