The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.4
Up to 100% performance improvements thanks to the efforts of a diverse and growing developer and QA community
Berlin, May 30, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.4, the fifth version of the free office suite’s 3.5 family. LibreOffice 3.5.4 offers significant performance improvements over the previous versions of the product, which are the combined result of the many code optimizations executed during the last months and the bug and regression chasing activity performed regularly by volunteers and developers. As a result, LibreOffice 3.5.4 is the fastest version of the best free office suite ever, with up to 100% performance gains when opening large files (depending on operating system, hardware configuration and file contents).
The Document Foundation suggests all users to upgrade from previous versions to LibreOffice 3.5.4.
LibreOffice 3.5.4 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.
Change logs are available at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.4/RC1 and http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.4/RC2.
The worldwide LibreOffice Conference will take place in Berlin, Germany, from October 17th to 19th, 2012. Details on the program and a call for papers will be available soon at http://conference.libreoffice.org.
Fix “The automatic download of the update is currently not available” !!!! , to actually keep users up-to-date. Believe me, users are way behind. So they’re judging the product on ancient versions. This doesn’t make it look good, doesn’t make it used as much as possible. One of the often heard complaints: “I don’t use that gratis (‘free as in beer’) office thing anymore, it’s unbearingly slow”. A few times I checked the version and it was ancient. So if you can’t update with a simple “OK”, better call it “re-install that is too much hassle” to be honest.
+1, better update system is always worth the investment 🙂
The automatic download works for LibreOffice 3.5, but not for the previous versions. It is not possible to make it work for the previous versions because the necessary code was missing. We understand that users are way behind, but in order to leverage the best free office suite ever they have to make some effort. Otherwise, they will always stay behind, which is not a good option also for security reasons.
No, it doesn’t ! I can’t upgrade “in app”. I’m upgrading from 3.5.2 and get: lick ‘Download…’ to download LibreOffice 3.5.4 manually from the web site…
I get the same error message, and I have LibreOffice 3.5.3.
I don’t know what this is about, as I got new version automatically as soon as it appeared in repository. (Non-existent) problem solved.
I consistently get an error when attempting to upgrade within the program.
The windows chaps do anything to get windows apps installed, even upgrade their system rams. The moment it comes to free, people tend to pose x number of issues for not using it. We must understand the meaning of FREE as freedom. Else be slaves of microsoft. LibreOffice is a software with a cause, MS Office is devil’s product with all alluring features. However good MS Office may be, I dont give a damn. To me its just dust and dust alone. Vive la libreoffice!!!
When is the portable version expected?
A new, appealing icon theme would be a nice refreshment. A call for interest e.g. in gnome-look.org will definitely yield many contributions.
Another thing that would be good to have, is an extension of the documentation to community-based and more focused projects, for instance a “writing a Thesis in LibreOffice” book.
@ italovignoli
No, the automatic download does not work for LibreOffice 3.5. Or we may not be talking about the same LibreOffice. Here is what my “Check for Update” box says:
Status.
LibreOffice 3.5.4 is available.
The installed version is LibreOffice 3.5.3. — etc., etc., and below:
Description.
The automatic download of the update is currently not available.
Click ‘Download…’ to download LibreOffice 3.5.4 manually from the web site.
Yes, the user can make an effort.
I may have missed the point of a Check for Update feature which forces the user do the download-install complete process — perhaps the answer is lost in translation. What gives?
I am a writer and I love working with LibreOffice as I did with Go-oo after dumping OpenOffice after dumping MS Office… some 12 years ago.
Yep, same problem here…
Unfortunately, the update mechanism has been inherited from OOo, and does not allow other choice than installing the entire suite on top of the previous version. We have, of course, evaluated the possibility of changing this mechanism, because we – as users – are pissed off as much as any other user, but in order to get to this point we still miss some development steps, and some code cleaning. Some portions of the code are really old, and they have never been renovated during the years. We have been working on this code renovation, and got rid of a large amount of useless or redundant code. We still need some progress before we can tackle big features such as incremental updates.
For Windows, there are free 3rd party programs that can be used as word-around for auto-update:
the portableapps.com suite includes LO and auto-updates with 2 clicks, (it’s builds a re just released with a few days delay)
http://patchmypc.com/ includes LO too by fetching the installer from this site, and can auto-update (install) on preconfigured moments, without bugging you every time you use a program. There jight be more tools like these out there.
Still, an incremental update system for windows some time in the future would save time and bandwide. (perhaps the KDE4Windows could be usefull?)
http://windows.kde.org/news.php#itemKDESoftwareCompilation480forWindowsavailable
Anyway, good luck with your awesome effords at LO.
Same here, auto-upgrade doesn’t work. It links to libreoffice download page.
P.S. What about using magnets for torrent downloads? :-))
Small usability feedback. I clicked the green button to try and download but to no avail. Only after I clicked ‘Main installer’ does the download begin.
