LibreOffice 5.4 works better with Office files

The Document Foundation makes the free, open source LibreOffice 5.4 more compatible with Microsoft Office¹.

If you like your productivity software to come as a big, sprawling, all-encompassing suite, you can buy an annual Microsoft Office subscription.

Or, you could get the power of Office without paying a penny. LibreOffice is free and open source. When I tested LibreOffice 5.2 a year ago I found it was a solid alternative, but lacks polish.

There’s still no polish. The Document Foundation has stuck with a retro user interface. It says this will be the last LibreOffice 5 version. The next will be LibreOffice 6. That may see the software get a make-over.

While LibreOffice 5.4 make look dated to some, the comments in the earlier post show some users are comfortable with the older way of working. The fancy Microsoft Office ribbon interface doesn’t help you get things done any faster. It’s just cosmetic.

Writer

Whether you like LibreOffice’s look and feel or not, the power of the software is beyond question. The Writer app has almost all the features found in Microsoft Word. If anything is missing, it’s something almost no-one ever uses.

This time around LibreOffice adds the ability to import AutoText from Microsoft Word DOTM templates. In plain English this means you can import the default styles and custom elements that determine how documents look. If you work with others who run Microsoft Word, you’ll be able to create documents in the same style.

The 5.4 update also means you can export and paste number or bullet lists as plain text while keeping their structure. There is a new ability to create watermarks and LibreOffice has updated menus for working with sections, footnotes, endnotes and styles.

LibreOffice says Writer has cleaned up how it deals with imported PDFs. I’ve not tested this yet.

LibreOffice 5.4 improves file compatibility

You may notice an improvement in file compatibility between LibreOffice ODF and Microsoft .docx formats while in LibreOffice Writer. This still doesn’t work so well the other way around when you’re in Word, but that’s not The Document Foundation’s fault. There are still incompatibilities, but they are fewer and less difficult to deal with.

Taken as a list, the upgrades to Writer are incremental, it’s not a big upgrade. There’s a little more going on with the Calc update. LibreOffice has added pivot charts among other things, but it is still an incremental update. You can check the wiki for a full list of changes.

Is LibreOffice 5.4 right for you? It is if you need a full software suite and don’t want or can’t afford to pay for Microsoft Office. You might also ask yourself if you need a suite at all. That’s another post.

See my more up-to-date review of LibreOffice 7.

1. Not that it wasn’t already compatible enough for most people. ↩︎