LibreOffice

A little bit of history

I was probably around 14 or 15 when I first used a word processor. Despite using for a short time Windows 3.1, I was impressed by the "shiny" Windows 95 and the first true "Office" suite for me was Microsoft Office 95.

I recall I was very lucky because my first computer - a Compaq Presario Pentium 1 75 MHz with 16 MB of RAM that I described in the Total Commander review came with both a Windows 95 licence - serial number on its back and with an official Microsoft Office 95 original CD - also with a licence code.

I said "very lucky" because I think I was one of the few using a licence - back then we were a poor country and everyone was using a pirated version of Windows and especially a "cracked" version of Office.

But anyway, Microsoft Office 95 had the best and most intuitive interface for that time. I kept using it until I switched my operating system to Microsoft Windows 98, Me (I hated it), 2000 and finally XP.

Although my cousin brought me a "cracked" version of Office 97 - I could not move on from using Microsoft Office 95.

I hated the new office assistant (Clippy) - I found it highly distracting and the "Internet Features" because for years I didn't have access to the Internet on my Compaq Presario. Each time I needed access to Internet I went to an Internet cafe.

So maybe, this also made me "hate" Microsoft Office 97 and I was so stubborn that I tried using Microsoft Office 95 until Microsoft Windows XP but due to constant crashes so I finally stopped using it.

I bought Office 97 on CD (proper big box, thick manual, the works) but never used it. Then, I found a licence for Office 2000 and finally Office 2003 because it was the last version before the Ribbon ruined everything, and at some point in the 2010s I realised Microsoft had started moving the whole thing to the cloud and wanted a monthly subscription from me.

I started looking for free alternatives that were also compatible with my previous Office files.

So I tried OpenOffice back when it was still Sun Microsystems running things. If I remember correctly the first time I discovered and tried OOo - OpenOffice it was via a Mandrake Linux version right after Windows XP SP3 was dropped by Microsoft and thought it might be an idea to switch the operating system.

I recall I struggled with Open Office - to mention a few things I recall: the conversion filters - OpenOffice had to reverse engineer the closed format of Microsoft such as .doc or .xls and the result was usually poor: bad tables, fonts replaced with other alternatives etc.

Plus the OpenOffice standard .odt while Microsoft Office 2000/2003 could not read it without special plugins and if you had to interact with a public agency - some of them were still using Office 2007 so go figure. Absolute madness and high levels of frustration.

I could also name the user interface - as an Office user it was hard for me to get used with a completely new interface that, instead of attempting to make the transition easier it was also hiding some advanced functions in its menu - I still have a book dedicated to OOo - Open Office somewhere.

OpenOffice was also using a lot of Java code so it made it feel heavier vs the native Word but I will stop here with my rant.

Then Oracle bought Sun in 2010 for 7.4 billion dollars and immediately started being Oracle about it.

How LibreOffice started

In September that year 33 core developers and community leaders (Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens, Italo Vignoli, Caolán McNamara and others) walked out and forked the whole project.

They called it LibreOffice and set up The Document Foundation as a German charitable foundation based in Berlin, and within two weeks they had over 80 new developers working on it.

Oracle eventually donated the OpenOffice trademark to Apache just to spite them. Apache OpenOffice still technically exists but the commit frequency is basically zero these days. If you see someone recommending OpenOffice in 2026 they have not been paying attention for 15 years. LibreOffice won the fork decisively.

I started using it around 2015. And look, I know exactly what happens when you install it for the first time. You open a Word document, the tables look like a complete mess and you immediately blame open-source software.

You don't realise Microsoft's OOXML and the OpenDocument Format are completely different under the hood. Word relies on a text-flow engine. Writer uses physical geometry. Making them match pixel for pixel is mathematically impossible - Microsoft literally keeps a tag called lineWrapLikeWord6 in their 7000-page specification just to keep ancient bugs alive.

Just in case you get frustrated

I still get complaints from friends saying LibreOffice broke their formatting. It usually turns out to be a font issue. You load up a file typed in Calibri but the software uses Liberation Sans as a substitute. They are metric-compatible but not identical. If you scroll down through a massive document the Skia rendering engine will calculate the bounding boxes differently than Microsoft DirectWrite does it.

Your pagination gets completely ruined. People freak out and reinstall Word immediately. It is so stupid - just install the core fonts package on Linux or copy the Microsoft fonts from a Windows machine and the panic stops.

