NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, March 2011
LibreOffice - Another Free Office Suite
By Ira Wilsker, Radio Show Host,
Columnist, College Professor and deputy sheriff
iwilsker@sbcglobal.net
(click to email author)

WEBSITES:
http://www.libreoffice.org
http://www.libreofficeportable.org
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-office-suite.htm
https://docs.google.com
http://www.openoffice.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libreoffice

When most users think of an office suite, they think of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office.

Dominant over its competitors, Microsoft Office has near universal acceptance in business and industry, as well as educational and home use. It is a Microsoft product, and has the panache' of Microsoft, but is among the most expensive of the office suites. Microsoft Office does not have a monopoly, although Microsoft and many software pundits and IT departments treat it as it does. There are some excellent competitors to Microsoft Office, including both commercial and freeware products. Corel, often better known for its excellent video and image editing software also is the publisher of WordPerfect Office X5; long time computer users and secretaries may remember when WordPerfect was the predominant word processor, but after a series of buyouts and mergers between such former powerhouses as WordPerfect Corporation, and Borland, the WordPerfect Office X5 is the latest iteration in a long standing tradition of excellence that grew from just a word processor (the original WordPerfect) to a complete suite, including the former Borland Quattro Pro spreadsheet, both of which are still considered by many to be better at what they do than the more popular Microsoft products, Word and Excel. While both Microsoft Office and Corel WordPerfect Office X5 are excellent, and offer compatibility with each other as well as a similar appearance and command set, they are expensive. The full version of WordPerfect Office X5 retails for about $250 (a "Professional" version is $100 more), and Microsoft Office retails for $280 (2010 Home & Business edition, with the 2010 Office Professional edition retailing for $500; several other versions available at other prices), there are some excellent freeware alternatives to those products.

There are several freeware office suites available, that can be used by anyone without restrictions, and that includes personal, business, and educational use. In these tough economic times, with budgets shrinking and under stress, many students, families, corporations, colleges, and government agencies have switched from the expensive commercial suites (almost entirely Microsoft Office) to the free alternative suites. Most of the published reviews and commentaries indicate that users who switched from Microsoft Office to one of the major free office suites had no significant problems using the free software, as the basic view, toolbars, menus, and command sets are very similar. Most of the free office suites can read and write Microsoft Office files, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access formats. OpenOffice (openoffice.org) is by far the best known and most widely used free office suite, with over 125 million copies downloaded. OpenOffice also has a portable version that can be installed to, and run from a flash drive, providing excellent portability, and the ability to edit, display, and present files from computers lacking OpenOffice; I carry the portable version of OpenOffice on my flash drive, and have used it frequently. OpenOffice will run on virtually any platform. including Windows, Linux, MAC, and others. Google Docs (docs.google.com) is generally available for free, has a large and loyal following, and can read and write most Microsoft Office formats (except Access), as well as convert most PDF files to text and images that can be manipulated with Google Docs. Google Docs has the advantage of accessibility wherever the internet can be accessed, and includes a minimum of a gigabyte of free storage. GoogleDocs can be accessed from almost any computer with internet access and a browser, regardless of operating system installed on the computer. Other free office suites are listed and rated the Gizmo community at http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-office-suite.htm.

Recently, I became aware of another interesting free office suite that has all of the "bells and whistles" of Microsoft Office, without the cost of the Microsoft product. This is the LibreOffice ("Libre" as in "free") available for download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download (215mb for the Windows version). According to its webpage, " LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Support and documentation is free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers." After downloading it and trying it, it looked amazingly like the OpenOffice I already had installed, even down to similar names for each of the components. The reason for this is that LibreOffice is based on the open source code of OpenOffice, including the same version numbers (currently 3.3), even though LibreOffice was not even formed until late September, 2010. LibreOffice was created when a group of former OpenOffice employees started "The Document Foundation" to ensure the survival of the OpenOffice concept. According to Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libreoffice) the future of OpenOffice is in doubt since Oracle Corporation purchased Sun Microsystems, the primary sponsor of OpenOffice. Oracle has removed the leadership of OpenOffice, with some speculation that OpenOffice will be shut down, the same way that Oracle shut down OpenSolaris after an earlier buyout. Within a month after the takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, " ... October 2010, 33 developers left OpenOffice.org and moved to The Document Foundation to support LibreOffice."

Just like OpenOffice, upon which it is based, LibreOffice will run on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, BSD, and Windows, and is available for free installation on a computer or on a flash drive as a portable edition (http://www.libreofficeportable.org). LibreOffice is complete as an office suite, and offers the epitome of compatibility as it can read and write almost any word processor, spreadsheet, database, and presentation format, including all of the Microsoft Office formats, including the old "dot-three-letter" formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.) as well as the newer "dot-four-letter" formats of Office 2007 and Office 2010 (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). In my experience, users who are familiar with Microsoft Office can instantly use LibreOffice and be equally competent with the free office suite. All of the LibreOffice components can also read and write all of the internationally standardized open-document formats, as well as the file formats used by many other proprietary products. All of the LibreOffice components can natively write (save) output in the popular PDF format. There are thousands of free templates and extensions available for LibreOffice that can be used as a basis for most projects.

