LibreOffice 3.3 review

Oracle’s recent acquisition of Sun raised a few concerns among open-source software supporters. Sun was the main sponsor of the OpenOffice.org project, an open-source spin-off of its own commercial StarOffice suite. Sun’s patronage was generally seen in a positive light by the open-source community, but uncertainties remain over Oracle’s commitment to open source – for example, after acquiring Sun in January 2010, it halted development of the OpenSolaris operating system and sued Google for alleged Java copyright infringement in its open-source Android Mobile OS.

There were also frustrations among some developers about the way Sun approved or rejected code changes in OpenOffice, so with a view to improving matters the project’s main non-Sun members formed a breakaway project by ‘forking’ the code — essentially making a copy (completely legal for open-source projects) and developing it themselves as a parallel office suite. Oracle still owns the OpenOffice.org brand, so a new name was needed for the project, along with a new organisation to oversee it — hence ‘LibreOffice’ and The Document Foundation (TDF).

LibreOffice is TDF’s first release of this forked project. Its launch coincides with Oracle’s first update to OpenOffice, and both versions of the suite are now at 3.3 (LibreOffice kept the OpenOffice version number for consistency). The suites are superficially similar, but in the four months since the fork TDF has found time to add a few new features to LibreOffice. The suite can import Microsoft Works documents, for example, and save in Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010’s XML document format — OpenOffice 3.3 can read these documents, but not write to them.

At first glance, there’s little to distinguish LibreOffice 3.3 from its Oracle-sponsored counterpart, which is a good thing for anyone who’s making the switch from OpenOffice — or the visually similar pre-2007 versions of Microsoft Office. The component application names are the same, but the interface has been given a subtle makeover to differentiate from Oracle’s release. This is most noticeable with the toolbar buttons, but their redesign is only a partial success and you’ll need tooltips to identify the more cryptic ones.

LibreOffice’s word processor is probably the part of the suite that many will use the most. Writer is an extremely capable application that matches Microsoft Word almost feature for feature. Unfortunately, that’s not to say all its features are as well-realised as Word’s — the grammar checker, for example, seems oblivious to some elementary language mistakes and the document edit-tracking system lacks finesse. Whether when dealing with documents in LibreOffice’s native format or ones imported from Word, Writer’s inability to hide edits and preview the ‘final’ version of a document, or show who’s changed what without stepping through edits in a clumsy dialog box, makes collaborative work a chore if more than just a few pages are involved.

Writer does do a pretty good job of importing Word documents, so those concerned about inter-suite compatibility have little to worry about. Paragraph styles seem to be the only hitch for text documents and Writer often renders line spacing differently, but re-applying the style usually remedies this. Things get stickier with more sophisticated formatting, and embedded images in particular tend to upset a layout in an imported Word document. This only seems to be an issue with Word 2007 .docx files, though, and re-saving in the older .doc format before importing usually fixes things — but this won’t always be possible, of course.

It’s a similar story with the LibreOffice spreadsheet. Calc is more than a worthy replacement for Excel and it will be familiar to anyone already familiar with Microsoft’s application. LibreOffice’s take on Calc is a little more user-friendly to Excel users than OpenOffice’s version, too. Excel, for example, will accept both commas and semicolons to separate the parameters of a function, as will LibreOffice Calc. OpenOffice Calc, on the other hand, can only use semi-colons — a comma will generate an error.

As with Writer and Word, Calc apes Excel to the extent that it can read its files with very few problems. The eagle-eyed will notice some differences in how certain things appear, though. A whole-column cell reference of A:A in Excel, for example, is translated to A1:1048576 in Calc, but as both spreadsheets support the same 1-million-plus number of rows, the effect is the same. More sophisticated Excel sheets with such things as filtered data, in-cell drop-down lists and floating objects tend to suffer from formatting problems after importing, but since OpenOffice Calc 3.3 doesn’t exhibit the same behaviour, this is most likely a bug in this first LibreOffice release.

Anyone in need of a presentation application for general-purpose use will be well served by LibreOffice’s Impress, but it’s not quite a complete PowerPoint replacement. It’s certainly powerful, but lacks a few useful features like narration support and the ability to play a sound file across a whole presentation, rather than just a single slide. Importing PowerPoint files can be hit and miss, too. Simple slides pose few problems, but timings and transitions aren’t always preserved and correcting such things by hand is difficult when you have no idea how the original presentation was supposed to look.

Impress’s limitations must be taken in context, however, as for many people the suite’s price makes them worth putting up with when paying for PowerPoint is the only alternative. Sadly, the same excuse doesn’t quite work for Base, LibreOffice’s database application. Although functionally similar to Access, it’s nowhere near as easy to get to grips with and hardly a like-for-like open-source alternative. Base can’t open Access databases directly either, making it the only component of LibreOffice that’s not a patch on its Microsoft Office equivalent.

LibreOffice also lacks certain applications that are found in various Office bundles — there’s no Outlook equivalent, nor anything to do the job of OneNote. The suite does, however, include a serviceable diagram and chart editor in the shape of Draw (along similar lines to Microsoft Visio) and the Math scientific/mathematic formula editor is similar to Office’s Equation Editor.

LibreOffice is an excellent free alternative to spending £78 on Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010. The functional and visual similarity of Writer, Calc and Impress to their counterparts in older versions of Office also makes LibreOffice a good choice for anyone not keen on Office 2007 and 2010’s Ribbon interface, and file compatibility between LibreOffice and Microsoft’s suite is good enough to cause few problems for most users.

It’s also reassuring that LibreOffice 3.3 is just as solid as OpenOffice.org, considering the short time since the code fork, but there’s currently little practical reason to switch from OpenOffice if you don’t need the handful of new features LibreOffice provides. That said, the current strong similarity between both suites also makes this the best time to move to LibreOffice if you don’t trust Oracle to keep OpenOffice open, or just want to support The Document Foundation’s open-source ideals. After all, there’s no guarantee that the two projects won’t diverge more significantly in later releases, which could make a later switch from OpenOffice more of a problem.