LibreOffice
In the beginning there was a fork: After the takeover of Sun by Oracle, the future of the free office suite Open Office, which had emerged from the proprietary StarOffice, was in the stars. No wonder the LibreOffice fork quickly became standard on Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions). This has not changed, although OpenOffice was handed over by Oracle to the Apache Foundation and continued as a separate product. That kind of diversity is typical of the open source scene. As always in such cases, however, the question must be allowed why the wheel has to be invented twice instead of working together on a powerful alternative to Microsoft Office.
Since version 6, which was released on January 31, 2018, the ribbons copied from Microsoft Office, called notebook bar in LibreOffice land, have also been successively implemented in all program parts. Since version 7.1, there is a configuration dialog for this during the initial installation. In older program versions, you have to activate the notebook bar manually. First, the experimental functions must be enabled via Tools > Options > Advanced, which requires a restart of LibreOffice. Then, under View > Tab Views, the new Notebook bar option is selectable. The classic menu can additionally be shown by selecting the Menu Bar option in the hamburger menu at the top right.
With version 7.1 released on February 3, the Document Foundation, which is the entity behind LibreOffice, started a new release policy. The old distinction between “still” (stable) and “fresh” editions was dropped. Instead, there is a community and an enterprise edition – one for personal use, the other for corporate customers including support. However, the functionality of the office suite should always remain the same – whether for private users or paying customers.
Another change came in 2024, when version numbers became calendar-based. Thus version 7.6, which appeared in 2023, was followed by version 24.2, which appeared – can you guess? – in February 2024.
LibreOffice is published by The Document Foundation, which is based in Berlin, Germany.
Six-in-one programs
LibreOffice consists of six applications:
- Writer: A word processing application for creating and editing text documents, similar to Microsoft Word.
- Calc: A spreadsheet application for data analysis and visualization, similar to Microsoft Excel. It supports various functions, formulas, and charts.
- Impress: A presentation program for creating slideshows and visual presentations, similar to Microsoft PowerPoint.
- Draw: A vector graphics editor used for creating diagrams, illustrations, and flowcharts. It can also handle simple drawings and layouts.
- Base: A database management tool for creating and managing databases, similar to Microsoft Access. It allows users to create forms, queries, and reports.
- Math: A formula editor for creating and editing mathematical equations and formulas, which can be embedded in other LibreOffice documents.
The compatibility with Microsoft Office is good and constantly worked on by the LibreOffice developers, but it is of course not perfect.
While LibreOffice can open all Microsoft file types like xls(x) for Excel spreadsheets or doc(x) for Word documents, it has its own file types like .odt for text files or .ods for spreadsheets, which are part of the OpenDocument standard (ISO/IEC 26300). This standard, which dates back to the times of StarOffice, is politically important as it guarantees free usability and openness of source code, ensuring that no corporation can restrict or charge for access to documents created with it.
Since 2007, Microsoft Office also supports that standard, although third-party plugins initially did a better job for use of od* files in Office.
Installation
LibreOffice can be installed directly from Ubuntu’s package sources, but is only in the community repository Universe, so it is not one of the programs officially maintained by Canonical. To get Libreoffice fully working in your language of choice, you also require packages for dictionary, thesaurus, hyphenation. Here is an example for the German language:
sudo apt install libreoffice-l10n-en libreoffice-help-de hunspell-de-frami hyphen-de mythes-de
The package libreoffice-gtk3 (or predecessor libreoffice-gtk2) provides integration into desktops with the GTK toolkit, such as Xfce/Xubuntu. For Gnome one installs libreoffice-gnome accordingly. For KDE there is libreoffice-kde5 or libreoffice-kde4 depending on the desktop version.
Since LibreOffice is constantly updated, you may not always get the latest version from Ubuntu, like, for example, version 7 of LibreOffice did not make it into Ubuntu 20.04. In such casest may be worthwhile to get the latest version via LibreOffice Fresh PPA, which is first mounted as follows:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa sudo apt update
New LibreOffice versions are also officially available as snap or flatpak.
Help and Documentation
LibreOffice has a built-in help function that can be accessed by pressing the F1 key or, in program dialogs, by using the help button. The help files can either be installed locally as a package or accessed online. Additionally, for each program version, a number of application manuals are available for download, namely the Getting Started Guide and books for the individual program modules.
Alternatives
Equally open source is Open Office – see above. A commercial, continuously developed office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux (including .deb packages) is Softmaker Office; the professional version comes with Duden corrector software. There is also a stripped-down free variant called FreeOffice. OnlyOffice is a cloud application whose open-source, free community edition can be installed on its own server. The office from Latvia additionally masters project management, customer relations (CRM) and team collaboration.