Office is a pricey piece of software. When it comes to creating documents, spreadsheets, databases, and presentations, MS Office is the suite that comes to mind. LibreOffice is a comprehensive, professional-quality productivity suite that you can download and install for free. There is a large base of satisfied LibreOffice users worldwide, and it is available in more than 30 languages and for all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, etc.

The Document Foundation on Monday announced the release of version 3.4.2 of its LibreOffice productivity software suite, which not only offers a raft of improvements but is also the first version of the suite to be declared enterprise-ready. LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes the majority of the most-important bugs identified by users in the previous version, and can be deployed for production needs by most enterprises.

LibreOffice is a feature-packed and mature desktop productivity package with some really great advantages :

• It’s free – no worry about license costs or annual fees.
• No language barriers – it’s available in a large number of languages, with more being added continually.
• LGPL public license – you can use it, customize it, hack it and copy it with free user support and developer support from our active worldwide community and our large and experienced developer team.
• LibreOffice is a free software community-driven project: development is open to new talent and new ideas, and our software is tested and used daily by a large and devoted user community; you, too, can get involved and influence its future development.

LibreOffice opens with a main menu that let us select which application we wanted to use: Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math, and Writer. Each application’s interface will look very familiar to you if you’ve used MS Office products. We started with LibreOffice Writer, the suite’s word-processing application. We typed up a document and formatted it without any issues. The application saves documents as .odt files by default, which cannot be opened by MS Word. But to solve any compatibility issues, it does allow you to save it as a .doc file. We proceeded to check out Calc and Impress, the suite’s spreadsheet and presentation programs. Like Writer, each program introduced a familiar interface. We were able to bypass the default .ods and .odp file types to MS file types and open them without any issues.

The Math and Draw applications were just icing on top of the cake of this capable suite of tools. Should you need it, each application includes a link that takes you to the Web site for support. LibreOffice installs and uninstalls cleanly. Its tools work just as well as their pricey competitor’s, and it’s free.