Is LibreOffice 4.0 Better than Microsoft Office 2013?
What’s new in LibreOffice 4.0?
As expected, there are a lot of improvements in the compatibility for Microsoft Office native documents format: .doc and .docx. There is a slight improvement at rendering of the files, and the orientation of the document is quite well, too. LibreOffice 4.0 also offers support for Microsoft Publisher files, this is the only free software which could work around such platform. Punching Microsoft where it hurts the most, the publishing feature will give thousands of students, institutions and end users a chance to cost cut and do it for free.
LibreOffice has also strengthened its user interface; version 4.0 gives you an option to dress up the suite as you desire by using Firefox Personas.
There is an extensible work done on the support and integration for CMS (Content Management System) and DMS (Document Management System). They have also amended RTF handling and Maths formula engine. You can also access and manage Visio files with much convenience in LibreOffice now. In addition to all this, LibreOffice Writer, the word processor now has the ability to set variant first page headers and footers to a given page style.
Another feature that caught my attention while writing this article (mind you, I wrote this article on LibreOffice Writer) is the word predictions feature. If you have a smartphone or a tablet and you use any 3rd party keyboard app like SwiftKey Keyboard, you would know that those apps give you a feature where based on your writing pattern, they predict your next words. Well, LibreOffice has got this exact feature.
In the coming months, LibreOffice is expected to be ported for Android and iOS devices as well. LibreOffice’s major challenge was to get the code as compact and clean as possible. The Document Foundation mentioned this in the Libreoffice 4.0 announcement-
The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty-five thousand lines of comments from German to English.
Microsoft goes haywire with licensing
Concept of À-la carte has been introduced in Office 2013, giving you the option to single out the software you want. So, suppose you want only the Word and not Excel or Powerpoint etc, you could leave them, and pay just for the Word. Pricing might not be justifiable for some users, though.