Document Foundation LibreOffice 3.3 review

Free software set to rival OpenOffice

Launched last week, LibreOffice 3.3 is the The Document Foundation's answer to Oracle's OpenOffice suite.

The Document Foundation is a community of ex-OpenOffice developers that was formed last September.

Software vendor Novell has said LibreOffice will be included in the next release of its OpenSUSE Linux operating system, and Ubuntu owner Canonical has said it will replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice in the next Ubuntu distribution.

Install
We installed LibreOffice 3.3 running under Windows on an Asus Eee PC Seashell 1015PEM netbook, and also on a Dell Optiplex 980 desktop system. It installed in under five minutes on both systems, after first asking whether we wanted to open Microsoft Office documents with the package.

Users also need to install a Java Runtime Environment (JRE), which The Document Foundation doesn't bundle with LibreOffice.

We downloaded and installed the latest JRE, version 6 update 23, to run with LibreOffice 3.3.

We also installed LibreOffice 3.3 on Red Hat's Fedora 14 operating system [see picture].

To check how LibreOffice 3.3 performs against its Oracle-published rival OpenOffice, we also installed version 3.3.0 of OpenOffice, which launched in December.

LibreOffice offers users the facility to choose their language at install rather than having to download the specific language version users require, as is the case with OpenOffice.

Features
Running both LibreOffice and OpenOffice in parallel we found small differences in many settings. For example, OpenOffice loads by default at system start-up, while LibreOffice doesn't.

The main features touted by The Document Foundation for its initial LibreOffice release were support for Scalable Vector Graphic (.SVG) format files, the ability to import PDF files – although we found the import sluggish even with small .PDF file sizes – and also the ability to import Microsoft Works and Lotus Pro Word files. WordPerfect file import has also been improved compared with OpenOffice.

We could import and export .SVG files, although we found that the line thickness needed tweaking sometimes to ensure the correct visualisation of the .SVG file, and we sometimes had the wrong fill colour in some of our files.

Other enhancements include new fonts, a console for slide-shows and improvements to the Calc spreadsheet, which offers the ability to create documents with more than one million rows, and better cell and sheet management.

We were able to create a spreadsheet with more than one million rows, which we could save in the Open Document Format spreadsheet file format .ODS. The limit on how many rows users can have is not a function of the data size in the individual cells of the rows of the spreadsheet according to The Document Foundation.

Conclusions
LibreOffice 3.3 offers new features over those of OpenOffice, but this release is more about code clean-up and getting it ready to support more advanced features expected in version 3.4.

If you are an OpenOffice user, should you upgrade to LibreOffice? The feature sets of the two are currently similar so you may want to wait until the next version of LibreOffice is released. Many of the developers from OpenOffice have moved to LibreOffice so it’s possible that future versions of LibreOffice will become very competitive. Of couse, if you love experimenting with new software, you'll want to download it now.