It also give you complete control over the contents of menus and toolbars, as well as the actions invoked by keyboard shortcuts. LibreOffice’s interface is enough like Microsoft Office’s that few users will have trouble adjusting to it. You can also use the Draw app to create presentations. I found the Draw program and its myriad shapes and objects particularly useful and easy. A design wizard and a decent collection of nice-looking templates help to get you started.īoth the Math (formula rendering and shaping) and Draw applications are capable. PDFs don’t require proprietary software, namely PowerPoint, to render. However, Impress is quite facile at creating presentations, and it exports to PDF, which is the format I see most often these days. LibreOffice Impress has impressive presentation creation capabilities, though PowerPoint compatibility isn’t quite 100%. Impress didn’t display some portions of PowerPoint presentations imported, so in that regard it was one of the less successful modules in LibreOffice. One feature I do miss is the Word’s formatting paintbrush, but I don’t miss it enough to go back. Writer fully supports revisions and presents them in more tasteful default colors. The one thing that’s truly held me back from Office alternatives over the years was lack of support for Word’s Track Changes feature, which is a mainstay for many writers and editors. LibreOffice Writer is a stellar word processor and highly compatible with Microsoft Word. It offers only one word-not a choice of several, as Microsoft’s does-but it is handy on occasion. Indeed, it has some of its own, such as the predictive word assistance similar to the one Microsoft has on its phone software, but has never bothered to implement it in Word. Writer is enough like Word that the transitional learning curve is minimal, and I’ve yet to find an important feature missing. Writer’s grammar checker is better, and the spell checker and other tools are also top-notch.
I don’t miss Microsoft Word’s pitiable grammar checking one bit. For pure writing and editing, it’s simply more in tune with my methods than anything else I’ve tried. I’m writing this article using Writer and enjoying every moment of the process. It’s also free-not an insignificant attribute for most of us. It supports OS X and Linux in addition to all flavors of Windows. An extremely capable office suite, LibreOffice 4 is also highly configurable, extensible, and cross-platform. If you’re feeling like an overtaxed and unappreciated serf in Microsoft’s kingdom, LibreOffice 4 might just offer the freedom you seek.
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