LibreOffice Writer a free Word Processor which is great to use on Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is so lightweight and fast that it can run quickly on older Windows, Linux computers, and very affordable $35 Raspberry Pi 2 Micro computer with a 900MHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and on-board video.
LibreOffice is based on Open Office by Apache. LibreOffice and Open Office both have similar features like they both come with a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Drawing and Database tool. I been using OpenOffice, and LibreOffice for many years, and they both work very reliably. I don’t experience file corruption and crashing problems like other free word processors which I tried in the past. Scrolling up and down a document with many pages is fast, and smooth.
Using LibreOffice is faster than using online based Word Processor for web browsers, and other regular word processors in my experience. Sometimes web browsers or the website which the Word Processor is hosted on have slow performance problems which make typing slower because there is a second of wait time before I see the text I type show up on online web browser window. Sometimes regular Word Processors start up slowly, and crash a lot which makes using it more slow. When I type words in LibreOffice Writer, words show up instantly onto Writer, and there is no word processing slowdown problems even when I type very quickly.
The text quality is clear, and easy to read on LibreOffice Writer. In the Tool Options’ view section, You can turn on and off Hardware acceleration, and Anti-Aliasing which makes text smoother and look nicer. LibreOffice also comes with a lot of nice looking fonts when I use it to type documents.
LibreOffice Writer is its Word Processor program. Writer has most of the features which I need in a Word Processor. Writer has Spell-check, auto-save recovery, word count, page count, undo, redo, text formatting like bold, italics, underline, different font styles, text size changing, text alignment, bullet points, margins adjustment tool, insert images, insert website links, insert table, export document as PDF, keyboard shortcuts for tasks like copy, paste, and save, etc.
LibreOffice Writer is pretty easy to use because most of the buttons like save, spell check, and text formatting tools which I use are on the top tool-bars, or can be easily found on the menu bar on the top of Writer.
Typing a regular document like a letter is easy in LibreOffice Writer because I just need to open it, and start typing on the document are on Writer like other popular Word Processors. There is also an auto-word complete feature. When I type LibreO, LibreOffice will suggest the word LibreOffice for me, and I can just press enter to type LibreOffice Writer is very reliable when I use it to type out a document. It rarely crashes, or freezes when I use it on my computer. Writer also only takes a few seconds to open up a file, and fully load Writer. Saving a file takes about a second to complete.
The file sizes of saved ODT (ODF Text Documents) are small. A 1 page text document uses about 30 KB of space on my hard drive. In my experience, the ODT file format has been very reliable, and I never experience file corruption problems with ODT files.
In LibreOffice Writer, I can also save files as .doc and .docx to make your documents compatible with MS Word.
I can also save files as a .RTF (Rich Text File), HTML Document, and other document types. Writer can also be used to Export a Document file as a PDF, or HTML file.
You can also save a file as a template file which is useful for writing school reports, letters, and other types of documents.
I like the classic, and clean user interface where I can find most of the commonly used tools like save, print, bold, italics, and underline on the toolbars in Writer. I like using Writer’s user interface because it is similar to other Word Processors which I used in the past, so Writer is very easy to use, and learn how to use. There are is a web layout view to type a document using the whole width of your monitor which is useful if your monitor is smaller. Another layout for typing documents is Print Layout which shows how your document would look on a piece of paper. There are also a gray background with dark gray shadows around the white paper which you are typing on. The Print Layout seems more comfortable for typing on because I can stare at the gray background when I am not typing. Plus, I don’t have to stare at the entire width of my larger monitor to type a sentence when I use Print Layout mode. It is easily possible to hide the ruler, status bar, formatting, and regular toolbar in LibreOffice by using the View menu and View’s toolbar section if you prefer a basic user interface, or if your monitor is very small, and you want as much vertical text space as possible for typing on. You can also show and hide other toolbars like the insert, picture, formula, etc toolbars in the View’s Toolbar menu.
There is a Full Screen typing mode which you can turn on by pressing CTRL+Shift+J on your keyboard at the same time, or using the View menu and clicking on the Full Screen button. The Full Screen mode is a distraction free typing mode which let you use your entire area of your monitor to type on. To exit full screen mode, you can press CTRL+Shift+J on your keyboard at the same time, or the Full Screen button on the top left of the screen.
LibreOffice Writer is a great free open source Word Processor which has all the features like text formatting, spell-check, auto-save recovery, and word count I need. It is also very lightweight and reliable when I use it in Windows, and Linux based operating systems like Ubuntu. Writer is lightweight and reliable enough to use on Raspbian for the Raspberry Pi mini computer which has a 900MHz CPU, and 1GB of RAM. I also like the classic and easy to use user interface for LibreOffice which makes using it very easy, and fast. Text which I type is also displayed very clearly, so it is easy to read. There are a lot of nice fonts which work with LibreOffice Writer, so I can very easily style my documents nicely with nice looking fonts.
You can download LibreOffice at libreoffice.org .