LibreOffice 3.3 is as polished as one might expect in a project that, for all of its novelty,
has many years of development work backing it up. Any outfit that’s looking for a solid toolset for users who don’t require a lot of handholding, or integration with Microsoft’s Office server applications, could do much worse than to choose it. For many users, this will have everything necessary in a desktop productivity suite, for an unbeatable price: free. The suite consists of the Writer word processor, the Calc spreadsheet, the Impress presentation creator and its associated Draw component, the Math equation editor, the Base database manager and a PDF creation tool. If some of those names seem familiar, they should; they come from the corresponding tools in OpenOffice.org. But LibreOffice is more than just a badge-engineered version of OpenOffice.org. A number of features are unique to LibreOffice, and that itself is significant, considering that the project has only existed for about four months.