I needed to find an alternative to Excel and found one alternative that was Chinese (which shall remain nameless) so I didn't go that route and found LibreOffice. Wikipedia describes it thus: 'LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation. It was forked in 2010 from, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice.' I tried to find out who owned The Document Foundation, but came up with nothing so far. It has Writer Document (MS Word), Calc Spreadsheet (MS Excel), Impress Presentation (MS PowerPoint), Draw Drawing (MS?), Math Formula (MS?), Base Database (MS Access). So far, I've just used Calc Spreadsheet extensively and have played around with the others. I'm especially looking forward to playing around with Base Database, since I was an MS Access database developer for nearly 14 years. For instance, I've always used the thesaurus feature in MS Word, but it doesn't replace the word with the new choice, but LibreOffice does.Įvery feature is there as far as I can tell and some of them are even better. The Help references the default settings of the program on a system that is set to defaults. However, the MS thesaurus is more comprehensive than LibreOffice. Descriptions of colors, mouse actions, or other configurable items can be different for your program and system. There's only one negative I've found so far and that's their templates.īut, I just can't say enough good things about this program. They aren't as good as Microsoft, but I just transferred them from MS to LibreOffice (Shhh!). Cutting and pasting from one to the other is also done with ease.

Libreofficeorg