There are many free office suites out there, the quintessential among them:
LibreOffice. Having taken over the free championship from
OpenOffice, Libre stands as the zero-cost alternative to the hugely expensively, hugely popular and
excellent Microsoft Office as your desk-and-chair productivity bundle. But wishful thinking aside,
LibreOffice never quite managed to replace its commercial rival.
I’ve written about this
time and
again – the simple cruel reality is, if people need top notch fidelity in their documents, they
must use Microsoft Office to cooperate with other folks. Over the years, LibreOffice has matured, grown
better and more
accurate in its support for the Office formats, but it never gave a perfect record. Wait now. Version
6.0 has just been released, and it promises to be the best thing ever. Is it?
On paper … and in reality
The setup was fairly simple for me. I downloaded the archive, extracted the 30-odd Deb files on my
Kubuntu Aardvark instance, and then installed the program
side by side with the resident 5.X edition. So far so good. On launch, there’s a nicer, cooler
splash. Visually, it’s hard to tell the difference between the old and the modern, but if you’re keen
of eye and true of heart, you will see the aura of pro glitter that comes with the new kid on the
block.
Indeed, LibreOffice 6.0 ships with a load of improvements. But instead of just listing what the
official release notes tell us, let’s test. I wanted to see whether the program can actually deliver.
To wit, I grabbed one of my own books, after it had gone through a round of copyediting by a
professional editor, sporting hundreds if not thousands of little changes, all carefully tracked and
commented. A DOCX file, if you will.
Excellent. The loaded DOCX document was 100% true to its original look, feel and behavior in
Microsoft Office. Everything was just as it should be, and this is probably the
very first time I felt comfortable enough considering using LibreOffice
for serious work knowing that other parties will be using Microsoft Office. Not quite there yet, but
this is a monumental leap in quality. The implications are staggering.
Better all around
My book notwithstanding, LibreOffice is a significantly better product than its predecessors.
Smarter layout, less clutter, more options, more logically arrayed options. It’s easier to embed and
manipulate images. Easier to add mathematical equations. Everything just feels less cumbersome, less
ponderous. It’s almost as if someone said, let’s focus on making LibreOffice be an efficient product
first and foremost. Seriously, this is felt in every aspect of usage. Even tracking changes works
fine, and it used to be a productivity killer. Not as smooth as Microsoft Office, but it’s actually
usable now.
Writer often takes focus, so it’s easy to overlook other programs in the suite, but neither Calc nor
Impress are overlooked. I remember my frustration trying to prettify charts in LibreOffice. Now, it’s
bearable, and almost fun. You have more freedom doing things, and you’re not fighting the ghosts of
2001. Impress also lets you very easily charge slide aspect ratio, there’s better Macro support. Joy
all over the place.
Better spelling AND grammar. Yes.
Ribbon interface
Now, this is not a new thing, and you could enable experimental features in the 5.X branch and use
the Microsoft-like contextual menu interface instead of the classic toolbar layout. It feels apt
actually testing this with the new LibreOffice version.
The Ribbon-equivalent (dose) layout is called Notebookbar, and there are six options, including full
and compact grouped tabs, contextual and whatnot. I tested these, and found Tabbed (full) to offer the
most Microsoft-like experience and with easier access to different options. Still, the setup is a bit
clunky, you may need the menu bar regardless of what you choose (Alt won’t always pop it), so there’s
more than can be done to make this seamless and fun.
ePUB support
LibreOffice also lets you export documents as reader files. This worked relatively well. I tried
both headings and page breaks, and the created files were reasonable enough. Sure, there’s always room
for improvement, and it will be nice if LibreOffice comes with additional styling support and metadata
editing for mobile/reader formats, but that’s something for future versions.
PDF support
The old stuff is there – plus encryption, digital signatures and all that. Very neat. You can also
add watermarks, so this helps if you need to share potentially confidential material with people of
shady character.
Extensions
The self-update and extensions install mechanism are similar to what we had in the past, and this is
definitely something that LibreOffice should improve. Installing new stuff still takes you online.
Being able to sort and install extensions from the program’s interface would be a nice boon.
Other things
Security, ease of use, you name it. But wait. There’s more! There’s focus on commercial deployments,
and talk about cloud, too. This has already been proven to work, and work well, and for a brief while,
we had
Open365, which I guess inspired the renewed
focus on the remote/online version. The Android Viewer is also more than just a lovely shell slash
remote control for your presentations. I will be exploring these aspects of the LibreOffice usage in
more depth in the future.
Conclusion
LibreOffice 6.0 is a phenomenal release. Pro-am if you will. The very first version that can proudly
wear its laurels. It’s almost a completely different product. More elegant, more efficient, with better
and smarter layout and work logic, improved functionality with pretty much everything. Most
importantly, Microsoft Office supports is very good. It was also stable and fast.
Technically, LibreOffice is playing catchup with Microsoft Office. We probably may never achieve
parity, as office suites take millions of dollars to develop and maintain. But still, in this game of
hare and armadillo, the open-source beastling is making great strides forward. LibreOffice 6.0 has an
expensive, elegant, refreshing feel to it. An office suite reborn. Official release notes are often
three quarters hyperbole and one quarter nonsense, but in this case, it’s all awesome stuff. I am
extremely happy, and I urge you to install and test LibreOffice 6.0. There are few free products that
warrant this much joy. 10/10. Font away.
Cheers.