LibreOffice is free and open-source, opens almost any legacy document, and is the only office suite available on all major desktop platforms. What it lacks is the smooth interface and stability of its paid competitors.

There are lots of reasons to choose the free LibreOffice 5 as your office suite, and plenty of reasons to choose something else, too. The best reason for choosing it is that it's the only fully up-to-date open-source office suite, meaning that security-conscious users like governments and financial institutions—who are typically leery about proprietary office apps from Microsoft, Google, or Apple—can use LibreOffice in full confidence that everything it does is publicly visible, and that none of their data is slipping surreptitiously into some remote database in the name of enhanced productivity. This review focuses mainly on version 5.3 of LibreOffice for Windows, but I also tested it on the Mac, as I'll explain.

Free and Flexible

Other reasons for choosing LibreOffice include that it's free; that it's available with an identical interface and feature set in Windows, macOS, and Linux; and that it's one of the few suites that can open and convert almost any legacy document that you or your office may have created over the last three decades. Another attraction is that LibreOffice still uses the familiar toolbar-and-icon menu structure that millions of users learned from older versions of Microsoft Office , but which Microsoft abandoned ten years ago for the new Ribbon interface. As for the reasons to choose something else, I'll get to those later.

Office Work

LibreOffice combines a word-processor called Writer, a spreadsheet called Calc, a presentations app called Impress, a vector-drawing program called Draw, a database called Base, and a math-formula editor called Math. The newly released version 5.3 retains the old-school interface of earlier versions, but with more features added to the optional sidebar panel and standard shortcut keys like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for cutting and pasting visible on the menu and enabled by default.

A new Safe Mode lets you start LibreOffice with a new user profile, disable extensions, or reset the whole configuration. All this is designed to help you fix the suite when it starts crashing regularly—a problem that, in my experience, is more common in the macOS version than the Windows version. (I haven't been able to fix this problem in macOS, but it's more of a time-wasting annoyance than a data-losing disaster because it usually happens when I try to open a file.)

The Writer word-processor finally provides a dialog that lets you jump to a specific page number, supports preset table styles, adds a line-drawing toolbar, and enhances color-selection tools and coordinated color themes that more closely match the stylish ones in Microsoft Office. The Calc spreadsheet acts more like Excel, with wildcards rather than regular expressions as the default setting in formulas, enhanced pivot-table dialogs, and a function-selection menu that narrows down your choices as you type. The Impress presentations app, never a strong point, gets some moderately stylish new templates and a new template-selection dialog when Impress opens up, but don't expect anything like the elegant design and gee-whiz animations that Microsoft gives you with PowerPoint (8.25 Per User Per Month with Annual Commitment at Microsoft 365 Business) and Apple with Keynote.

LibreOffice 5.3

LibreOffice's main rivals are Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Sheet, and Slides, the corporate G Suite, and Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, formerly marketed as a suite under the name iWork. All these rivals exist in online versions accessible through a web browser or mobile apps, and all support real-time remote collaboration. Microsoft and Apple's apps exist in both desktop and mobile versions; Google's are only online. Until now, LibreOffice, in its full version, was available only for the desktop. Now, it's also available in a browser-accessible LibreOffice Online version, complete with collaborative editing, but only if your IT department installs it for you. There's no publicly available LibreOffice Online, as there is for Microsoft's, Apple's, and Google's apps.

LibreOffice's developers have made slow but steady progress into making the sidebar panel into an easy-to-use alternative to the menus and toolbars, and I'm impressed with the current version's spacious, clean design. The LibreOffice sidebar looks a lot like the sidebar in Apple Keynote (Free at Apple.com) , Numbers, and Pages but Apple gets things right that LibreOffice doesn't. For example, Apple's page-layout sidebar lets you enter custom settings for all four page margins.

LibreOffice's sidebar only lets you choose among preset margin settings, and you need to open a separate dialog to set custom margins. Once you've set custom margins, the sidebar shows Custom as one of the available margin settings—but if you click on Custom, you don't get back to the dialog where you change the settings. Instead, you have to go back to the separate margin-setting dialog. Apple and Microsoft get this kind of thing right in their desktop suites, but keep in mind that you have to pay for those suites while LibreOffice is free.

Legacy File Formats

I mentioned LibreOffice's compatibility with legacy file formats. This is a major feature for anyone who may have to work with files created decades ago in obsolete word processors or spreadsheets, and LibreOffice far outclasses Microsoft, Google and Apple in this arena. Its closest rival is the Windows-only Corel WordPerfect Office ($249.99 at WordPerfect) suite, which also opens almost any legacy document, but, oddly, can't open documents created by the last, unofficial release of WordPerfect for the Mac, while LibreOffice can. If you work in a school, office, or lab with legacy documents, LibreOffice is an essential tool even if you don't use it for everyday work.

Clunky and Crashy

As for reasons to choose something other than LibreOffice, these may be decisive for you as they are for me. First of all, despite improvements, it's clunky to look at and crashes more than it should. You can easily change its ugly default font, the open-source Liberation Serif font, but until you do, no one will be impressed by your documents. The most commonly used menus are clear and spacious, especially the ones in the sidebar pane, but the Options menu is cramped and often incomprehensible unless you've been using LibreOffice for years. Next, until someone funds a publicly accessible version of LibreOffice online—and that's not likely to happen—you can't work with LibreOffice remotely in the way you can with Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

LibreOffice 5.3

Another problem is that some features simply don't work—or at least don't work reliably enough to rely on. The Mac version of LibreOffice typically crashes a few seconds after I import any Word document, though the same documents cause no problems when I import them in LibreOffice's Windows version. On both the Mac and Windows versions, I wasted a lot of time trying to use an option to access "remote files" on Google Drive or OneDrive, but every effort to log in to those drives produced an obscure error message saying "The specified device is invalid." I eventually discovered that I had encountered a known bug that's been left unfixed for a year. This isn't how professional-quality software is supposed to work.

When I edit documents in Microsoft Word in Window (or via Word in Office on the Mac ($69.00 at Amazon) ), I turn on the feature that hides the top and bottom margins of the page, so that when I type a sentence that begins on one page and ends on another, I don't have to look at two inches of blank space where the page break occurs. LibreOffice has nothing like this, offering only a Web View that doesn't show any page formatting at all. This hide-blank-space feature may not matter to you, but once you get accustomed to it, there's no going back.

A Good Backup Suite

LibreOffice is an impressive achievement that keeps getting better with its frequent incremental releases, and anyone who has legacy documents lurking on a hard disk ought to have a copy. But unless you have security requirements that demand open-source software, or your organization needs apps that work on Linux as well as on Windows and the Mac, you're likely going to prefer to pay for Microsoft Office or use Apple's or Google's apps instead.

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Further Reading