I COULDN’T believe my ears when I recently overheard a salesman pitching an Office 365 bundle to a potential Mac buyer. Why in the world would anyone—much less a Mac user—want to pay to use Microsoft’s subscription-based office productivity suite when free alternatives are readily available?
Apple has bundled its iWork suite—which includes Pages (a word processor), Numbers (a spreadsheet) and Keynote (presentation software)—for free on all Macs and iPads since 2013.
If, like me, you want to use the same software across different operating systems, you need look no further than LibreOffice—a free and open source drop-in replacement MS Office that will work on Windows, OS X and Linux.
I find it astounding that there are still people—including that customer at the Mac store–who don’t know about LibreOffice. LibreOffice has been around since 2011, when it was spun off as a fork of OpenOffice. Since then, it has been downloaded 120 million times and has been deployed by large organizations in every continent. If you still don’t have it, you can grab it for free here: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/
LibreOffice includes Writer, the word processor; Calc, the spreadsheet application; Impress, the presentation engine; Draw, a drawing and flowcharting application; Base, a database and database front end; and Math for editing mathematics.
This month, the foundation behind LibreOffice, gave us even more reasons to download the free productivity suite. The new LibreOffice 5.1 released Feb.10 incorporates significant improvements over the previous version, including reduced startup time and an overall increase in speed on any of the three operating platforms on which it runs.
Although the user interface has been reorganized to provide faster and more convenient access to its most used features, LibreOffice thankfully retains the traditional menu-based approach.
I never cared much for Microsoft’s ribbon interface that first appeared with the release of MS Office 2007 and have always felt that it was confusing and that it took up too much screen space, especially on a laptop.
Among the interface changes, Version 5.1 adds a new menu to each of the applications: Style for Writer, Sheet for Calc, and Slide for Impress and Draw.
LibreOffice has always been read and write documents and spreadsheets created on MS Office. Now, Version 5.1 improves its compatibility with more proprietary formats, with new filters for Apple Keynote 6, Microsoft Write and Gnumeric files.
There have been improvements in each of the LibreOffice modules.
On Writer, there is are new contour and spacing controls for text wraps.
Calc’s formula engine has been improved with features addressing restrictions in table structured references and sticky column or row anchors, interoperability with OOXML spreadsheets and compatibility with ODF 1.2
The presentation engine, Impress, has also received several tweaks that make it easier to use, as well as new transitions that take advantage of OpenGL.
Not obvious to users, LibreOffice 5.1 has also been improved under the hood, making the open source office suit easier to develop, maintain and debug—which can be important in enterprise installations.
Bjoern Michaelson, director at the Document Foundation and a leading LibreOffice developer, says LibreOffice 5.1 is a sign of things to come for the open source productivity suite.
“Since 2010, we have gone through different development cycles to clean up the code and make it more responsive. We are now at a stage where we are close to providing a better user interface.”
Jan Holesovsky, a director and member of the LiberOffice design team, adds that the goal is to enable users to choose the best layout of the elements on the screen for their own needs, so that they can make the best use of their desktop space.
All this was going through my brain when I heard the sales pitch for Office 365.
I couldn’t help myself—and offered the potential Mac buyer some unsolicited advice.
“Why not just download LibreOffice? It’s free,” I said. Chin Wong
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