LibreOffice 3.3 review

LibreOffice’s word processor is probably the part of the suite that many will use the most. Writer is an extremely capable application that matches Microsoft Word almost feature for feature. Unfortunately, that’s not to say all its features are as well-realised as Word’s — the grammar checker, for example, seems oblivious to some elementary language mistakes and the document edit-tracking system lacks finesse. Whether when dealing with documents in LibreOffice’s native format or ones imported from Word, Writer’s inability to hide edits and preview the ‘final’ version of a document, or show who’s changed what without stepping through edits in a clumsy dialog box, makes collaborative work a chore if more than just a few pages are involved.

Writer does do a pretty good job of importing Word documents, so those concerned about inter-suite compatibility have little to worry about. Paragraph styles seem to be the only hitch for text documents and Writer often renders line spacing differently, but re-applying the style usually remedies this. Things get stickier with more sophisticated formatting, and embedded images in particular tend to upset a layout in an imported Word document. This only seems to be an issue with Word 2007 .docx files, though, and re-saving in the older .doc format before importing usually fixes things — but this won’t always be possible, of course.

It’s a similar story with the LibreOffice spreadsheet. Calc is more than a worthy replacement for Excel and it will be familiar to anyone already familiar with Microsoft’s application. LibreOffice’s take on Calc is a little more user-friendly to Excel users than OpenOffice’s version, too. Excel, for example, will accept both commas and semicolons to separate the parameters of a function, as will LibreOffice Calc. OpenOffice Calc, on the other hand, can only use semi-colons — a comma will generate an error.

As with Writer and Word, Calc apes Excel to the extent that it can read its files with very few problems. The eagle-eyed will notice some differences in how certain things appear, though. A whole-column cell reference of A:A in Excel, for example, is translated to A1:1048576 in Calc, but as both spreadsheets support the same 1-million-plus number of rows, the effect is the same. More sophisticated Excel sheets with such things as filtered data, in-cell drop-down lists and floating objects tend to suffer from formatting problems after importing, but since OpenOffice Calc 3.3 doesn’t exhibit the same behaviour, this is most likely a bug in this first LibreOffice release.