The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3
The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3
The first stable release of the free office suite is available for download
The Internet, January 25, 2011 – The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project.Not only does it ship a number of new and original features, LibreOffice 3.3 is also a significant achievement for a number of reasons:
- the developer community has been able to build their own and independent process, and get up and running in a very short time (with respect to the size of the code base and the project’s strong ambitions);
- thanks to the high number of new contributors having been attracted into the project, the source code is quickly undergoing a major clean-up to provide a better foundation for future development of LibreOffice;
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the Windows installer, which is going to impact the largest and most diverse user base, has been integrated into a single build containing all language versions, thus reducing the size for download sites from 75 to 11GB, making it easier for us to deploy new versions more rapidly and lowering the carbon footprint of the entire infrastructure.
Caolán McNamara from RedHat, one of the developer community leaders, comments, “We are excited: this is our very first stable release, and therefore we are eager to get user feedback, which will be integrated as soon as possible into the code, with the first enhancements being released in February. Starting from March, we will be moving to a real time-based, predictable, transparent and public release schedule, in accordance with Engineering Steering Committee’s goals and users’ requests”. The LibreOffice development roadmap is available at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan
LibreOffice 3.3 brings several unique new features. The 10 most-popular among community members are, in no particular order: the ability to import and work with SVG files; an easy way to format title pages and their numbering in Writer; a more-helpful Navigator Tool for Writer; improved ergonomics in Calc for sheet and cell management; and Microsoft Works and Lotus Word Pro document import filters. In addition, many great extensions are now bundled, providing PDF import, a slide-show presenter console, a much improved report builder, and more besides. A more-complete and detailed list of all the new features offered by LibreOffice 3.3 is viewable on the following web page: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/new-features-and-fixes/
LibreOffice 3.3 also provides all the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.3, such as new custom properties handling; embedding of standard PDF fonts in PDF documents; new Liberation Narrow font; increased document protection in Writer and Calc; auto decimal digits for “General” format in Calc; 1 million rows in a spreadsheet; new options for CSV import in Calc; insert drawing objects in Charts; hierarchical axis labels for Charts; improved slide layout handling in Impress; a new easier-to-use print interface; more options for changing case; and colored sheet tabs in Calc. Several of these new features were contributed by members of the LibreOffice team prior to the formation of The Document Foundation.
LibreOffice hackers will be meeting at FOSDEM in Brussels on February 5 and 6, and will be presenting their work during a one-day workshop on February 6, with speeches and hacking sessions coordinated by several members of the project.
The home of The Document Foundation is at http://www.documentfoundation.org
The home of LibreOffice is at http://www.libreoffice.org where the download page has been redesigned by the community to be more user-friendly.
*** About The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the OOo Community into a new, open, independent, and meritocratic organization within the next few months. An independent Foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.
*** Media Contacts for TDF
Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Mobile: +49 151 14424108 – E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812 – E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org
Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829 – E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
Congratulations for the achievement 🙂
LibreOffice is great, already better than OpenOffice, but i hope u can add great tool that is in Microsoft Office which is called Microsoft Visio! Its great tool, real professional – and i hope some look-a-like gonna be in LibreOffice – please can u confirm this, that u already thought bout it?
I am usin Linux for few years now..but still i think MS Office is the only thing they did real right.
Libreoffice Draw
Well Draw doesn’t cut it for this job. What I found usefull is Kivio, which is part of KOffice – http://www.koffice.org/. KOffice also has another part that is missing in LO/OO – a project management app caled KPlato. The database app in KOffice, called Kexi, is also better than what is available in LO/OOo.
Dia
Congratulations to all who worked hard to achieve this wonderful milestone!
I only heard about this project after reading about Ubuntu’s announcement to include LibreOffice in it’s next release.
Looking forward to use these great open-source tools from the community.
Congratulations 🙂
Congratulations on the first release. A big thanks to everyone who made it happen. Keep up the awesome work. Making the release message viral. 🙂
Fantastic! Congratulations, I pass from openoffice to libreoffice.
I tried LibreOffice 3.3 and found it to be less functional than OpenOffice 3.2. I am trying to print a 114-page document using draft quality print settings. Because I am using custom sized paper, I cannot use auto-duplexing (print drivers, not software problem). Because I am having to manually feed each sheet through, the software keeps changing the printer settings back to default after printing each page.
