And if you’re a Linux user, you may already be using Libre Office as it’s now included with many Linux distributions. The suite itself is free and open source, and is made up of a word processor, spreadsheet and. That makes Libre Office the obvious choice for businesses, schools, and anywhere else security is important. LibreOffice is the offspring of The Document Foundation and split from OpenOffice in 2010. As of this writing, Open Office’s last update was a year ago Libre Office’s latest release came last month. Having relative feature parity with Open Office, it comes down to the release frequency of new features and fixes, and Libre Office wins that race hands down. Libre Office should be the choice of open source enthusiasts.

Fantastic compatibility with Microsoft Office formats.

That can facilitate sharing files for group review-track changes and commenting are supported-but no real-time authoring. There’s no native cloud integration, but Libre Office does have a Remote Files feature that allows you to access files outside servers like Google Drive and OneDrive. The installed template selection pales compared to what you get with Microsoft Office, but you can beef it up with downloads from Libre Office’s Extensions and Templates library. In our tests, it better handled the more complex documents that Open Office struggled with. Libre Office uses open document format as its native format, but it can also read and write a range of Microsoft Office formats including the newer DOCX, PPT, and PPTX files. Libre Office seamlessly translates Office formats, including complex documents.

Open office libre office