LibreOffice 5.1 in final development stage

Over 19,000 commits from 300 developers in the last 12 months

Berlin, October 28, 2015 – LibreOffice 5.1 has officially entered the final stage of development with the release of the Alpha version, which is available to technology enthusiasts and community members for the 1^st Bug Hunting Session organized from Friday, October 30, to Sunday, November 1.

LibreOffice 5.1 starts twice as fast than the previous version, and adds to the usual incremental interoperability improvements with MS Office file formats (including MS Office 2016) some nice features, such as the Chart Sidebar to change settings in a more intuitive way, an easier workflow with Google Drive, OneDrive and SharePoint, and a Style Menu in Writer which will help user to access this fundamental LibreOffice feature.

The first release candidate of LibreOffice 5.1 will be available in mid December, and will be the first version to offer a good overview of all the features for product reviews and deployment evaluations (not to be used for the production of real documents).

In January 2016, a second and a third release candidate will come before the final availability of the application in early February, just after FOSDEM 2016 (where LibreOffice developers will provide all the technical details about the new and improved software features).

During the last 12 months, around 300 developers have hacked the LibreOffice source code, providing over 19,000 commits (corresponding to a weekly average of 375 commits).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.0.2, the current “fresh” version, is available for download from this link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/. LibreOffice 4.4.5, the current “still” version, is available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-still/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.