LibreOffice Draw Review

LibreOffice Draw resembles Microsoft Visio in functionality, supplying users with tools for creating any graphical plan, from sketches to architectural designs and structured diagrams.

The setup part was earlier described in LibreOffice Writer's review.

The full pack contains Writer, Impress, Calc, Draw, Math and Base.

However, users may opt out of any components, including extra features such as support for ActiveX control or help documentation.

Templates with drawings can be imported from OTT, STW, OTH, OTS, STC, OTP, STI, OTG, STD and VOR format, as well as created from scratch and saved to file.

Meanwhile, regular drawing projects can be saved to ODF drawings (ODG), OpenOffice.org 1.0 format (SXD) and OpenDocument drawings flat XML (FODG).

Apart from exporting projects to popular image file extensions (e.g. BMP, EPS, GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG, WMF), it is possible to prepare them for online publishing by turning them into HTML, XHTML, PDF or SWF files.

Normal and master view modes can be easily toggled between, while the entire project perspective can be switched to color, grayscale, or black and white. There are numerous toolbars that may be shown or hidden from the interface, and all their containing functions are customizable. A navigator comes in handy for rapidly jumping to a particular slide or selecting specific objects from a page, whether they are named or not.

Page setup options are pretty basic; they address the paper format (e.g. letter, tabloid, legal, Japanese postcard), width, height, margins, layout counting mode, and background fill (none, color, gradient, hatching, bitmap).

New slides can be inserted as well as duplicated, together with layers (visible, printable, locked), snap objects (point, vertical, horizontal), data fields (date, time, author, page number or count, file name), comments, and hyperlinks (directed to an online location, email, news, existing or new document).

Showing the LibreOffice Draw insert menu

Other attachable items are pictures (from file or scanner directly), tables, movies and sounds (e.g. WMV, MOV, MPG, MKV, FLAC, MP3), OLE objects, plugins and mathematical formulas, charts (e.g. column, bar, pie, area, bubble, net, stock, column and line) and floating frames.

Character settings can be changed in terms of font type, language, style, size, effects (e.g. outline, shadow) and position (e.g. rotation, spacing), while the indents, spacing, alignment and tabs for paragraphs may be tweaked. There are eight types of bullets and eight kinds of numbering modes, in addition to numerous graphics for counting purposes.

Showing the LibreOffice Draw format menu

Additional formatting options concern the position, size, rotation, slant and corner radius of the currently selected object, line and arrow styles, area fill, transparency and gradients, alongside text animation effects, among others.

Pictures can be cropped, scaled and resized, just like in LibreOffice Writer, Calc and Impress, Draw includes preset styles and formatting profiles that relieve users from adjusting aforementioned settings.

When it comes to modifying object properties, it is possible to convert items to curves, polygons, contours, 3D, 3D rotation objects, bitmap and metafiles, align, group, ungroup, combine, split and rearrange them (e.g. send to back, bring to front, edit names and descriptions (useful when quickly selecting objects using the navigator), as well as to merge, subtract and intersect shapes.

Showing the LibreOffice Draw modify menu

The drawing functions were presented in Impress' review. They contain selection, lines, line ends with arrows, rectangles, ellipses, curves, connectors, basic and symbol shapes, flowcharts and callouts.

Similar to LibreOffice Writer, Draw has a spellchecker, autocorrect, thesaurus, hyphenation mode, color replacer, and gallery with predefined shapes and various drawings. It supports other tools as well, such as macro execution (requires Java), extensions (e.g. Wiki Publisher), and configurable XML filter settings.

Most program preferences are shared by all LibreOffice components. The ones particular to Calc can disable quick editing, use background cache, distort objects in curve, as well as change the measurement unit, tab stop distance and drawing scale. It is also possible to make rulers invisible, snap lines when moving, display the grid, edit printing settings (e.g. quality, pages), and so on.

Showing the LibreOffice Draw program settings panel

The Good

LibreOffice's best features are applicable in all modules. Draw sports numerous options and configuration parameters for defining each part of the graphical plan as well as for the general elements in the interface (such as toolbars and keyboard shortcuts). The styles and formatting presets simplify the entire layout designing process. The document recovery feature usually comes to the rescue when experiencing system crashes.

LibreOffice is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) and compatible with all popular Windows versions (including 8 and 8.1, 32 bit and 64 bit), has multiple UI languages and a help manual, and works with a wide array of file types. CPU and RAM usage is generally low.

Those who want to skip the installer may resort to Portable LibreOffice.

The Bad

The program often takes a while to paste pictures as well as to load some features. It froze several times during our evaluation when inserting files with unsupported formats, which eventually led us to restarting Draw.

The Truth

LibreOffice is a complete office suite free to anyone, and Draw is that one app whose drawing projects can be smoothly integrated into text documents or presentations to finalize them. Anyone can take advantage of its vast features, regardless of previous experience.

NOTE: Make sure to check out our reviews for LibreOffice Writer, LibreOffice Calc, LibreOffice Impress and LibreOffice Math.

LibreOffice Draw Review

key review info

application features

The Good

The Bad

The Truth