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LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite consists of programs for word processing, creating and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 115 languages.
  • As its native file format to save documents for all of its applications, LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), or OpenDocument, an international standard developed jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). LibreOffice also supports the file formats of most other major office suites, including Microsoft Office, through a variety of import and export filters.
  • LibreOffice is available for a variety of computing platforms, with official support for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux and community builds for many other platforms. It is also available as an online office suite called LibreOffice Online, which includes the applications Writer, Calc and Impress. LibreOffice is the default office suite of most popular Linux distributions. It is the most actively developed free and open-source office suite, with approximately 50 times the development activity of Apache OpenOffice, the other major descendant of OpenOffice.org.

Features

  • 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. It can also create fillable forms via PDF or the Forms tab.
  • Calc: A spreadsheet program, similar to Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3. It has several unique features, including a system which automatically defines series of graphs, based on information available to the user.
  • Impress: A presentation program resembling Microsoft PowerPoint. Impress has support for multiple file formats including PPTX, ODP, and SXI. Presentations can also be exported as SWF files, allowing them to be viewed on any computer with Adobe Flash Player installed.
  • Draw: A vector graphics editor, raster graphics editor, and diagramming tool similar to Microsoft Visio, CorelDRAW, and Adobe Photoshop. 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.
  • 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.
  • Base: A database management program, similar to Microsoft Access. LibreOffice Base allows databases to be created and managed, and the generation of forms and reports
  • of database content. Like Access, it can be used to create small embedded databases that are stored with the document files (using Java-based HSQLDB and C++ based Firebird.

Operating systems and processor architectures

LibreOffice is cross platform software. The Document Foundation developers target Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS. There are community ports for FreeBSD,NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X 10.5 PowerPC receive support from contributors to those projects, respectively.LibreOffice is also installable on OpenIndiana via SFE.

Historically predecessors of LibreOffice, back to StarOffice 3, have run on Solaris with SPARC CPUs that Sun Microsystems made. Unofficial ports of LibreOffice, versions now obsolete, have supported SPARC. Current unofficial ports of LibreOffice 5.2.5 run only on Intel-compatible hardware, up to for Solaris 11.

LibreOffice Online

LibreOffice Online is the online office suite edition of LibreOffice. It allows 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. The Document Foundation, IceWarp, and Collabora announced a collaboration 4to work on its implementation.

In October 2020 Collabora announced the move of its work on Collabora Online from The Document Foundation infrastructure to GitHub.

Comparison with OpenOffice

A detailed 60-page report in June 2015 compared the progress of the LibreOffice project with the related project Apache OpenOffice. It showed that "OpenOffice received about 10% of the improvements LibreOffice did in the period of time studied."

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.