LibreOffice 3.6.3 Review (Archive)

(Editor’s note: This is from when I was running Vista. VISTA. Nothing in this review is remotely applicable to LibreOffice today and it is reproduced here solely for archival purposes.)

LibreOffice is a free full office suit for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is open source and includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, a drawing program, a math program, and a formula program. LibreOffice comes pre-installed with Linux Ubuntu, and works very well with that OS.

I have LibreOffice currently installed on three computers: one running Windows Vista, one running OS X 10.7.5, and one running Linux Ubuntu 12.04. On the Windows machine, LibreOffice runs fairly well. It could open faster, and it does seem to lag a bit sometimes, but then again it didn’t cost anything. I’m not trying to say “Oh, it was free, so it doesn’t need to run very well to get five stars”. I have to say, I do prefer Microsoft Office 2010, but for a free program LibreOffice is pretty good. That’s the beauty of open source.

On Mac OS X, LibreOffice runs about the same as on Windows. It is the only word processor/office software I have on my Mac, and I get along fairly well with it. Every once in a while, a cool feature that I hadn’t noticed before will show up and I’ll like the program even more.

Ubuntu is where LibreOffice really shines. It’s a great fit, and it runs like it was designed with Linux at heart.

Verdict: If you have Windows or Macintosh and don’t want to shell out $100+ for MS Office, LibreOffice is a good open source office solution. If you have Ubuntu, you will definitely want LibreOffice.