LibreOffice 4.1: a landmark for interoperability

The office suite features a large number of improvements which bring compatibility with proprietary and legacy file formats to the next level

Berlin, July 25, 2013 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.1, not only the best but also the most interoperable free office suite ever. LibreOffice 4.1 features a large number of improvements in the area of document compatibility, which increases the opportunities of sharing knowledge with users of proprietary software while retaining the original layout and contents.

Interoperability is a key asset for LibreOffice, which is the de facto standard for migrations to free office suites since early 2012. Numerous improvements have been made to Microsoft OOXML import and export filters, as well as to legacy Microsoft Office and RTF file filters. Most of these improvements derive from the fundamental activity of certified developers backing migration projects, based on a professional support agreement.

Instrumental for interoperability are also new features such as font embedding in Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw – which helps in retaining the visual aspect when fonts used to produce the document are not installed on the target PC – and import and export functions new in Excel 2013 for ODF OpenFormula compatibility.

In addition to interoperability, LibreOffice 4.1 offers a very large number of new features and improvements also in other areas of the suite, which are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-1-new-features-and-fixes.

LibreOffice 4.1 is also importing some AOO features, including the Symphony sidebar, which is considered experimental. LibreOffice developers are working at the integration with the widget layout technique (which will make it dynamically resizeable and consistent with the behaviour of LibreOffice dialog windows).

LibreOffice 4.1 arrives at the end of a significant development process, which has just been outlined on the foundation blog: http://wp.me/p1byPE-q0. Feature wise, the summary is here: https://www.libreoffice.org/features/why-libreoffice/.

In just two months, on September 25, 2013, the LibreOffice community will gather in Italy at the Third LibreOffice Conference, hosted by the Department of Computer Science of Milan State University. More information on the conference web site at the following address: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2013/en. The Call for Paper is open until Sunday, August 4.

Downloading LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.1 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

Changelogs are available at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.0/RC1 (changed in 4.1.0.1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.0/RC2 (changed in 4.1.0.2) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.0/RC3 (changed in 4.1.0.3) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.0/RC4 (changed in 4.1.0.4).

Support The Document Foundation

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.

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