LibreOffice is free!
While Office 2011 is bloated, fills your Applications folder with files and folders, and consumes 3GB of disk space, LibreOffice is slim, puts just one item in your Applications folders, and needs less then 200MB of space. That, you might think, has more to do with missing features and functions than it does with optimisation. But you’d be wrong. Sure, there’s no equivalent of Outlook in LibreOffice, but there are modules for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, and one each for drawing and rendering mathematical formulae.
Within the modules themselves, there’s little to separate them from their Microsoft counterparts. Both the older and newer XML-based Office proprietary file formats are supported, meaning that opening, for example, a .docx is a breeze.
Writer, the word processor, is terrific. It has features for adding comments, tracking revisions, and accepting or rejecting changes. Its spell- and grammar-checker are excellent and it has a large gallery of symbols, shapes and graphics. Long document support is great too, with support for indexes, bibliographies, and tables of contents.
Calc (spreadsheets), had no problems opening Excel documents. But here lies LibreOffice’s only major limitation; it has its own macro system, and doesn’t support Visual Basic. So if you have Excel spreadsheets with lots of macros, you’ll have difficulty using them in Calc. On the other hand, conditional formatting in Calc is excellent, and in some ways an improvement on Excel.
The Presentation tool, Impress, is decent, though lacks the polish of Keynote or even PowerPoint. To add a new slide, for example, you must go to the Insert menu and choose Slide. There’s no keyboard shortcut. It does, however, have lots of templates, transitions, and some really good animation controls.
Base is a database creation and management tool that can be used as a front-end to an SQL or Access database, for example; or alternatively, with the help of Java, as a database in its own right. There’s no equivalent in the Mac version of Office. Lastly, there’s a decent drawing and painting tool, and there’s Math, a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae for use in other documents.
If you only need a word processor, you might be better off trying Bean (bean-osx.com), which uses OS X native frameworks, so is fast, light, and has a familiar interface. It has live word and character counts, great formatting options, a customisable full-screen mode, and tabbed windows for multiple documents. However, it’s no longer actively developed, so will stop working after future OS X upgrades – it’s fine currently, though, except that it’s missing built-in OS X versioning.
If you need the lot, though, give LibreOffice a try; you’ll be in for a very pleasant surprise.