LibreOffice 3.4.2 is "Enterprise Ready"

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LibreOffice 3.3.3 Released for the Cautious

Speaking of The Document Foundation, Italo Vignoli of the steering committee, today announced the release of LibreOffice 3.3.3. This latest release "fixes several bugs and improves the security of the suite, to specifically address the needs of corporate deployments, where stability is more important than new features."

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Get Ready for LibreOffice 3.4

LibreOffice 3.4 is approaching. The second release candidate for 3.4 was released on May 27, and has improvements for Writer, Calc, and much more. Ready for a look?

The upcoming release of LibreOffice 3.4 is slightly overshadowed by the announcement that Oracle is proposing OpenOffice.org as an Apache Incubator project. What does that mean for the free office suite landscape? It's far too soon to tell, though Apache president Jim Jagielski has reached out to The Document Foundation about cooperation. I'm cautiously optimistic that the projects will find a way to work together and benefit the rest of the FOSS community.

But for now, LibreOffice is the only project with an imminent release — so let's take a look at that and what's in store.

LibreOffice is focusing on more modest, time-based releases. This means that 3.4 doesn't have massive new features, but it does have a slew of performance improvements and minor new features that make life a little better. Let's take a look at some of the highlights.

Sadly, the LibreOffice folks still haven't implemented vi-like keybindings for Writer. (OK, that may only be sad for some of us, but still...) But Writer still has a few minor features that you might enjoy.

If you do a lot of footnotes and bullets, you're going to find this release interesting. LibreOffice now has support for Greek (upper and lower case) letters for bullets — not something that I've had call for yet, but might be of interest to some users. (Testing this feature shows that I'm not, in fact, up on my Greek alphabet...) You'll find this in the Options tab of the Bullets and Numbering dialog.

If you're working on a paper or document that will be printed in color, or distributed as a PDF, you now have the option of defining the style and color of footnote separator. You'll find that one in the Footnote tab of the Page Style dialog.

The LibreOffice folks have also been working on "flat ODF" import and export filters — so if you have a need for the .fodt document type, you might want to check this out. What's flat ODF? In a nutshell, it's uncompressed ODF — the standard ODF document is a zipped file with XML data. Most users probably will want to stick with the traditional ODF — but this is a way to use LibreOffice to produce documents that can be worked with by other programs.

The Pivot Table support in Calc has been stepped up a notch in 3.4, and heavy spreadsheet users may want to look at upgrading to 3.4 right away. You now have support for unlimited fields (as opposed to a limit of 8 fields) using Pivot Table. The Pivot Table feature now allows users to define named ranges as a data source as well.

The 3.4 release also adds support for OLE links in Excel documents — so if you're working with a lot of Excel documents, this means that you won't be seeing import errors from Excel docs with OLE links.

A couple of features have been refined to allow per-sheet support as opposed to global document support. Autofilter and named ranges can now be defined on a per-sheet basis rather than being applied to the entire document.

Are you an Ubuntu Unity user? If so, you now have support for the global menu.

The 3.4 release also has a few features for improved graphite font handling, and for drawing text with Cairo as well as improved GTK+ theme support. This means that LibreOffice should look much nicer than 3.3 as a native Linux app.

Do you do presentations, and want to put them up on the Web? (One of the first — and most annoying — questions I get when doing a presentation is "will the slides be online?") This has been, let's say, not one of LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org's strong points. I tried it out with a couple of my old presentations, and it works like a charm now. So if you need to put a presentation online, LibreOffice 3.4 has you covered.

There's also the usual under the hood improvements, bug fixes, and so on. The 3.4 release is not a big leap forward — but it's an improvement and seems stable enough for most users to dive in.

Remember, the LibreOffice project recommends the .0 releases for more adventurous users. If you're wanting to contribute to LibreOffice, or just like to live a bit closer to the edge, the 3.4.0 release is for you. Odds are, if you're reading this article you like to try new features and want to be running the latest and greatest. But if not, then just hang on until the latest LibreOffice turns up in your favorite Linux distribution or at least wait for one of the point releases (like 3.4.1 or 3.4.2) that have cleaned up any nagging bugs that slipped through in 3.4.0.

According to the release notes, you should be able to install 3.4 side-by-side with 3.3. Of course, I read this after I removed the 3.3 packages from Linux Mint and installed 3.4 — but it should save you some trouble if you want to test 3.4 without removing the older release.

Naturally, you'll find packages for most major Linux distributions — the pre-release page has RPM and Debian packages for 32- and 64-bit systems.

The release plan calls for 3.4.1 to be out in late June, and for 3.4.2 to be released in late July. The next major release of LibreOffice is set for next February. Whether the OpenOffice.org news will impact LibreOffice releases, if at all, is unclear. With LibreOffice ramping up, OpenOffice.org apparently moving to the Apache Software Foundation, and Calligra picking up steam, it looks to be an interesting time for free office suites.

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Meeks: LibreOffice Progress to 3.4.0

Michael Meeks digs in to the changes that went into LibreOffice 3.4, including better translation support, merging changes from OpenOffice.org (part of which was a "multi-million-line" OOo cleanup patch), adding more build bots, and more. One major area of work was in doing some cleanup to reduce the size of LibreOffice: "First - ridding ourself of sillies - there is lots of good work in this area, eg. big cleanups of dead, and unreachable code, dropping export support from our (deprecated for a decade) binary filters and more. I'd like to highlight one invisible area: icons. Lots of volunteers worked on this, at least: Joseph Powers, Ace Dent, Joachim Tremouroux and Matus Kukan. The problem is that previously OO.o had simply tons of duplication, of icons everywhere: it had around one hundred and fifty (duplicate) 'missing icon' icons as an example. It also duplicated each icon for a 'high contrast' version in each theme (in place of a simple, separate high contrast icon theme), and it also propagated this effective bool highcontrast all across the code bloating things. All of that nonsense is now gone, and we have a great framework for handling eg. low-contrast disabilities consistently."

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LibreOffice 3.4beta5 and Communication Changes

The LibreOffice Project announced beta 5 of the upcoming 3.4 release today. The project is also announcing a change in its announcement strategy — the -announce list will only be used for final and stable releases.

As part of the announcement, Italo Vignoli mentioned that there seems to be some confusion about the LibreOffice scheduling and development process, and selecting the "right" release of LibreOffice. LibreOffice is on a "time based release model" and the project is avoiding schedule slips. He also encouraged users to select the "right release of LibreOffice for each situation."

Conservative users who want very stable releases are encouraged to choose a commercially supported version, or at least wait for a point release that has all the bugs shaken out. Users who are helping with development, testing, or just want to experience the "bleeding edge," are encouraged to run 3.4.0 when released or even the betas and nightly releases.

Users that still want to hear about the betas and such should subscribe to the projects and/or development lists.

For the latest beta, see the pre-releases page on the LibreOffice site. Debian packages and RPMs for x86 and AMD64 Linux systems are available, as well as Windows and Mac OS X binaries.

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LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 4 Now Available

The Document Foundation has released the fourth beta of LibreOffice 3.4. It will be followed by three release candidates, after which the final version of LibreOffice 3.4 is scheduled to be released on 31 May

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LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 4 Now Available

The Document Foundation has released the fourth beta of LibreOffice 3.4. It will be followed by three release candidates, after which the final version of LibreOffice 3.4 is scheduled to be released on 31 May

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