Dumping the old Cairo graphics engine back in version 7.1 was a huge relief because 4K screens used to lag horribly. Now scrolling is smooth and complex 3D charts in Calc do not stutter at all.

I am agnostic to any user interface, regardless how old it looks as long as the functionality is there. So you still hear some people saying: it looks so old.

The funny thing is they actually built a modern ribbon interface called the NotebookBar years ago. For some weird reason they decided to hide it in the View menu instead of making it the default layout. Such a stupid marketing failure or I am too dumb to understand.

Just go to View then User Interface and pick Tabbed. It takes five seconds and suddenly it looks like Office.

If you look at the recent updates you might wonder why the version numbers jumped from 7.6 straight to 24.2. They just switched to calendar versioning. Year 24, month 02. No marketing garbage about massive updates anymore. As long as there is a naming convention I respect that enormously.

The Excel compatibility question comes up constantly. Calc actually has 517 built-in functions while Excel only has 492. Version 24.8 finally added dynamic array functions like XLOOKUP and XMATCH. The only real nightmare is old VBA macros. You can trigger a compatibility layer by typing Option VBASupport 1 and it runs about 80% of standard math macros without complaining. But if your business runs on a 500-line VBA spreadsheet full of ActiveX controls written by Barry from accounting back in 2003 - that thing needs a total rewrite anyway. I tell everyone to just use Python.

The Python-UNO bridge lets you drive LibreOffice using NumPy and Pandas directly. You will end up configuring VS Code externally to recognise the UNO objects because there is no native IDE built into the suite. Once you get it working you can automate things Excel VBA could never even dream of doing.

Important: Not many people know this but you can also run the software headless on a Linux server to batch convert old .doc files to PDF. I tried this once. You just run soffice --headless --convert-to pdf and it processes everything without a graphical interface. Corporations pay thousands for proprietary PDF engines while this sits there for free.

Just do not expect miracles with presentations. If you open a heavy PowerPoint file in Impress it usually breaks because Microsoft uses proprietary DirectX codecs and weird Slide Master hierarchies. Animations vanish and placeholders misalign. I use Impress for very basic slide decks and nothing else.

I need to put a massive warning here about LibreOffice Base.

This is my personal opinion: Do not touch it! They tried to migrate away from the Java-based HSQLDB backend to an embedded Firebird SQL engine and the whole project basically hit a wall. If you try to migrate a legacy database you get these awful "invalid map" or Dynamic SQL errors. Timestamps corrupt. Professional database guys will explicitly tell you to disable the Firebird migration and just use Base as a dumb front-end for a real MariaDB or PostgreSQL server. The 2026 situation is bad, I don't know how to describe it other than that.

If you need a proper database, use a proper database.

There is also the Java dependency thing that catches enterprise deployments.

The core apps (Writer, Calc, Impress) are all written in C++ and do not need Java. But Base needs it for HSQLDB. Several wizards like the Letter and Fax wizards need it. The media player backend on some Linux distros needs it. And loads of third-party extensions need it. Organisations deploying LibreOffice to escape Oracle Java licensing fees sometimes find their features silently degrading because they stripped out the JRE. Not LibreOffice's fault but worth knowing.

And now the drama.

In April 2026 The Document Foundation had a full governance crisis. Collabora, the company that writes nearly half of all commits to recent LibreOffice releases, has its own commercial product called Collabora Online (COOL). TDF decided to revive LibreOffice Online from its retired status, which Collabora viewed as TDF directly competing against them. The TDF Membership Committee invoked newly adopted Community Bylaws and ejected all Collabora staff and partners from foundation membership, citing conflict of interest and the need to protect the non-profit charitable status.

Over 30 developers got purged, including seven of the top ten all-time committers. Collabora set up their own Gerrit repository and the development effort fractured. This was unprecedented and it exposed how fragile the foundation model is when one company writes half your code.

I am not taking sides here because I honestly do not know who was right. What I do know is that open-source governance is hard and messy and this is going to slow things down for a while.

On the brighter side (I wonder if this was a premonition to Trump vs Europe)

European governments have been quietly abandoning Microsoft Office for LibreOffice for years. The French Gendarmerie migrated over 70,000 PCs to Linux and LibreOffice ages ago.

Schleswig-Holstein in Germany started migrating 30,000 government workstations away from Microsoft starting in 2024, explicitly to build what they call a "digitally sovereign IT workplace" free from foreign vendor lock-in.

