Libreoffice
Version: 6.3 Web: www.libreoffice.org
libreoffice is the main office tool for millions of home users, office workers and even governments that have decided to cut costs and ditch the proprietary Microsoft Office in the favour of freedom. Does Libreoffice perform better than its rival? A while back, when Libreoffice was seen as a continuation of Openoffice, the main argument was still rather ideological than practical because there were plenty of compatibility issues with Microsoft’s file formats (mainly DOC/DOCX). When loading a large document with pictures, tables, cross-references and footnotes spread over few hundred pages, Libreoffice lagged terribly.
We’ve conducted some stress tests to see that the situation has greatly improved. Not only Writer but Calc showed substantially better speeds when loading a heavy spreadsheet with lots of embedded functions. A skewed layout of a Word document opened in Writer is also a much rarer case nowadays. Even different versions of Office sometimes distort DOC/DOCX files, so in that regard Libreoffice 6.3 has a high rank.
The visible changes in this new release include a major revamp of the Notebookbar, and the new Contextual Single UI. In previous Libreoffice releases we simply avoided Notebookbar as it was so ugly, but now it looks much more usable. For its part, Contextual Single UI is an interesting approach to a compact toolbar design. It looks very traditional, but the selection of available buttons in the toolbar is dynamic, changing depending on what you are currently doing. The easiest way to see this is to insert a picture into the document and select it.
Many other improvements have been introduced other components of the suite. For instance, when you copy cells from Calc and insert them as a table in
Writer, the inline table editing now works much better. In short, Libreoffice is better than ever.