Probably the most widely used office component is a word processor, and Writer is the word processor included in LibreOffice. It is full featured, and a direct competitor to Microsoft Word, including virtually all of the features of Word, without the expense.

Writer can be used to create simple documents, or to produce sophisticated desktop publishing materials, books, magazines, resumes, and other documents. Writer supports embedded images and diagrams, and includes " ... while-you-type auto-completion, auto-formatting and automatic spelling checking make difficult tasks easy (but are easy to disable if you prefer)." Writer has much the same look and feel of Word, and there is a near zero learning curve for Word users to become comfortable and productive with Writer.

For years I happily used Borland's Quattro as my spreadsheet, later importing my data into Excel when Borland ceased to exist. As an experiment, I imported some of both my old Excel .xls files, and my newer .xlsx files into the LibreOffice spreadsheet appropriately named "Calc", and they imported flawlessly. The menu or "ribbon" at the top of the Calc screen looked very familiar and close to Excel, and the command set was nearly identical.

Calc is fully capable of doing what any other spreadsheet can do, and even has some intelligence built in that eases the implementation of commonly used functions. Calc can be totally adequate for filling almost all spreadsheet needs, and supports graphics, sounds, database functions, and all of the other features that people use in the expensive commercial competitors.

I do a lot of PowerPoint presentations, and sometimes share my presentations with my students and others. Often my cash-strapped students do not have PowerPoint (although Microsoft does have a free PowerPoint viewer available), and they have no way to edit my PowerPoint slides or create their own original presentations. Impress is the aptly named presentation utility included in LibreOffice, and can read and write all of the PowerPoint file formats, as well as most other formats used around the world. As with the other LibreOffice components, Impress can be quickly mastered by anyone familiar with PowerPoint, and virtually all of the features available in PowerPoint are available in Impress. One cute feature of Impress is that it can export (convert) presentations into the near universal Flash (.swf) format which can be displayed in almost any browser as a video, or by almost any video player.

Draw is the LibreOffice drawing and charting tool. According to its website, "Draw lets you produce anything from a quick sketch to a complex plan, and gives you the means to communicate with graphics and diagrams. With a maximum page size of 300cm by 300cm (almost 10 feet x 10 feet), Draw is a an excellent package for producing technical drawings, general posters, and much else." I am not graphically gifted, but I have used Draw to create an organizational chart and several flow charts, and it was easy to create professional looking output. Draw can import images and graphics in most formats, including BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and WMF, and can save the output in any open document format (universally compatible), and can also create Flash (.swf) presentations.

Many people create databases to track and analyze data, and LibreOffice offers Base as its database program. " With Base, you can seamlessly integrate your existing database structures into the other components of LibreOffice, or create an interface to use and administer your data as a stand-alone application. You can use imported and linked tables and queries from MySQL, PostgreSQL or Microsoft Access and many other data sources, or design your own with Base, to build powerful front-ends with sophisticated forms, reports and views. Support is built-in or easily addable for a very wide range of database products, notably the standardly-provided HSQL, MySQL, Adabas D, Microsoft Access and PostgreSQL." With power and compatibility like this, there may be no need for other expensive database programs.

Sometimes I have to create and display equations, and getting the formatting correct in a word processor is often difficult to nearly impossible. For this explicit purpose LibreOffice offers Math as a simple equation editor. Math can be run as a free standing program, or can be accessed from the other LibreOffice components as needed by simply clicking on INSERT - OBJECT - FORMULA. Math can be used to create, edit, and manipulate mathematical, chemical, electrical or scientific equations quickly in standard written notation. Math " ... can include a wide range of elements, from fractions, terms with exponents and indices, integrals, and mathematical functions, to inequalities, systems of equations, and matrices." Math is easy to use with intuitive commands; for example, typing "1 over 2" creates the fraction one-half, which can be edited for size and format as desired, and then easily brought into any other LibreOffice component or printed.

I have always enjoyed using OpenOffice, and have written about it several times in the past. With uncertainty about its future, and the loss of much of its creative staff who went to The Document Foundation, LibreOffice may very well be the primary surviving, full featured office suite. For anyone who would like a comprehensive office suite without the expense of the Microsoft or Corel products, LibreOffice would be a wise choice. In the past, I have recommended OpenOffice to my students who need an office suite, but now I will be recommending LibreOffice.

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