Webopedia Term of the Day: What is LibreOffice?

“A new fork of Oracle’s Open Office open source office suite
that was first released in September 2010 by The Document
Foundation. LibreOffice has started to branch away from its Open
Office (or OpenOffice.org) roots in several ways, including a
reduced reliance on Java and the inclusion of an improved Windows
installer.

“LibreOffice’s name is a combination of the French word for free
(“Libre”) and Office. Like OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice features a
word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet app (Calc), a presentation
program (Impress), a database management tool (Base), a vector
graphics editor (Draw), and an app for working with mathematical
formulas (Math). LibreOffice also includes a PDF creation and
import tool for working with Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)
files.

“LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as its native
file format, and the office suite also supports reading and writing
of numerous other file formats, including both older and newer
Microsoft Office files (including the Office Open XML spec used by
Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2010), OpenOffice.org XML files,
and Rich Text File (RTF) files.

“LibreOffice is currently available as version 3.4.x for a wide
variety of platforms and operating systems, and new releases are
expected every six months or so.”

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