What is LibreOffice?

Do more – easily, quickly

LibreOffice is a powerful office suite – its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your creativity and enhance your productivity. LibreOffice includes several applications that make it the most powerful Open Source office suite on the market: Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).

Finally, documents that look good

Your documents will look professional and clean, regardless of their purpose: a letter, a master thesis, a brochure, financial reports, marketing presentations, technical drawings and diagrams. LibreOffice makes your work look great while you focus on the content.

Use documents of all kinds

LibreOffice is compatible with a wide range of document formats such as Microsoft® Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Publisher. But LibreOffice goes much further with its native support for a modern and open standard, the OpenDocument Format (ODF). With LibreOffice, you have maximum control over your data and content – and you can export your work in many different formats including PDF.

Get more features with extensions

Beyond the many features shipped by default, LibreOffice is easily extensible through its powerful extensions mechanisms. Get even more features and document templates on our dedicated websites.

Built on a strong heritage

LibreOffice is a successor to OpenOffice, which in turn was based on StarOffice. Many years of development have gone into the software, and it has been used in its various incarnations by millions. Today, LibreOffice is by far the most active continuation of the OpenOffice codebase, with releases every six months and hundreds of contributors. Also, LibreOffice uses libraries from the Document Liberation Project, handing control back to content creators.

Writer

Edit all kinds of documents

Writer has all the features you need from a modern, full-featured word processing and desktop publishing tool. It's simple enough for a quick memo, but powerful enough to create complete books with contents, diagrams, indexes, and more. You're free to concentrate on your message, while Writer makes it look great.

Impeccable documents in just a few clicks

Your documents look better than ever when they're made with LibreOffice. You can choose and apply fonts that are on your computer, and set and customize styles for virtually every part of your document. With the AutoCorrect dictionary you can trap typos and spelling mistakes on the fly. The AutoCorrect dictionary checks your spelling as you type (it's easy to deactivate if you want to). If you need to use different languages in your document, Writer can handle that too.

LibreOffice helps you all the way through your document

Wizards takes all the hassle out of producing standard documents such as letters, faxes, agendas and minutes, and make short work of more complex tasks such as mail merges. Type more efficiently with AutoComplete, which can suggest commonly-used words and phrases to complete what you started typing, using the built-in dictionary and by scanning the documents you open. Document templates are shipped by default – there's no need to create complex documents, because we've built them in for you!

Calc

The spreadsheet for everyone

Calc is the spreadsheet program you've always needed. Newcomers find it intuitive and easy to learn, while professional data miners and number crunchers appreciate the comprehensive range of advanced functions. Built-in wizards guide you through choosing and using a comprehensive range of advanced features. Or you can download templates from the LibreOffice template repository, for ready-made spreadsheet solutions.

All the professional features you need

Styles and direct formatting makes it easy to apply flexible cell formatting options, including freely rotating contents, templates, backgrounds, borders and much more. Become a spreadsheet expert by using templates with built-in functions, so that you can reuse a pre-prepared sheet and just focus on the immediate work.

The Scenario Manager allows "what if ..." analysis at the touch of a button. For instance, you can compare profitability for high, medium and low sales forecasts.

Calc's solver component lets you solve optimization problems in which the optimum value of a particular spreadsheet cell has to be calculated based on constraints provided in other cells.

Unleash your data

Advanced DataPilot technology makes it easy to pull in raw data from corporate databases, and then cross-tabulate, summarize, and convert it into meaningful information. Real-time data streams can now be integrated in sheets and reports, and factored in calculations.

Collaborate with others

You can perform collaborative work on spreadsheets, thanks to Calc's multiple-user support. Just share a spreadsheet so that other users can easily add their data to it. The spreadsheet owner can then easily integrate the new data in just a few clicks. This collaboration feature helps to avoid editing conflicts.

Excel at Excel®

While Calc saves spreadsheets in its native OpenDocument Format (.ods), it can also open and save files in Microsoft Excel format for sending to people still locked into Microsoft products. If you only need to make your data readable, but on a wide range of devices and platforms, you can easily export to Portable Document Format (.pdf). Calc can read .xlsx files created with Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows or Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X.

Impress

Presentations done right

Impress is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Creating and editing slides is very versatile thanks to different editing and view modes: Normal (for general editing), Outline (for organizing and outlining your text content), Notes (for viewing and editing the notes attached to a slide), Handout (for producing paper-based material), and Slide Sorter (for a thumbnail sheet view that lets you quickly locate and order your slides).

Rich content for outstanding presentations

Impress has a comprehensive range of easy-to-use drawing and diagramming tools to add style and sophistication to your presentation. What's more, you can bring your presentation to life with slide show animations and effects. The Fontworks tool lets you create attractive 2D and 3D images from text. Impress enables you to build and control 3D scenes incorporating a large variety of objects and components.

Stay in control - Master your performance

When the time comes to present your work, a powerful Slide Show mode gives you total command over how your slides are displayed and sequenced, so that you can focus on addressing your audience (which slides get shown; manual or timed slide transition; pointer visible or invisible; navigator visible/invisible; and much more).

Impress supports multiple monitors, and its bundled Presenter Console extension gives you even more control over your slide show, such as the ability to see the upcoming slide, view your slide notes, and control the presentation timer while the audience is looking at the current slide.

A touch of creativity

Impress has a comprehensive range of easy-to-use drawing and diagramming tools to add style and sophistication to your presentation. And you can save even more time by downloading templates from the LibreOffice template repository.

