This leaves you with small panes that don't show very much. In this mode the Gallery is a large pane at the top of the window and the Navigator, Styles and Formatting open as panes you can move around or dock at the side of the screen, where they sit on top of the sidebar rather than opening inside it. If you don't, you'll still see a sidebar that works slightly differently from OpenOffice: instead of an obscure list of icons, it shows all the available panes in collapsible sections. The sidebar is marked as an 'experimental' feature that you have to enable in the advanced options. It reflects the fact that the Document Foundation that maintains LibreOffice is able to incorporate code from OpenOffice to fix bugs, remove unused features or improve performance.Ĭonfusingly, LibreOffice supports both the new OpenOffice sidebar and its own sidebar-like docked panes that sit one on top of another One of new features – the sidebar - may look familiar from older versions of Microsoft or OpenOffice 4.0. The site concentrates on telling you how to upload templates rather than how to find and download them, and the template section isn't as well designed as the OpenOffice site. LibreOffice 4.1 offers similar links to templates and extensions on its start page as OpenOffice 4.0, and they're equally confusing for inexperienced users. Also, you can now choose whether you only want to find words with the right case (Office rather than office, for example). However, if you just want to find a word you can use the search bar that opens at the bottom of your document in all the LibreOffice applications.

Many dialogue boxes are also larger with better layouts, except for the Find & Replace dialogue, which looks cramped compared to the OpenOffice Writer Find & Replace. The interface is firmly in the menus and toolbars era, although the toolbar icons in LibreOffice are larger and slightly easier to make out than in OpenOffice.

It also has broadly the same features, with some extras. When you have installed LibreOffice 4.1 it looks very much like OpenOffice 4.0 with different icons. Select multiple images to show on the pages of your presentation

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