LibreOffice 4.3 gets good marks for useful improvements
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has just reviewed the recently releeased LibreOffice 4.3, and gives it a thumbs up. It has made huge strides since the OpenOffice.org – LibreOffice "divorce" and this version includes improvements in office format interoperability, spreadsheet performance and usability, comment management, and the arrival of 3D models in Impress.
The program's code quality has also been greatly improved in the last two years. Coverity Scan found the defect density per 1,000 lines of code has shrunk from an above the average 1.11 to an industry leading 0.13 since 2012. According to Coverity, "LibreOffice has done an excellent job of addressing key defects in their code in the short time they have been part of the Coverity Scan service."The release notes are available here. Gentlemen, start your downloading engines!
Like previous versions, LibreOffice is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows systems. You can also run an older version, LibreOffice 4.2, from the cloud using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.
With the United Kingdom making LibreOffice's native ODF its default format for government documents, LibreOffice is certain to become more popular. Other cash-strapped governments, such as Italy's Umbria province, have found switching to LibreOffice from Microsoft Office has saved them hundreds of thousands of Euros per thousand PCs.