A Free Portable Office Suite

One of the most often asked questions is “What free office suite to you recommend?”. Well, there are a lot of good ones, OpenOffice comes to mind. But today, we’re featuring Libre Office Portable.

LibreOffice Portable is a full-featured, free office suite which can create and open almost any Microsoft Office file.  And because it’s portable, you don’t have to install it. It’s a full-featured office program you can take with you. 

Those of you who have Microsoft Office know what a long and arduous process installing it can be. It makes hundreds of changes to your registry and it can be a pain to uninstall. Yet most people agree it’s the best full-featured office program, and certainly the most popular – even though it’s not free and remains – even with all of the new purchase options – rather pricey.

If you need a full-featured office program – one you don’t even have to install – and one you can uninstall just by deleting its folders – one you can take with you, and one that is totally free, you will like the portable version of LibreOffice. It includes all of the programs of most other full-feature office suites, but this one you don’t have to install – in fact you can take it with you wherever you go.

The program comes as a standalone exe file you click to extract its programs and features. You can extract it to a USB and use it on any computer. Yes – an office suite you can take with you – pretty sweet, eh EB?

Just click on the LibrePortable exe files and it extract to a single folder it creates on a USB flash drive, external drive, or your hard drive. If you ever need to remove it from you computer, just delete the LibreOfficePortable folder and it’s gone. It makes no changes to your registry or your system. If you like it and plan on using it, we highly recommend that you open the LibreOfficePortable folder and right-click on the LibreOfficePortable application and pin it to your start menu, taskbar or both.

Above: Libre Office Portable  on an external drive – it creates one folder and everything you need is in that folder.

Above: A Microsoft Word document open for editing in Libre Office Writer.

Above:  One of our newsletters (HTML document) open for editing in Libre Office Portable.

Above: You can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, databases, HTML (web page) documents and more using Libre Office Portable.

Above: Presentation backgrounds. Libre Office Portable can create and work with Windows PowerPoint presentations.

Finally, not only can you open most Microsoft documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases etc., but you can save in most Microsoft formats as well:

Above: We created a text document and we can save it as Microsoft Word (docx) or any of the other formats you see in the screenshot above.

Now a word from the developers who have obviously toiled long and hard making this exceptional program:

LibreOffice Portable is a full-featured portable version of LibreOffice – including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database – packaged as a portable app, so you can take all your documents and everything you need to work with them wherever you go. It is packaged in PortableApps.com format so it can work with the PortableApps.com platform and its automatic updater and app store, work with other portable menus, or work by itself from a USB, cloud or local drive. And it is open source and completely free.

OK – This is one fine free office suite. Is it as good as Microsoft Office – nope…but it really really good and really really cheap (free in fact). If you don’t want to give Microsoft any more of your hard earned money but you want to be able to open and create Microsoft Office documents, we think you’ll be very happy with Libre Office Portable – the office suite you can put on a flash drive and take it with you. Or just put in on your hard drive if you want. It works where you put it.

Now, go forth and read more about and/or download LibreOfficePortable.

Note: If you have a slow internet connection you might want to plan on watching a movie while this downloads – it’s around 116 MB. Just sayin’.

EB thinks she is my office sweet, but she is not I tells ya