A quick update on Libre Office
As you might be knowing by now, Libre Office has evolved into a key player in Office Productivity Suites with Canonical deciding to ship Ubuntu with a pre-installed version of Libre Office.
Libre Office is an open-source based alternative to Microsoft Office and has evolved from Open Office, after Oracle bought over Sun Corporation. Libre Office has all the office productivity suites like Word-processing, Spread Sheets, Presentation, etc and it is totally free of cost. Free as in Free Spirit (and) Free to download and use.
The Document Foundation (Which is to Libre Office like what Mozilla Corporation is to Firefox) is on its way to set up an independent foundation in Germany, and the requisite funds for the same has already been collected. This important move gives stability to the project and will ensure that the project continues to evolve and grow.
After their first stable release of Libre Office 3.3, they have released two more stable releases – Libre Office 3.3.1 & Libre Office 3.3.2 with a lot of feature enhancements and bug fixes, in a very short duration. This is a testimony for the amount of efforts put in by the community and their commitment to enhance the Office Productivity Suite to be one of the best.
In true democratic style, they have opened up the applications for community membership (who can vote on important matters) & more recently an Engineering Steering Committee has been announced to ensure a technical vision/ direction for the project.
So with so much activity happening with Libre Office in recent times, perhaps its time for you to look at adopting Libre Office for your Office productivity needs, if you have not already done so.