The Italian Ministry of Defence and various Danish institutions have done the same. After the US Cloud Act made it clear that European data sitting in American datacenters could be accessed by American intelligence, a lot of European governments decided enough was enough.

ODF is the only office format where you can guarantee that a document written today will still be readable in 50 years without needing a licence from anyone.

The extensions fix most of the gaps.

LanguageTool integrates directly into Writer for grammar and style checking and genuinely rivals Grammarly. Zotero Integration is the gold standard for academic citation management. TexMaths lets you insert raw LaTeX equations into Writer and Impress as rendered vector graphics. MultiFormatSave saves your document as ODF, .docx and PDF simultaneously with one click which is what I use because I am constantly sending files to people who insist on Word format. Code Highlighter 2 gives you syntax highlighting for code blocks. Pepito Cleaner strips double spaces and stray paragraph marks out of pasted text. Install these and LibreOffice transforms from "good" to "actually better than Word for serious writing".

The Navigator panel (press F5) is the feature I miss whenever I have to use Word on someone else's computer. It gives you a dockable panel showing all your headings, tables, cross-references and OLE objects, and you can reorganise a 300-page document by dragging headings around. Word's Navigation Pane is a joke compared to this. Same with Master Documents for managing multi-chapter books - Writer handles this properly while Word still has weird section break issues.

Draw is the secret PDF editor nobody mentions.

It imports PDFs, separates text strings into editable blocks and lets you manipulate the vector graphics. It also handles proper digital signatures including XAdES (XML Advanced Electronic Signatures), OpenPGP keys and ECDSA keys on Linux and macOS. There is even a hybrid PDF/ODF export where the raw ODF source gets embedded inside the PDF container, so it opens in any PDF reader but remains fully editable in LibreOffice. Slick.

The AI question is where TDF is making an actual philosophical stand.

Microsoft has jammed Copilot into every single Office application. Google put Gemini throughout Workspace. TDF has officially decided that LibreOffice will not include native integration with cloud-dependent proprietary LLMs because that would violate the project's core principles of offline capability, data privacy and open-source sovereignty.

Some people hate this decision and warn LibreOffice will become a legacy typewriter in the age of automated drafting. Privacy advocates and the European government crowd are delighted because they now have a guaranteed sanctuary from continuous corporate algorithmic scraping of their documents.

Me? I am with the privacy crowd.

Remember the cloud days when corporations started to integrate them? That was the pre-AI age and the loss of privacy - again, in my humble opinion.

I have spent the last years watching every application I use get stuffed with AI features that nobody asked for and that quietly upload my work to someone else's server. A word processor that just processes words, without phoning home, without analysing my documents, without training on my content, is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. The extension scene has bridges to locally hosted open-source LLMs if you really want AI assistance. There is even a "Stable Diffusion for LibreOffice" extension powered by the AI Horde. You just have to set it up yourself and run it on your own hardware.

I am not against AI

Don't get me wrong, there are benefits for sure but running a local LLM if you work with sensitive data is a must. And if you installed a local LLM you know you are limited by hardware and some not so capable models, depending on your task.

Mobile is where LibreOffice still falls short.

There is no official first-party iOS or Android app. If you search the app stores you find "Collabora Office" which uses the LibreOffice engine but creates brand confusion. The cloud story is similar - Collabora Online is excellent but requires you to self-host via Nextcloud or ownCloud, which is great for organisations with IT staff and unthinkable for small businesses. There is no Google Docs-style first-party SaaS offering from TDF itself. If you need real-time collaborative editing over the web and you are not willing to run your own server, LibreOffice does not really have an answer for you.

Finally

The reason I keep using it despite all these warts is simple. My documents sit on my hard drive. Nobody scans them. Nobody trains an AI on them. Nobody charges me a monthly fee to keep opening them. The file format is an open ISO standard that will still be readable when Microsoft Office is a distant memory. The programme is written by a German foundation and paid developers funded through charitable donations rather than venture capital, and every release is audited by people who actually care about doing it right.

If you are still paying for a commercial office version just to write letters and do your tax spreadsheet, please stop. Download LibreOffice from dAppCDN or from the official website. Enable the NotebookBar so it does not look like it is from 2005. Install LanguageTool and MultiFormatSave. Spend an afternoon getting used to it.

Considering the effort and the quality of LibreOffice - it is simply the best, free alternative to Microsoft Office so I recommend you to donate if you use it!

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