Conclusion
Overall, LibreOffice 24.2 looks like a very decent suite. Let's start with the positives. Fast, responsive. The look is more coherent than before. The new icons are cool. I had good results opening Microsoft Office templates, and they seem to have rendered pretty well. There were no obvious errors, and only tiny glitches. All in all, seems like a fresh start for LibreOffice. I also tried PDF export, printing, a few other small everyday functions, and the results were good. Spell check and grammar tools are decent. Macro security is set to high. Solid.
On the downside, the styles in Writer remain clunky and inefficient - they require too much work, and they aren't the prettiest, either. Calc is the underdog of the suite, and it lags behind Excel in many aspects. The UI layout tool is simply unnecessary. It detracts from more important elements of the suite, and it takes a lot of effort maintaining and developing. And in vain, too, because the results feel rather awkward. Badly put together, with tons of incompatible elements. The free price tag helps, but that can only work if the actual output meets the user's expectation. So far, LibreOffice has failed to dislodge Microsoft from the throne. Now, this latest version 24.2 comes with lots of good things about it, and I'm cautiously optimistic. By and large, it does feel like the best LibreOffice release yet. They say, you always gotta quit on a high note, so with that mind, I'm gonna drop me mike, and let you digest this review. Me like, a lot. Bye bye.
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