LibreOffice

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It’s four years since Microsoft last released a new version of Office for Mac, and if you’re tired of waiting for Office 2016, you’ll find plenty of alternatives. The best for Mac is LibreOffice, a full-featured office suite which surpasses Microsoft Office for Mac when it comes to the sheer number of apps bundled within it. It lacks an equivalent of Outlook, but in other respects LibreOffice matches Office 2011. As well as modules for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, there’s a database, a drawing program, a database tool, a formulae and equations tool, and an app for creating and editing charts. There are also add-ons created by a huge community of developers, demonstrating one of the suite’s strengths as open-source software.

LibreOffice supports a large number of file formats, including Microsoft’s proprietary .doc and .xls and XML-based .docx and .xlsx extensions. If you think LibreOffice may be a lightweight alternative to Microsoft’s behemoth, think again. Writer includes features for adding comments, tracking revisions and accepting or rejecting changes. Long document support is also great thanks to support for creating indexes, bibliographies and tables of contents. Calc, the spreadsheet tool, has an excellent conditional formatting tool and there’s a Scenario Manager to perform complex ‘What If…’ analyses.

The presentation app, Impress, is powerful enough for most of us, with drawing and diagramming tools, animation and effects, and the Fontwork tool enables you to create 2D and 3D images from text. Draw can be used to create anything from quick sketches to technical drawings and charts.

The latest version of LibreOffice includes several new features, including enhanced abilities to digitally sign PDFs. Version 4 also saw an overhaul of the user interface, so if you’ve previiously tried it but weren’t taken, it’s worth another look. It’s just excellent, all up.