LibreOffice is an open source productivity suite that provides all the necessary office components for small-business, educational and non-profit organizations. It is a fork of the well-known OpenOffice.org application.
A drop-in replacement for OpenOffice.org
LibreOffice’s story starts not so long ago, as a continuation of the work already implemented in the OpenOffice.org software. The initial release of LibreOffice was made available back in 2011. Since then, the project got a lot of attention from the open source community, many developers joined the team, and in only a couple of years it became the number one office suite for almost, if not all Linux distributions.
It’s compatible with major office suites
The project is compatible with various other major office suite applications, including OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, it is available on a variety of platforms, and it’s comprised of six main components: Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Math, and Draw.
LibreOffice’s main components
LibreOffice Writer is the main component, and probably the most used one. It is also the most important one from the entire office suite, as many people install LibreOffice to create high quality word documents. It provides users with plenty of options for formatting text, inserting tables, drawings and images.
LibreOffice Calc is there for those of you who work with spreadsheet documents, and LibreOffice Math can be used to easily insert equations and formulas in word, spreadsheet, drawing, and presentation documents.
If you work a lot with presentations and slideshows, we strongly recommend to use the Impress component of LibreOffice. Moreover, LibreOffice Draw allows you to generate drawings that include charts, formulas or tables.
The last component, and the most advanced one, is LibreOffice Base, which can be used to design and maintain databases for storing all sorts of data, from survey information to financial reports.
Bottom line
Thanks to its CMIS standard, LibreOffice allows users to easily collaborate with online document storage and CMS (Content Management System) systems. Being one of the fastest growing open source office suite in the world, LibreOffice is now adopted by many Linux operating systems and it is our number one choice for ordinary desktop office tasks.
