I found that Writer is quite sufficient to use on my Mac. The nice thing about LibreOffice is that I can switch to Windows 10 Pro or elementary OS 5 (Linux) and use the same files to edit, etc. Sending TDF a donation soon, because I think it's worth it.
NeoOffice is an office suite for Mac that is based on OpenOffice and LibreOffice. With NeoOffice, you can view, edit, and save OpenOffice documents, LibreOffice documents, and simple Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.
- Download LibreOffice for Mac to process and produce documents. LibreOffice has had 2 updates within the past 6 months.
- LibreOffice / ˈ l iː b r ə / is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice.
- Libreoffice is an App by now and does not include a direct swriter link anywhere in the system. The easiest thing to do (so you also have the shortcut for Spotlight) for me was to create a shellscript that starts the libreoffice writer.
- LibreOffice Writer. LibreOffice Writer is open source software, which means it’s available for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux operating systems. There’s also LibreViewer for Android. LibreOffice Writer supports for over 100 languages. For those who have been using MSWord, you’ll find the interface for MS Word very similar.
Two engineers created NeoOffice in 2003 when they made OpenOffice run natively on OS X for the first time. Since then, the NeoOffice engineers have continually added improvements to NeoOffice that you will not find in OpenOffice or LibreOffice such as:
- NeoOffice > Open at Launch menu to open Calc or Impress instead of Writer at launch
- File > Browse All Versions menu to restore previous versions of your documents
- Native file locking to safely edit files in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or network drives
- Native Mac grammar checking
- Support for Mac Services
The open source office suite, LibreOffice, is not only a very fine piece of software, it has some capabilities that leave many commercial products in the shade. One of them is a very powerful command line. It can do a lot of stuff without ever loading up the GUI. That makes it useful for batch processing of files and also for file format conversions.
Libreoffice For Apple
For example, image you want to convert a Word (docx) file to PDF. You can open it in Word or LibreOffice and save to PDF. Or, at least on Linux (but Windows can do the same if you put the LibreOffice executables into your PATH), you can type one of the following:
(The $ is the prompt.) This will produce test.pdf, which you can then view or use as you see fit.
I have recently been playing around on Linux without the GUI (because I have an old netbook that gets a bit slow when lots of GUI stuff is loaded up).
Say I want to view a Word (or LibreOffice, or … whatever) document. My first port of call is a command like that above. Then I can type:
And I can view the PDF in the framebuffer, no X windows, no GUI, no lag. This is what it looks like:
But of course this is really a corner case. Such a conversion is most likely to be useful when you want to convert a lot of files from one format to another. Opening them in the GUI and one by one saving would be a real pain. In Linux you could just type:
and it would convert all the docx files in the directory. (See comments for further info on this.)
Libreoffice Writer Master Document
Now, of course, the quality of the conversion is limited by LibreOffice’s ability to interpret the file format of interest. But I have found it useful.