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The changes in LibreOffice 4.4 are visible the moment you open a document, though some are fairly subtle.
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If you plan on using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office, know that document compatibility is still a roll of the dice - but with each revision LibreOffice is improving the odds. To its credit, LibreOffice 4.4 handles old- and new-school Microsoft Office documents better than ever before - no small feat considering how prohibitively complex such documents can be. Now for the bigger question: Can you recommend LibreOffice in the same breath as Microsoft Office? The short answer: Maybe. The effort has paid off: It’s a no-brainer to recommend LibreOffice over OpenOffice, thanks to Libre’s consistent release schedule and the increasingly polished quality of the product. The developers behind LibreOffice, the free and open source productivity suite forked from OpenOffice, have sweated and bled to advance the toolkit over the past couple of years.
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