LibreOffice is the most actively developed free and open source office suite, a project of The Document Foundation. It was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite comprises programs for word processing, the creation and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 110 languages.
LibreOffice uses the international ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument file format (ODF) as its native format to save documents for all of its applications. LibreOffice also supports the file formats of most other major office suites, including Microsoft Office, through a variety of import/export filters.
LibreOffice is available for a variety of computing platforms, including Microsoft Windows, macOS (10.8 or newer), and Linux (including a LibreOffice Viewer for Android). It is the default office suite of most popular Linux distributions.
Between January 2011 (the first stable release) and October 2011, LibreOffice was downloaded approximately 7.5 million times. The project claims 120 million unique downloading addresses from May 2011 to May 2015, excluding Linux distributions, with 55 million of those being from May 2014 to May 2015.
Features
LibreOffice 4.0 Writer: A word processor with similar functionality and file support to Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. It has extensive WYSIWYG word processing capabilities, but can also be used as a basic text editor.
LibreOffice 4.0 Calc: A spreadsheet program, similar to Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3. It has a number of unique features, including a system which automatically defines series of graphs, based on information available to the user.
LibreOffice 4.0 Impress: A presentation program resembling Microsoft PowerPoint. Presentations can be exported as SWF files, allowing them to be viewed on any computer with Adobe Flash Player installed.
LibreOffice 4.0 Draw: A vector graphics editor and diagramming tool similar to Microsoft Visio and comparable in features to early versions of CorelDRAW. It provides connectors between shapes, which are available in a range of line styles and facilitate building drawings such as flowcharts. It also includes features similar to desktop publishing software such as Scribus and Microsoft Publisher. It is also able to act as a PDF-file editor.
LibreOffice 4.0 Math: An application designed for creating and editing mathematical formulae. The application uses a variant of XML for creating formulas, as defined in the OpenDocument specification. These formulas can be incorporated into other documents in the LibreOffice suite, such as those created by Writer or Calc, by embedding the formulas into the document.
LibreOffice 4.0 Base: A database management program, similar to Microsoft Access. LibreOffice Base allows the creation and management of databases, preparation of forms and reports that provide end users easy access to data. Like Access, it can be used to create small embedded databases that are stored with the document files (using Java-based HSQLDB as its storage engine), and for more demanding tasks it can also be used as a front-end for various database systems, including Access databases (JET), ODBC/JDBC data sources, and MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or Microsoft Access.
Work is ongoing to transition the embedded storage engine from HSQLDB to the C++ based Firebird SQL backend. Firebird has been included in LibreOffice as an experimental option since LibreOffice 4.2.
Operating systems
LibreOffice Viewer on Android
The Document Foundation developers target LibreOffice for Microsoft Windows (IA-32 and x86-64), Linux (IA-32 and x86-64) and macOS (x86-64). Community ports for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and OS X 10.5 PowerPC receive support from contributors to those projects, respectively. Libreoffice is also installable on OpenIndiana via SFE.
LibreOffice Online will allow for the use of LibreOffice through a web browser by using the canvas element of HTML5. Development was announced at the first LibreOffice Conference in October 2011, and is ongoing. LibreOffice announced a collaboration with Icewarp and Collabora to work on the cross-platform interface. A version of the software was shown in a September 2015 conference, and the UK Crown Commercial Service announced an interest in using the software. On 15 December 2015, Collabora, in partnership with ownCloud, released a technical preview of Libreoffice Online branded as Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE).] By October 2016, Collabora had released nine updates to CODE.
In 2011, developers announced plans to port LibreOffice both to Android and to iOS. A beta version of a document viewer for Android 4.0 or newer was released in January 2015; In May 2015, LibreOffice Viewer for Android was released with basic editing capabilities.
In January 2015, a LibreOffice Impress remote app was unveiled for the Pebble smartwatch.
Unique features of LibreOffice
A detailed 60-page report in June 2015 compared the progress of the LibreOffice project with its cousin project Apache OpenOffice. It showed that “OpenOffice received about 10% of the improvements LibreOffice did in the period of time studied.”
Supported file formats
Miscellaneous features
LibreOffice can use the GStreamer multimedia framework in Linux to render multimedia content such as videos in Impress and other programs.
Visually, LibreOffice uses the large “Tango style” icons that are used for the application shortcuts, quick launch icons, icons for associated files and for the icons found on the toolbar of the LibreOffice programs. They are also used on the toolbars and menus by default.
LibreOffice also ships with a modified theme which looks native on GTK-based Linux distributions. It also renders fonts via Cairo on Linux distributions; this means that text in LibreOffice is rendered the same as the rest of the Linux desktop.
LibreOffice has a feature similar to WordArt called Fontwork.
Licensing
The LibreOffice project uses a dual LGPLv3 (or later) / MPL 2.0 license for new contributions to allow the license to be upgraded. Since the core of the OpenOffice.org codebase was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, there is an ongoing effort to get all the code rebased to ease future license updates. At the same time, there were complaints that IBM had not in fact released the Lotus Symphony code as open source, despite having claimed to. It was reported that some LibreOffice developers wanted to incorporate some code parts and bug fixes which IBM already fixed in their OpenOffice fork.
Scripting and extensions
LibreOffice supports third-party extensions. As of April 2015, the LibreOffice Extension Repository lists more than 280 extensions. Another list is maintained by the Apache Software Foundation and another one by the Free Software Foundation. Extensions and scripts for LibreOffice can be written in C++, Java, CLI, Python, and LibreOffice Basic. Interpreters for the latter two are bundled with most LibreOffice installers, so no additional installation is needed. The application programming interface for LibreOffice is called “UNO” and is extensively documented.
LibreOffice Basic
LibreOffice Basic is a programming language similar to Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) but based on StarOffice Basic. It is available in Writer, Calc and Base. It is used to write small programs known as “macros”, with each macro performing a different task, such as counting the words in a paragraph.
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