With OpenOffice 3.2, I never experienced this problem. The software would remember the print settings for each document until I either manually changed the setting or closed the document.
LibreOffice is a step backwards, not an improvement in my opinion.
Dave, is this problem with the Windows version or Linux version?
Hi,
I have uninstalled OOo and installed LO french version on Windows Vista basic Home Edition (32bits), all seems to work fine…
Good job, congratulations!
Thank you for the work and the time of all members of DocumentFoundation.
Best regards.
Congratulations. Very interessting what will happen in the future with three version of OO.org on a mac.
The download page doesn’t work with safari browser under snow leopard.
Can you open up the Launchpad account so people can submit Blueprints/feature ideas?
Congratulations guys, great work. Downloaded, installed, run. Oracle can stick it.
Great News, and now that you are independent from Oracle maybe this project would me more willing to accept other ideas.
I would love if some sort of synergy could be established with http://www.openclipart.org/ as they have great repository of SVG graphics for use as clipart. Some sort of agreed on integration with LibreOffice could improve ease of use and functionality for end users.
I forgot to say I’d been waiting for SVG support for a long time, great to see it making its way in.
*Thank you, thank you very much. LibreOffice team!
Since the first beta I’ve followed the development of your admirable work.
When I installed the RC 4 and I tried, I had no doubt that I had on my PC the first stable version of LibreOffice. It is a pleasure to use it in my papers.
Knowing OpenOffice since version 0.45, I can say that LibreOffice has exceeded it eliminating some of its eternal shortcomings.
The only complaint I have is that my two attempts in last September to subscribe to the newsletter of The Document Foundation failed because I do not know what circumstances. Everything else has been a cinch.
I just hope that developers of GNU / Linux leave your fears aside and start including LibreOffice in their distros.
——————
¡Gracias, muchas gracias equipo de LibreOffice!
Desde el primer beta he seguido el desarrollo de vuestro admirable trabajo.
Cuando instalé el RC 4 y lo probé, no me quedó duda de que ya tenía en mi PC la primera versión estable de LibreOffice. Es un placer emplearlo en mis trabajos escritos.
Habiendo conocido OpenOffice desde la versión 0.45, puedo decir que LibreOffice lo ha superado eliminando algunas de sus eternas deficiencias.
La única queja que tengo es que mis dos intentos por suscribirme en septiembre pasado a los boletines de The Document Foundation fallaron por no sé qué circunstancias. Todo lo demás ha sido “coser y cantar”.
Sólo espero que los desarrolladores de GNU/Linux dejen sus temores a un lado y empiecen a incluir LibreOffice en sus distros.
That’s one small step for the fundation, one giant leap for community!
Awesome, I can’t believe we are finally free to choose, use and contribute with a real open driven office suite software like LibreOffice.
Long live to Libre Office¡
Been Beating on 3.3.0.4 and its much faster and more stable then .3 I used to use Lotus Word Pro till OO and now Libre, I wont go back but the conversion from LWP files to Libre files isnt perfect have to do much rework but mostly resetting fonts and sizes.. but the bulk of the page comes over fine. Thanks for a good upgrade path and a great program
Congratulations! Looking great – keep up the good work. I look forward to some great new features this next year.
Andrew Prough
Kyle, Texas, USA
So far Open Office has been a huge disappointment. I am no fan of Microsoft Word, having loathed it from the very beginning, but Open office copies most of the worst features of Microsoft word, such as the awful bullet and automumbering metaphors, and then adds hundreds of very irritating bugs. Where the metaphors differ from Winword, such as in table mode, the changes are mostly for the worse, making it very difficult to format a clean looking, properly aligned table.
In addition, there are very few improvements to the inefficient stylesheet/template metaphors of Micosoft Word. I really wish they had copied Framemaker and/or Ventura Publisher for much more effective document metaphors.
I agree with you. I was very happy with OpenOffice for allowing me to open and create MS Office files without installing the evil itself… but the one fly in the ointment was the fact that the OOo UI did most of the functions in the same “wrong” way as MS Office!
