LibreOffice is an open-source office software suite managed by The Document Foundation. It provides tools like Writer for word processing, Calc as a spreadsheets program, Impress for preparing presentations, Draw to create vector graphics and flowcharts, Base to work with databases, and Math for formula editing.
Like Apache OpenOffice, it was also forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, which was itself derived from StarOffice. It however, has become more popular than Apache OpenOffice due to better support team and resources and receives around 10 times more code contributions than Apache OpenOffice.
LibreOffice is designed to run on numerous operating systems such as higher versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It also has a LibreOffice Viewer for Android. It follows OpenDocument Format (ODF) file format, an ISO/IEC standard, as its native format to save documents for all of its applications. It can also read and write a wide variety of other file formats, including those from Microsoft Office. It supports 110 languages.
LibreOffice has three release versions, Fresh – a tested version with new features, Still – a more stable version, and Development versions which are still undergoing testing and not recommended to be used for application purposes. The very first version of LibreOffice was released in January 2011. Its latest releases, at the time this writing, LibreOffice 5.1.6, a Still version of LibreOffice was released in October of 2016 while LibreOffice 5.2.4, a Fresh version of LibreOffice was released in December of 2016. Also, a development version LibreOffice 5.3.0 was released immediately. The LibreOffice is dual licensed under LGPLv3 (or later) and MPL 2.0 licenses for new contributions.
Components of LibreOffice
LibreOffice shares a common set of components as Apache OpenOffice as both have evolved from OpenOffice.org. It also has component like Writer similar to Microsoft Word with extensive WYSIWYG word processing capabilities and a basic text editor. It has Calc, a spreadsheet program similar to Microsoft Excel with excellent accounting, reporting and graph designing capabilities. It has Impress which is a presentation program like Microsoft PowerPoint. It includes Draw a vector graphics editor and diagramming tool similar to Microsoft Visio. It provides an application designed for creating and editing mathematical formulae known as Math. It also includes Base, a database management program, similar to Microsoft Access that allows the creation and management of databases and its data.
LibreOffice also includes a programming language - LibreOffice Basic that is based on StarOffice Basic and similar to Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). It can be used to create "macros", small programs to perform simple tasks in Writer, Calc and Base. There are predefined macros, as part of the office suite; LibreOffice also allows users to define macros of their own to carry business logic tasks.
Additionally, the LibreOffice Extension Repository lists more than 280 extensions. It also supports third-party extensions. For this, it provides its own API known as “UNO".
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