LibreOffice 3.5 Available, Huge Feature List

Libre Office 3.5: The Best Free Office Suite Ever

LibreOffice 3.5 is now available and is over-flowing with features and fixes.  No, you won’t find any Citrus in this release but you will find these key changes;

1.) Better UI for header/footer handling. Easily add header or footers.

2.) New faster built-in grammar checker for English and several other languages.

3.) New multi-line input bar in Calc.

4.) Import filter for Microsoft Visio documents.

5.) Custom Shapes import was greatly enhanced, many bugs were fixed and new presets implementation added.

6.) LibreOffice checks for updates automatically at user defined intervals, and allows manual download of the newest version.

7.) New native driver for PostgreSQL databases.

8.) The word count dialog is modeless and updates as you type.

9.) Improved font hinting fir high quality docs.

But these aren’t the only improvements!  Here are some of notes from the announcements, that if nothing else, further alienate its fore-father, Open Office, from relevancy.  This except touches on a few issues with the code of the original Star Office.

We inherited a 15 years old code base, where features were not implemented and bugs were not solved in order to avoid creating problems, and this – with time – was the origin of a large technical debt,” says Caolán McNamara, a senior RedHat developer who is one of the founders and directors of TDF. “We had two options: a conservative strategy, which would immediately please all users, leaving the code basically unchanged, and our more aggressive feature development and code renovation path, which has created some stability problems in the short term but is rapidly leading to a completely new and substantially improved free office suite: LibreOffice 3.5, the best free office suite ever.

On overall progress;

In sixteen months, we have achieved incredible results – comments Michael Meeks, a SUSE Distinguished Engineer, who is also a founder and director at TDF – with nearly three hundred entirely new developers to the project, attracted by the copyleft license, the lack of copyright assignment and a welcoming environment. In addition to the visible features, they’ve translated tens of thousands of German comments, removed thousands of unused or obsolete methods – sometimes whole libraries – and grown a suite of automated tests. Although we still have a long way to go, users – who have sometimes complained for the stability of the software, as they were not aware of the technical debt we were fighting with – can now benefit from a substantially cleaner, leaner and more feature rich LibreOffice 3.5.

…and lastly, a nice shout-out to the community.

LibreOffice 3.5 is the first release where the contribution of local communities and associations, such as ALTA in Brazil, has been acknowledged. In addition, TDF tried to recognize those volunteers – where we could easily identify them – who put so much into the 3.5 release, with a “hacking” or “bug hunting” hero badge presented the same day of the announcement. TDF is encouraging the development of a global, open and diverse ecosystem where companies, associations, local communities and volunteers share the common objective of developing the best free office suite ever.

How Do I Get It?

Well, it’s available now from the project’s homepage, but if you are an Ubuntu user, you may want to wait just a little while longer.  The latest version available in the official Libre Office PPA is 3.4.5.  Though if you are brave, you can download it anyway from the homepage and give it the ‘ol college try.