Does this version finally support advanced OpenType features (standard and discretionary ligatures, proper small caps, stylistic sets etc) in OpenType fonts? If not, when will Libre Office do so?
This new version still gives me an error message for loading BASIC – user/basic/dialogues.xli: General Error. General inputOutput error. Previous version did the same, although I never experienced the problem with earlier versions.
I was just wondering why there is not a Final Version released anymore? It is always the same as the RC2 that is the one released as Final, Why is this? I realize that this is a continuing process but couldn’t the final version be just that and not an RC2?
If I’m not mistaken, that just means that there were now showstopping bugs found between the release of RC2 and the final version. If that’s the case, why bother rebranding the thing? It seems like an unneccessary amount of trouble just to have a “final” label slapped onto it.
I think you are on right track, but you should focus more on:
1. Increasing the speed of whole office suite and document opening.
2. Increasing compatibility with MS Office 2003/2007/2010 file formats.
Like it or not, this affects most users and MS Office is industry/business standard so it’s far more important for you to support MS standard then it is for MS to support your.
New features are important, but they affect daily users in small scale.
I’m glad to see from your charts that your users are by majority Windows OS users. Hopefully you’ll invest more in speeding up loading times and MS compatibility for them. 🙂
@ italovignoli
I understand the problematic inheritance related-relating to the ‘mise à jour’ feature.
Instead of cleaning that code and twist arms and legs to make it work, what about eradicating that segment as a whole to profit an external update-upgrade spawn process?
It would, eventually, close and reopen LO after its own process — no user intervention besides watching a nice screen saver or animation blurb about the release fixes, additions as well as powerful news from the home office.
My two cents.
Good work, dudes and dudettes.
JFJB
The problem is that you should eradicate the entire suite…
oops
kind of weird architecture — in Object-Oriented programming at least…
I’ll think of something else, then. Cheers!
The code goes back to the eighties, and in some areas is still the same. Updating a single platform would be possible with some workaround, but updating multiple platforms is a problem, if the architecture is the same on all platforms. On Linux, for instance, the update process is managed by the distribution, and most users never download an update. On Windows and MacOS, we know the problem, but a solution is more difficult.
RTF load time is about 20-30 times slower then in 3.4.6.
I use LibreOffice for viewing rtf reports, produced by my app.
LibreOffice 3.4.6 opens rtf document (even ones with few hundred pages) in a moment.
While 3.5.4 opens documents up to 50-100 pages very slowly and bigger ones not at all.
So I am still using 3.4.6
Franček
Honestly, Writer is the module of LibreOffice which I most use. Sometimes I require to Draw, and very occasionally Impress when I receive PowerPoints in my email.
Fortunately, none of this fails in the new version.
Thanks a lot!
However, I did have a small problem with the installation: Although it is among the dictionaries that I choose to install, LibreOffice does not detect the Spanish. This circumstance also happened to me with the installation of version 3.5.3.
For now is there any solution? Yes, download from LibreOffice repository and install independently the corresponding extension.
The cause of the problem? Unless I am mistaken, it seems that there are differences between the version of the extension – which corresponds to the year 2008 – that LibreOffice installer includes and the extension that is available in the repository and corresponds to 2011.
I really appreciate the development of Libreoffice. The frequent updates with clear improvements are a blessing. However, until the latest update I was a little frustrated with the time it would take to load a large .doc file and some incompatibility in accepting ms formatting (e.g. legislation). There are big improvements with both. The developers deserve our heartfelt thanks.
Will you guys include tabs on 3.6? And a new icon set?
At the moment, we are not working on this kind of features.
Congrats, I think we need an update mechanism like the one in Chrome (or Firefox), silent (with an option to disable it for system admins who want one stable version), also update must be only the binary difference, not the whole package again.
Unfortunately this beautiful product cannot be recommended for commercial applications, if complex text documents is the scope, util bugs like https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45049 and all his relatives are not solved, especially in those countries, where reference should be located before number. Function averageif is also long avaited addition to the calc component. Good lack to developers!
This release is much faster, as advertised. Thank you for the great work.
Great love the progress, though when I go and look at the release notes for each upgrade they often seem to give no information about the point release at all!
The Libre Office, release 3.5.4, have a bug in PDF format for image. I work with many images and when I save in PDF format, a black box appear in front of it.
Les joueurs sont très efficaces des activités sportives. Connecté au dunk | contraire CAN peut aussi pourraient autrement.
Nike SB trempés, y compris la langue rembourrage supplémentaire ainsi glisser l’atmosphère réelle sole.
dont know why – but I installed 3.5.3 a week ago -works fine – you will need to change your repositories to include the new version though
i’m on a win box now – sorry do not remember exactly the opensuse 12 path – but look around the lo-site and adjust your repos accordingly – then just update from within yast
rgds
per