What Is LibreOffice and What Does It Mean For You

LibreOffice is a fork of the popular open source office suite, OpenOffice. After Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, there have been concerns over Oracle’s long term support of open source projects. Due to this concern, The Document Foundation forked OpenOffice to create LibreOffice. Forking an open source project in essence makes a copy of a project to proceed in possibly a new direction. OpenOffice is still very much a viable and popular open source office suite. LibreOffice on the other hand is also fully compatible with OpenOffice 3.3, supporting all of its newest additions.

The LibreOffice Suite consists of six separate applications. Comparing it to Microsoft’s Office product, you get the following applications.

Writer = Word
Calc = Excel
Base = Access
Impress = PowerPoint

They also have Draw, a program the lets you build sketches and diagrams and Math is an equation editor. The suite maintains compatibility with all competitors file formats. You can import or save from Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The application is open source and licensed under the LGPL. What that means for you is that it is free. Other handy features, such as a built in PDF creator allows you to save documents in a format that anyone can easily read.

So, if you looking for a Microsoft Office alternative or just need a simple word processor, this could be your solution. Learn more at http://www.libreoffice.org