LibreOffice 3.3 review

Anyone in need of a presentation application for general-purpose use will be well served by LibreOffice’s Impress, but it’s not quite a complete PowerPoint replacement. It’s certainly powerful, but lacks a few useful features like narration support and the ability to play a sound file across a whole presentation, rather than just a single slide. Importing PowerPoint files can be hit and miss, too. Simple slides pose few problems, but timings and transitions aren’t always preserved and correcting such things by hand is difficult when you have no idea how the original presentation was supposed to look.

Impress’s limitations must be taken in context, however, as for many people the suite’s price makes them worth putting up with when paying for PowerPoint is the only alternative. Sadly, the same excuse doesn’t quite work for Base, LibreOffice’s database application. Although functionally similar to Access, it’s nowhere near as easy to get to grips with and hardly a like-for-like open-source alternative. Base can’t open Access databases directly either, making it the only component of LibreOffice that’s not a patch on its Microsoft Office equivalent.

LibreOffice also lacks certain applications that are found in various Office bundles — there’s no Outlook equivalent, nor anything to do the job of OneNote. The suite does, however, include a serviceable diagram and chart editor in the shape of Draw (along similar lines to Microsoft Visio) and the Math scientific/mathematic formula editor is similar to Office’s Equation Editor.

LibreOffice is an excellent free alternative to spending £78 on Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010. The functional and visual similarity of Writer, Calc and Impress to their counterparts in older versions of Office also makes LibreOffice a good choice for anyone not keen on Office 2007 and 2010’s Ribbon interface, and file compatibility between LibreOffice and Microsoft’s suite is good enough to cause few problems for most users.

It’s also reassuring that LibreOffice 3.3 is just as solid as OpenOffice.org, considering the short time since the code fork, but there’s currently little practical reason to switch from OpenOffice if you don’t need the handful of new features LibreOffice provides. That said, the current strong similarity between both suites also makes this the best time to move to LibreOffice if you don’t trust Oracle to keep OpenOffice open, or just want to support The Document Foundation’s open-source ideals. After all, there’s no guarantee that the two projects won’t diverge more significantly in later releases, which could make a later switch from OpenOffice more of a problem.