A new fork of Oracle’s Open Office open source office suite that was first released in September 2010 by The Document Foundation. LibreOffice has started to branch away from its Open Office (or OpenOffice.org) roots in several ways, including a reduced reliance on Java and the inclusion of an improved Windows installer.
LibreOffice’s name is a combination of the French word for free (“Libre”) and Office. Like OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice features a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet app (Calc), a presentation program (Impress), a database management tool (Base), a vector graphics editor (Draw), and an app for working with mathematical formulas (Math). LibreOffice also includes a PDF creation and import tool for working with Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as its native file format, and the office suite also supports reading and writing of numerous other file formats, including both older and newer Microsoft Office files (including the Office Open XML spec used by Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2010), OpenOffice.org XML files, and Rich Text File (RTF) files.
LibreOffice is currently available as version 3.4.x for a wide variety of platforms and operating systems, and new releases are expected every six months or so.
