Free alternatives to Microsoft Office

By Christoph Dernbach Nov 20, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Berlin - Microsoft Office remains the industry standard for office work, regardless of whether you're working with a Windows PC or a Mac, looking to type a document, making a presentation, checking email or making a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter if you work in a university or an office.

But there is some pretty tough competition out there. Better yet, many of them are free.

One of the pioneers of free office software was OpenOffice, released as freeware and commercial ware in 1999 by Sun Microsystems. But Sun was bought by Oracle in 2010, leaving many concerned that the new owner would have no use for distributing free software.

Which is what came to pass when OpenOffice.org was sold in June to the Apache Software Foundation. Adherents of freeware felt they had little choice but to start up an alternative, leading to the introduction of LibreOffice in September 2010.

The project was based on the code of the last stable version of OpenOffice, 3.2.1. Programmers sheared away 500,000 lines of unnecessary code, like that linked to support from the Adabas database, which was no longer available.

LibreOffice offers word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics creation and a database. It's now up to version 3.4.

'At the same time, LibreOffice introduced a new import filter and improvements with conversions from the MS Office macro-language VBA,' says Oliver Diedrich, an editor at the German computer magazine c't.

Programmers are also working on ways to optimize the import of data from Microsoft's spreadsheet programme Excel, as well as getting other expansions and master copies online.

The creators of LibreOffice announced in mid-October that they would release versions of the programme to work on web browsers and tablet computers. Versions for both Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating system are being planned. But users will have to wait until 'the end of 2012 or early 2013' before they can run LibreOffice on a tablet.

On desktops, LibreOffice is closely linked to the Linux operating system. 'Almost all Linux distributors moved from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice,' says freeware adviser Thomas Krumbein. And just about any Mac or PC user considering free office software would have to opt for LibreOffice, since it has shut down security gaps that are still present in OpenOffice.org 3.2.1.

But what happened to OpenOffice.org? Despite rumours to the contrary, it's not been mothballed at Apache Software Foundation.

'About 70 developers are working on the project,' says independent software consultant Christian Grobmeier. He's helping to free up the software of dead weight and convert it into another license form. 'That's important if you want to embed programme components from OpenOffice.org into other commercial projects.'

LibreOffice uses the kind of licenses that are preferred by the Free Software Foundation, but could prove problematic for commercial use.

Grobmeier cannot say when the newest version of OpenOffice.org from Apache will be available. 'But there is a certain level of anticipation in the blogs and mailing lists, so we are getting closer to the planned first release.'

He denies there is any rivalry between LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org. He said there are many 'good connections and friendly contacts' between multiple developers on the two projects.

Grobmeier said he could see a scenario under which both versions make use of the ODF document format without reservations. 'In the office you might find OpenOffice.org, at home it's LibreOffice, just like you might surf the web with different browsers between the office and home.'

Diedrich currently recommends LibreOffice, because it has made significant advances over the older version of OpenOffice.org. But the project at Apache is far from dead, especially since IBM has shown interest in it.