Draw

Eye-popping graphic documents

Draw lets you produce anything from a quick sketch to a complex plan, and gives you the means to communicate with graphics and diagrams. With a maximum page size of 300cm by 300cm, Draw is an excellent package for producing technical drawings, brochures, posters and many other documents. Draw lets you manipulate graphical objects, group them, crop them, use objects in 3D and much more.

Powerful diagraming and flowcharting

Design powerful and intuitive flowcharts with Draw. Smart connectors make it easy to build flowcharts, organization charts, network diagrams and much more, even if you're not a naturally talented artist. You can define your own "glue points" for connectors to adhere to, for precise and easily repeatable positioning. Dimension lines automatically calculate and display linear dimensions as you draw.

Create your own picture galleries

Draw enables you to manipulate pictures and images in many ways – you can even create an entire photo album with it. Its powerful engine allows the conversion of images from and to an impressive range of image and document formats.

Base

A powerful manager for all databases

Base is a full-featured desktop database front end, designed to meet the needs of a broad array of users. Base caters to power users and enterprise requirements, providing native-support drivers for some of the most widely employed multi-user database engines: MySQL/MariaDB, Adabas D, MS Access and PostgreSQL. In addition, the built-in support for JDBC- and ODBC-standard drivers allows you to connect to virtually any other existing database engine as well.

A fast and flexible database

Base comes configured with the full HSQL relational database engine. It's an ideal solution for everyday jobs, and for people requiring an easy-to-understand, simple-to-use system: data is stored right inside the Base file, and you also get native support for dBase flat files. LibreOffice Base provides wizards to help users who are new to database design (or just new to the software) to create tables, queries, forms and reports, and it comes supplied with a set of pre-defined table definitions for tracking assets, customers, sales orders, invoices and many other common and useful items.

Full integration with other LibreOffice applications

Base is much more than a tool that can be used for standalone purposes – it's also perfectly integrated with LibreOffice's other applications. Base can supply address book data for mail merges in Writer using the LDAP protocol, or various address book formats. In addition, Base can be used for creating linked data ranges in Calc files, for data pilot analysis or as the basis for charts.

Math

The neat equations and formulas editor

Math is LibreOffice's formula editor, and can be invoked in your text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings, enabling you to insert perfectly formatted mathematical and scientific formulas. Your formulas can include a wide range of elements, from fractions, terms with exponents and indices, integrals, and mathematical functions, to inequalities, systems of equations, and matrices.

You can start Math either as a stand-alone application directly from the LibreOffice Start Center or directly from within other LibreOffice applications such as Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw.

Charts

A powerful charts creation module

LibreOffice includes the ability to create and embed charts. Their style, color and size can be customized in a broad variety of ways – pie charts, square and round columns, trend graphs, dots, 2D and 3D charts, and so much more...

Charts on the go within your documents

Charts can be inserted in several documents: spreadsheets, presentations, drawings or text documents. As such the Charts module may be called from within any LibreOffice application and the data can be defined either via data included in the document, or from an independent source.

What is OpenDocument?

LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), a fully open and ISO standardized file format that guarantees access to your data forever. (You can, of course, encrypt your documents with a password.) Because ODF is standardized, other office software can implement support for it as well – and many programs have done so. By using ODF, you ensure that your data can be transferred between different computers and operating systems, without having to worry about vendor lock-in or license fees.

ODF extensions

Typical extensions for ODF files include the following:

• .odt - a text document
• .ods - a spreadsheet file
• .odp - a presentation file
• .odg - an illustration or graphic

What to do if you're sent an ODF file

If you are sent a file with one of the above extensions, but your software or operating system can't identify it, then simply open LibreOffice – it's open source software, originally based on OpenOffice, and handles all of the above extensions.

Templates & Extensions

Enhance LibreOffice with powerful and smart extensions

You can expand the functionality of LibreOffice even further with extensions available from our LibreOffice Extension Center. These extensions are software plugins that you install on top of the standard LibreOffice, and that add some kind of additional functionality to the suite, either to one particular application (eg Writer, Calc or Impress) or to the whole suite.

Boost your creativity with templates

If you need inspiration or just would like to automate your document editing tasks more effectively, LibreOffice can be used with custom templates for all kinds of needs. Visit our LibreOffice Template Center to browse or download templates for your needs.

Who uses LibreOffice?

Tens of millions of people around the world use LibreOffice every day, in homes, businesses, charities and government departments. Some notable users include:

MIMO, France's inter-ministerial working group on open source software, runs LibreOffice on almost 500,000 PCs. The software is used in many departments including energy, defense, agriculture and education.

The administration of the Spanish autonomous region of Valencia has installed LibreOffice on 120,000 PCs. This has provided the administration with IT vendor independence and reduced expenditure on proprietary software licenses.

Italy's Ministry of Defense is transitioning to LibreOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF) on over 100,000 computers. The Ministry is developing online courses to help with the switch to LibreOffice.

In Germany, the city of Munich has switched over 15,000 PCs to LibreOffice. This is part of a larger migration towards open source software including the GNU/Linux operating system.

Taiwan's Ministry of Finance has installed LibreOffice on over 24,000 PCs, with the standardized Open Document Format becoming the norm for exchanging data in the various departments.

In Brazil, the UNESP - Universidade Estadual Paulista, exchanged more than 10,000 PCs to LibreOffice. This is part of a larger migration towards open source software including the operating system GNU / Linux.

Get LibreOffice today and join the growing number of users getting their work done with open source and open standards.

Writer

Calc

Impress

Draw

Base

Math