The developers behind LibreOffice, the free and open source
productivity suite forked from OpenOffice, have sweated and bled to advance the
toolkit over the past couple of years. The effort has paid off: It’s a
no-brainer to recommend LibreOffice over OpenOffice, thanks to Libre’s
consistent release schedule and the increasingly polished quality of the
product.
Now for the bigger question: Can you recommend LibreOffice in
the same breath as Microsoft Office? The short answer: Maybe. To its credit,
LibreOffice 4.4 handles old- and new-school Microsoft Office documents better
than ever before -- no small feat considering how prohibitively complex such
documents can be. If you plan on using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement for
Microsoft Office, know that document compatibility is still a roll of the dice
-- but with each revision LibreOffice is improving the odds.
Looking good,
working better
The changes in LibreOffice 4.4 are visible the moment you open a
document, though some are fairly subtle. Application toolbars, for instance:
The default controls for each application in the suite have been cleaned up to
display the most commonly used functions. Though you're presented with a
slightly more crowded toolbar, it should be a more useful one. I’m of two minds
on this, if only because the pop-outside panel (which both OpenOffice and
LibreOffice inherited from IBM’s Lotus Symphony) has largely replaced the
toolbars for me.
Among the best of the interface improvements in Writer is a more
readable status bar, at the bottom of the application window. Word counts,
document positions, and other details about the document are spelled out more
explicitly and far less confusingly than before. The once-cryptic icons that
indicate a modified document or the selection mode now have tooltips that
explain their significance. Right-clicking on many, although not all, of those
elements brings up a contextual menu, such as one for selecting page styles.
You can’t, however, customize the elements appearing on the status bar, which I
always appreciated in Word. (I don’t really need the zoom slider.)
The
process of editing a document has been streamlined in some ways. If you make
changes to the style of a paragraph, you can now apply those changes to the
underlying style via the style drop-down, instead of editing the underlying
style directly. Master documents, which allow multiple documents to be ganged
together into a single file, can now be used as document templates -- a handy
way to reproduce the structure of a multipart document as part of a standard
workflow.
Unfortunately, some
long-standing annoyances remain. If you switch to draft mode, especially on
longer documents, the document’s page count jumps to an arbitrary number -- for
example, the counter will display "5 pages" for a 228-page document
-- and one’s position in the document creeps backward as the repagination
process takes place in the background. You can work around this by switching to
print layout mode, but for those of us who like to plug away at long documents
in draft mode, it’s galling. (There’s already a bug report for it.)
The other apps in the suite have their share of improvements,
too. Calc has new statistical functions in its Statistics Wizard, as well as
support for the Excel Aggregate function. Impress now supports OpenGL-powered
transitions. Draw and Impress documents can be password-protected. Two popular
proprietary fonts normally supplied by Microsoft, Cambria and Calibri, now have
open source replacements named Caladea and Carlito -- useful if you’re leaving
behind both Office and Windows. Plus, PDFs exported by any LibreOffice programs
can be digitally signed with whatever certificates are available from the
operating system.
From
OOXML to OpenDoc, but not always back
If LibreOffice continues to
botch complex Office documents, it’s not entirely to blame. A third party can
provide only so much cross-compatibility with Microsoft Office documents before
the user is eventually forced to pick, for keeps, either Microsoft's or
OpenDocument's method.
I fed LibreOffice Writer a
Microsoft Office (OOXML) Word document some 230 pages long and chock-full of
corrections, annotations, and stylistic markup. The document opened properly
and displayed accurately, including the corrections and annotations. Attempting
to make more than the most trivial changes to it, however, triggered a warning:
I’d need to save the document as ODF, not OOXML, to preserve all details. I
knew full well what might happen if I didn’t. In another document I’d converted
the same way, OOXML highlighting had been converted by LibreOffice into simple
text colors, irreversibly.
Such behaviors aren’t limited
to Writer. If you have a presentation in PowerPoint, for instance, Impress can
generally read it and display it. But Impress doesn’t support many of the
snazzy 3D slide transitions found in PowerPoint, so it replaces any such
transitions with a generic substitute like a cross-fade. That’s fine if you’re
only making a one-way conversion, but it’s disastrous if you’re bouncing from
Microsoft Office to LibreOffice and back.
None of this is LibreOffice’s
fault alone. No doubt ODF has features OOXML doesn't support as well. This
makes it nearly impossible for any program that deals primarily with one to
transparently interoperate with the other and not lose any details in the
shuffle. Consequently, you’ll have fewer document-format issues with
LibreOffice if you’re making a clean switch and not looking back, or you're
starting with a clean slate and not using any legacy documents with it.
The code cleanup continues
Even as the LibreOffice team
adds new features and improvements, it has been fearlessly revising the code
base. Aside from refactoring Writer internally, with large classes split into
many smaller ones, LibreOffice has seen a major improvement in code quality
across the last few revisions thanks to a code scan provided
by Coverity. According to the company, this eliminated 6,000-odd defects in the
code, the vast majority of them common C++ software gotchas like dereferenced
null pointers.
In my entirely subjective and
unscientific opinion, not only is the suite itself becoming much faster and
less buggy, but the project's bug-handling process also seems to be improving.
When I tested the 4.4 release version, the suite crashed when I tried to browse
by bookmark through a document that contained no bookmarks. It turned out to be a bug that had been fixed the day after I
reported it. Said fix will land in LibreOffice 4.4.1, and it was already
present in the nightly build I was invited to test out.
Microsoft Office still remains
king and emperor of all it surveys, even as productivity moves to the cloud and
Microsoft works to play catch-up. It’s impressive to watch LibreOffice keep
moving forward in the face of the challenge -- and to become increasingly a
preference, not only an alternative.
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