From the same Open Office developers (who rebelled against Oracle's control over Openoffice), LibreOffice was born in 2011, today the best alternative to Microsoft Office, the only real possibility of being able to use Word equivalent programs on Windows PC, Mac and Linux, Excel, Access and Powerpoint without paying anything. LibreOffice is in fact completely free and open source, therefore usable without having to buy anything even for commercial and business purposes.
LibreOffice includes several independent applications: Writer equivalent to Word, Calc for spreadsheets like Excel, Impress for presentations like Powerpoint, Draw, for drawing flowcharts as with Visio, Base, for managing a database as you would with Access and Math for math operations.
LibreOffice is compatible with all types of files created with Microsoft Office becoming an alternative that can replace in all respects the most famous, but not free, Microsoft programs.
READ FIRST: Better LibreOffice features compared to Microsoft Office
LibreOffice 6 can now be downloaded, which in this new version becomes a modern program, with a better user interface, compatible with Windows 10 and better interoperability between the different operating systems.
LibreOffice, as mentioned, is available for all three main operating systems, Windows, Mac and Linux, and can be downloaded in all languages, including Italian, by going to the download page.
For Windows PCs you can also download 64-bit LibreOffice 6 .
The default version on the page is the 32-bit version of LibreOffice for Windows so, if you need a different version, go back to the home and then to the download section.
READ ALSO: List of alternative programs to Microsoft Office
The new version of LibreOffice presents new icons and changes to the sidebar and the menu at the top, with a more beautiful, less Spartan than before interface, designed in a pleasant and easier to understand way.
Making a summary of the new functions of the various programs we see that:
1) Writer is the alternative to Microsoft Word and therefore serves to write text documents to the computer, edit them, save them in different formats (including the doc and docx format).
The command interface is similar to that of Word, without a band, with the function buttons placed next to each other.
The nice thing about Libre Office is the ability to create PDF from documents or save in html.
Writer has little to envy to Microsoft Word so there will really be no use problems and no function will be missing.
In the latest version LibreOffice 6 Writer adds support for Emojis with codes found in the automatic correction options.
There are style previews to immediately visualize the appearance of the text before applying a change.
You can now highlight text and use Word-compatible shading so that it is preserved when importing and exporting Word documents.
Images can be cropped with the mouse in the interface.
There is also a new Formulary menu, which makes it easy to create forms and save them to PDF.
2) Calc is like Microsoft Excel, the spreadsheet for making calculations in tables.
The formulas, expressed in natural language, allow you to use words to indicate numerical formulas.
You can also save a file in Calc in various formats, including Excel 2007-2010.2013 .xls or .xslx.
In the new version of LibreOffice 6 conditional formatting is supported, support for XLSX files in the import and export of spreadsheets and there are many changes to the formula generator.
3) Impress is the Powerpoint clone and allows you to create multimedia slides presentations.
Impress comes with all the tools available on Powerpoint and also allows you to export presentations in .swf flash format.
4) Draw is an alternative program to Visio to draw diagrams, flowcharts and even posters to be printed with project plans.
Draw is also capable of editing PDF files.
5) Base is very similar to Microsoft Access, a tool to create a data database that supports MySQL, Access and other types of multi-user databases, with compatibility with JDBC and ODBC.
Molt claim that Base is perhaps the only program inferior to its Microsoft Access alter ego.
6) Math is a program for inserting math formulas into documents so as to write functions and expressions on sheets written with Writer.
Those who have never tried LibreOffice and still think that the only way to write on the computer is by buying Microsoft Office, is wrong and I can only recommend a try of LibreOffice, a formidable free program.
In another article, the options to be modified to optimize and customize LibreOffice .
