Feb 8, 2019 - LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich.

LibreOffice 5.4, a new version of the popular cross-platform open source Office suite, has been released on July 28, 2017 to the public.

The new version, which is the last major release of the LibreOffice 5.x family, improves Microsoft Office compatibility, new features in all modules, and better PDF rendering for imported PDF documents.

The new version can be downloaded already from the official project website. Update checks in LibreOffice, which you can run with a click on Help > Check for Updates, don't pick up the new LibreOffice 5.4 release yet. It is only a matter of time though before they do.

Users on Windows and Mac devices need to know that LibreOffice 5.4 is the last version of the Office suite for some older versions of the operating systems.

It is the last version that supports Windows XP and Windows Vista, and Max Os X version 10.8.

LibreOffice 5.4

LibreOffice 5.4 has been released for all supported operating systems -- Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux -- and for the cloud.

The most important changes of the new LibreOffice release are:

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• General -- Use OpenPGP under Linux to sign ODF documents.
• General -- Support for ECDSA keys on Linux and Mac OS X.
• General -- Signature status of a document is shown with colored infobars.
• General -- Improved import of EMF+ vector images.
• General -- Improved rendering quality of imported PDF documents.
• General -- New standard color palette based on RYB color model.
• Writer -- The RTF filter supports all custom document properties.
• Writer -- Exporting of bullet and number lists improved when using copy and paste.
• Writer -- Custom watermark insertion via Format > Watermarks.
• Writer -- AutoCorrect options for strikeout and italic markup.
• Calc -- Calculate with precision as shown works with fraction format, several subformats, engineering notation and thousands divisors.
• Calc -- CSV export settings are remembered.
• Calc -- Option to change the priority of conditional formatting rules.
• Calc -- New cell commands: comments, delete all comments, show or hide all comments.
• Calc -- Use of absolute sheet references instead of relative references while building formulas, selecting a cell or range on another sheet with the pointer.
• Calc -- New Cell Protection toggle through Edit > Protection.
• Calc -- Four new Sheet protection options: insert columns or rows, delete columns or rows.
• Impress & Draw -- Duplicate Dialog box (Shift-F3)
• Impress -- Ctrl-M to insert a new slide.
• Chart -- New Pivot Charts feature.
• Online -- Performance improvements.
• Online -- Responsive design of the document iframe, and read-only mode.
• Online -- Number of rows in calc increated to 10000.

Plus a lot more. You can check out the LibreOffice 5.4 full changelog here.

Now You: Which Office program do you use?

The Document Foundation just released version 5.2 of its fully open source office suite LibreOffice. This release brings many new features and UI improvements. When I got the press release, I started updating LibreOffice on my MacBook. But here's the thing: I'm also a user of Microsoft Word.

That made me pause and consider why I use LibreOffice when I am forking over $99 a year to Microsoft. The flash of introspection surprised me. I'm an unabashed open source and Linux fan, but I am kind of agnostic when it comes to the tools I use. I use what works for me. So I reached out to my followers on Google+ and Facebook to learn about their reasons for using LibreOffice.

Here are some of the many reasons why people, myself included, love LibreOffice.

Interoperability: If you have ever used both Microsoft Word and LibreOffice on the same document, you may have noticed that LibreOffice often encounters problems opening files that were created or edited using Microsoft Office. Don't be too quick to blame LibreOffice.

According to Italo Vignoli of the Document Foundation, Microsoft uses non-standard version of its own OOXML format in Office products, which creates interoperability issues. On top of that, says Vignoli, Microsoft uses default proprietary fonts that break compatibility with other office suites. If you want to ensure interoperability, you should use LibreOffice and save your documents in the ISO approved Open Document Format (ODF).

Future-proofing: Microsoft is in great health and shows no signs of going away anytime soon, but you never know. If the company suddenly ceased to exist or shuts down the product or doesn’t support the previous version of a file format you won't be able to access your files. Case in point: Some users have reported not being able to open older .doc files with latest version of Microsoft Office. With LibreOffice you can leave your OpenDocument Text (ODT) files in a time capsule and open them decades later.

It’s open source: If you're among those who don’t trust any software whose source code they can’t see, then LibreOffice is your obvious choice. Whereas Microsoft Office is a fully proprietary technology, LibreOffice is a fully open source project developed publicly.

Better support for formats: LibreOffice has built-in support for ODF and many other file formats. As a rule I never save any of my files on non-standard formats like docx. All my files are stored either as ODF or .txt, and LibreOffice does a much better job at dealing with ODT files.

Cost: I pay $99 per year for my Office 365 subscription, whereas I can get LibreOffice for free of cost and I can use it on as many computers as I want. The cost issue is even more important for businesses that pay by the user.

Upload files to Google Drive: Documents can easily be uploaded directly from LibreOffice to Google Drive. LibreOffice also supports ssh (among other services and protocols), so I can easily upload my files directly to a remote server. The downside for Linux users is that Google Drive isn't available for Linux.

You can use it on Linux: Microsoft Office isn't available for Linux and it had been a second class citizen on macOS for a very long time. If you are someone like me who hops between macOS, Windows and Linux then LibreOffice is your only choice.

You can use it on Linux mobile: Canonical and the KDE community are working on developing their own Linux-based mobile platforms. LibreOffice can be easily installed and used on these platforms. I haved used LibreOffice on Ubuntu tablets and it works great. There is no Microsoft Office for Ubuntu tablets and phones.

Suggest new features: Because it's an open source project, anyone can contribute to LibreOffice and add features that they want. That's especially useful for businesses that have developers they can dedicate to adding features they need to LibreOffice. Collabora is a good example. They offer LibreOffice-based enterprise solutions and are among the top contributors to the LibreOffice code base. Companies like Canonical, SUSE and Red Hat are also among the leading contributors. By contrast, Microsoft Word is proprietary software developed solely by Microsoft.

Take control of security: No software is bug-proof. But because LibreOffice is fully open source technology anyone can submit a patch for a LibreOffice vulnerability. When there's a bug in Microsoft Office, users have to wait for Microsoft to patch it. That’s true with any proprietary product.

Conclusion

These are some of the reasons the people I polled said they prefer LibreOffice over Microsoft Office. Why do you use LibreOffice or Microsoft Office? Or what do you use instead?

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