Celebrating LibreOffice at 40 years

LibreOffice is a powerful open source office suite that supports all platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. LibreOffice in one form or another has been around since 1984, so it just turned 40 years old in 2024. We interviewed Italo Vignoli to learn more about LibreOffice and to celebrate this milestone anniversary:

Let's start with an introduction: Who are you and what do you do at LibreOffice?

I'm one of the founders of the LibreOffice project, the only Italian, after contributing to the OpenOffice project for the previous seven years. I've been a business communications professional since 1981, so I've always been involved in marketing, communications and media relations for both the OpenOffice and LibreOffice projects. I am also a spokesperson for the project and help organise LibreOffice's presence at FOSDEM and the LibreOffice Conference.

How did LibreOffice get started?

The roots of LibreOffice are lost in history. The first version of StarWriter dates back to 1984, developed by a German student: Marco Boerries. The great success of the software was the basis for the subsequent birth of StarOffice and the company StarDivision, based in Hamburg. StarOffice was a proprietary product, very similar to today's open source office suite.

StarOffice was a German product, although it was also available in English. Because of its strong German roots, it achieved a significant market share in Germany, second only to Microsoft Office. In my opinion, one of the reasons for its success was the fact that it was not a Microsoft clone, but an office suite with its own characteristics. It was also available for Linux from 1996, which made it very popular in the open source environment.

StarDivision was acquired by Sun in 1999. In 2000, the StarOffice source code was donated to the community and the OpenOffice project was born. For almost ten years, OpenOffice continued to gain market share as the main competitor to Microsoft Office. In 2010, following Oracle's acquisition of Sun, the community decided to take over development of the software and forked the project, creating LibreOffice and its home: The Document Foundation.

Why are people moving to LibreOffice? What draws them?

The first reason people switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice is that it is free. For the majority of users who have paid to use Microsoft Office, this is the main difference. Of course, there are many other benefits, but you have to use the software to discover them. For example, in addition to being open and standard (whereas Microsoft's OOXML is standard but proprietary), the native document format is more robust and much more secure. 

By the way, ODF will be 20 years old on 1 May 2025. Quite an achievement.

Once you start using LibreOffice, if you're not blocked by resistance to change and you're consistent enough in learning its functions, then all the strengths of the open source office suite emerge: the flexible user interface, the optimised use of available screen space, and the robustness.

What makes LibreOffice unique is the LibreOffice Technology Platform, the only one on the market that allows the consistent development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions - including those provided by companies in the ecosystem - capable of producing identical and fully interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

LibreOffice is the best office suite for users who want to retain control over their individual software and documents, thereby protecting their privacy and digital life from the commercial interference and the lock-in strategies of Big Tech.

Who are the typical users of LibreOffice?

LibreOffice is downloaded anonymously, as we don't ask for names, email addresses or other personal information, so it's very difficult to build up a profile of users. It is possible to know a little more from the emails sent to support, as some users provide some information to help us solve their problems, but it's too small a sample to make reliable assumptions. 

LibreOffice certainly has a large number of individual users, many of whom have had problems with Microsoft Office, but this is fairly obvious. LibreOffice also has a large number of users in public administration, especially in countries where there is a greater focus on digital sovereignty and privacy. Finally, LibreOffice is used in many universities, again in those universities where there is a greater focus on digital sovereignty and privacy.

Among the public administrations using LibreOffice are the region of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, several ministries in France, the Ministry of Defence in Italy, the Government of Taiwan, some large cities such as Valencia in Spain, Bari and Bologna in Italy, and many smaller organisations.

What features do you love about LibreOffice?

I am a heavy user of LibreOffice Writer to write articles and press releases, as well as longer documents such as white papers and e-books. I always use the native LibreOffice document format, which is open, standard and extremely robust, and thanks to this I have never lost a single document. I use styles for almost everything, plus advanced page formatting features such as the automatic table of contents. 

I am also a heavy user of LibreOffice Impress to prepare and deliver my presentations. It is a good presenter tool that avoids the often useless bells and whistles of PowerPoint to make life easier for the presenter. 

And I can easily exchange documents with the rest of the world using both ISO standard ODF and proprietary Microsoft formats. Of course, I am very careful to use fonts that are installed on all PCs, or their open source equivalents, to avoid the document being screwed up just because the font is missing on the receiving PC. I also use LibreOffice Draw to open PDF files and make small changes.

What's next for LibreOffice?

There are two major anniversaries in 2025: ODF, LibreOffice's native document standard format, will be 20 years old, and LibreOffice will be 15 years old. If we think about all the problems we have overcome in that time, these are two major achievements. ODF, although not as widely adopted as it should be, is recognised as the only standard format, and LibreOffice is still alive and growing, despite all the attempts to kill it by various companies using all kinds of strategies over the years.

In terms of functionality, of course, we are looking very carefully at integration with artificial intelligence tools and the development of desktop-level collaboration features, as well as improving existing features to keep up with the market-leading software.

Download the latest version from the LibreOffice website. Find documentation and download the user guides from the LibreOffice Documentation site.