LibreOffice 7.5
When it comes to traditional office duties, LibreOffice covers all bases.
As it’s an office suite, LibreOffice is actually several pieces of software. Like most of the LibreOffice modules, LibreOffice Writer has all of the core features that most business users need. This word processor is fully-featured and takes inspiration for its user interface from traditional GUI word processors, meaning that it will feel familiar to nearly every computer user as soon as they first encounter the program.
Having said that, it does have a more modern, ribbon based interface that is disabled by default. To enable the ribbon, visit the pop-up user interface menu (View > User interface). So, how does the ribbon operate? There’s a tab along the top of the ribbon area that divides the user interface elements into several categories. For instance, the Home category gathers together the usual formatting features. You can even decide whether to enable the ribbon for just the current module or throughout all areas of the suite.
The other modules are equally worthwhile. Calc, for instance, is a spreadsheet with a deep feature set. We prefer it to some of the online options because it’s the type of application where the fast opening of new documents coupled with responsiveness when navigating around a large sheet is appreciated. The charting features are extensive, too.
Base, the database module, is probably the most underappreciated area of the suite. It’s useful for traditional database tasks, and it can store its data with a back-end such as MySQL, meaning that the data can be stored on the other end of a network. The drawing module is a fairly complete vector-drawing program. It wouldn’t be our first recommendation as a pure illustration program, but it’s great for quickly putting together the sort of diagrams a typical business would need. There are some highly efficient workflows to be had involving dragging and dropping elements into the drawing in case of diagrams.
It’s arguable that presentation has taken over from the database in the ‘big’ three mandatory business applications. Covering this area, LibreOffice Impress comes packaged with useful templates to help you get started. It works well, and it can, erm, sometimes load in PowerPoint files properly. Seriously, it’s worth trying to load them, but the result might need some manual tweaking to look right.