Since MS Office regularly and royally screwed-up a lot of my academic and paid work while I was in university I had forced myself to learn to use LaTeX. Once you’ve programmed a bit of TeX you understand how all these office packages work under the skin (I could certainly “see” more of what was going on in WordPerfect and Word after that) but it also shows you just how much better it could be done and how many possibilities are missed due to the crappy way the UI is constructed.
Like you I hope that the “libration” of LibreOffice will allow the developers to work on moving away from just copying Microsoft’s UI towards creating a genuinely powerful interface of its own. I think the period of making it easy for MS Office users to step over is now over – most people have heard of OpenOffice and the interested have probably had some hands-on experience with it. Time to convince the doubters to switch by making LibreOffice BETTER than MS Office as well as being free (beer and speech).
Congratulations! And best wishes for the future of LibreOffice!
Can we get a Mirror in North America, please?
Fantastic! Thanks. Keep up the excellent – and fast – work. 🙂
My heartiest congratulation on a quick first milestone :). Thanks for all the hard work.
Excellent job Libreoffice team!!
I’ve just checked Libreoffice memory usage and it uses 40mb RAM less than Openoffice.org, even with up to five huge documents opened at the same time. It may seems not worthy noticing, but to those who work all day long with huge documents and spreadsheets, this is surely an improvement (whether it was intentionally accomplished or not).
A faster office suit, indeed.
Great work! Using LibreOffice instead of “OracleOffice” since now!
Costa Rica
Great, but: DOWNLOAD page seems to be BROKEN
I tried with 3 different browsers with and without javascript – it just returns a silly -fixme- string but no link for download. Not good. Hope, someone reads and fixes it – I don’t know where else to tell it…
But besides: Thanks guys for an amazing work,
manfred
I am running Vista and cannot download this suite. I think it doesn’t recognise my OS. Can’t see anywhere else I can manualy select the download from my system. Any ideas?
That is if you call “- fixme – add nice lang” user friendly and on top of that you do not foresee an alternative option that does work!
I want to download and try it!!!!
Hello,
I use Fedora 13, and cannot download from the official website because as you say so helpfully :
“When you visit this page, we try to detect your system and offer you the right download automatically, but we may not succeed in all cases.”
No way to go anywhere from this page… maybe you should disable the automatic detection ? I’m sure most people can manually click on the correct one if you propose a list of choices…
I found this file on torrent :
LibO_3.3.0_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz
is it the last version ???
all this is a bit confusing…
Hopefully the RPM on torrent will be the good version…
Great work people, to everyone involved, your work is hugely appreciated.
LibreOffice is fantastic! Downloaded and installed in my old PPC Mac Powerbook – it works a treat! While many developers are abandoning the PPC platform, you’ve provided us with a superb piece of software. Game on….
A fantastic application. Thank you.
But, I have difficulty finding the cursor in Writer. Would it be possible to allow users to resize and/or change the colour of the cursor?
Also, would it be possible to add a Print Current Page Only radio button to the print dialogue?
Thank you.
SJF
Libre Office 3.3.1 release out for grabs
The Document Foundation has released their latest version of Libre Office which now stands at 3.3.1. This is a micro release for Libre Office which stands to be a serous contender for Open Office.
http://ubuntumanual.org/posts/270/libre-office-3-3-1-release-out-for-grabs
Good find 😀
Thx 2 all the ones in The Document Foundation 4 this great suite office… i use it always… oh, only a small thing, plz make the toolbar icons a few bigger in the next versions, just like go-oo 3.2.1 had, cause i think it makes even easier to use it… But again, it so nice… Rafael Correa ordered all the public institutions have 2 use the free software… it’s so good 4 us… greetings from Ecuador…
I’ve been using continuously your office suite since StarOffice 5.2. Tell me why after all this years it still sucks a lot, especially Impress. In version 3.4.2 slide sorter is a pain in the ass. Each time when I try to rearrange the order of the slides this piece of crap crashes.
Well, well, Spiral …
First advice: Leave your ass at home and let us know your brain. ; )
Second advice: Download LibreOffice 3.3.4, which is the stable version for purposes of production. The Document Foundation Blog has very clearly informed this in the posts by the month of August.
Third tip: With the version 3.3.4 installed, to change positions the slides in Impress, simply drag the element chosen in the column of Slides or Slide Sorting. It’s easy!