LibreOffice Pips OpenOffice.org To The Post: Review
This open-source office suite proves that forking is not always the kiss of death
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The significance of these differences will, of course, be more or less, depending on one’s need for them. For example, someone who works with a wide range of document formats will be impressed by LibreOffice’s ability to import Lotus WordPro and MS Works files, and the improvements to the import of WordPerfect files. On the other hand, document publishers will appreciate the ability to import SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) pictures into Draw and Writer, and to edit those images in Draw.
Presentation gurus will benefit from the ability to import slide decks containing charts that were stored in PPTX (PowerPoint 2007/2010) format. People who live and breathe for the manipulation of document files with XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) can expect to save themselves some headaches by being able to load and save ODF (Open Document Format) documents in a flat XML format for faster processing.
I’m a big fan of the new default for the “Save As” feature of the LibreOffice applications, which only displays appropriate document formats. This won’t stop a user from selecting a nonstandard format if that’s really necessary, but it certainly makes it less likely that he or she will do so by accident. The new title-page creation and management tools will also appeal to different users, from the student to the most professional.
Meanwhile, the mad-scientist types (who most organisations keep tucked away in the cubicle or the office furthest from the front door) will enjoy the ability to test the as-yet-unfinished features of LibreOffice, which are exposed in the suite’s “Experimental” mode.
Other nice features common to LibreOffice 3.3 and OpenOffice.org 3.3 are the matching of case for auto-corrected words and the embedding of standard PDF fonts when desired. The export of RTF (Rich Text Format) files has been substantially overhauled to fix what TDF calls “critical” errors that, in worst-case situations, result in data loss.
Installation
Installing LibreOffice is a simple process once the appropriate version is in hand. However, some components require a Java virtual machine, especially in the case of the Base database manager; the installer doesn’t check for one. But the first run of the application suite will prompt the user if a supported JVM is absent. The only downside to this approach is the dozen or so error messages that appear during the startup.
I tested the suite on Mac OS X 10.6.6 and on Windows 7. The only noticeable difference between the two is that the Mac version of the suite installs as an application bundle, whereas the Windows version installs as discrete components. In addition, TDF notes that the Windows installer has been integrated into a single build containing all current language versions. This reduces the size of the complete package significantly, from 75GB to 11GB. Thanks to the common code base, many extensions and templates designed for OpenOffice.org can be expected to work on LibreOffice without modification; some of these are even included in the distribution.
In many ways, LibreOffice 3.3 is a mature office suite, more mature in some respects than any other open-source project that I can name. Although few people wanted to see OpenOffice.org fork into two camps — one driven more by the distrust of Oracle’s motives than anything else, and the other driven by loyalty to the software behemoth — the result is impressive. The dissidents who formed TDF have produced in LibreOffice a stable and versatile suite of productivity tools that any shop not closely tied to the Microsoft application stack should consider for deployment.
