LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users
Thanks to the work of 300 contributors, the new LibreOffice comes with substantial improvements
The Internet, August 1, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.4.2, the third version of the 3.4 family, targeting both private individuals and enterprises. LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes the majority of the most-important bugs identified by users in the previous version, and can be deployed for production needs by most enterprises.
The Document Foundation encourages large organizations deploying LibreOffice to do so in conjunction with a support partner, who can carefully assess specific requirements, help manage migration and provide bespoke fixes for identified issues. Purchasing LibreOffice support from a TDF partner also provides enterprises with an indirect means to contribute financially to the project, thereby funding its development, improving its stability, and accelerating its growth. Users should always refer to the release notes before deploying the new version.
LibreOffice 3.4.2 is the result of the combined activity of 300 contributors having made more than 23,000 commits, with the addition, deletion or modification of around five million lines of code. The developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers: Oracle and SUSE have each provided around 25% of the commits, with a further 25% coming from community volunteers new to the project since our inception, and with a further 20% from RedHat. The remaining commits came from a combination of pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.
If we look at the same data for individual developers, the top 12 by number of commits since the inception of LibreOffice is composed of a mixture of corporate-sponsored contributors (from 4 companies: Canonical, Oracle, RedHat and SUSE) and a number of private individual contributors, indicating a balanced situation and a healthy community.
“TDF was born with the aim of evolving the OpenOffice.org code to develop a cleaner and leaner free office suite and, after ten months, we are right on track to achieve this objective,” says Bjoern Michaelsen, one of the four Canonical contributors, and a key member of the Engineering Steering Committee. “Of course, with such a large code renovation effort, we are aware of the short-term risk of reduced stability, but this is counterbalanced by the long-term improvement in features, speed and – again – stability.”
Other news is that the number of TDF official contributors and LibreOffice users is increasing. Youbing Jin, President of RedFlag2000 Software Company, says, “We are delighted to see that TDF is getting ever stronger, and we are proud to be part of it.”
The community around The Document Foundation and LibreOffice will gather in Paris for the first LibreOffice Conference, from October 13 to October 15, 2011 (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). The call for papers is open until August 8, while registration will close at the end of September.
Although TDF is happy that 3.4.2, deployed with support from a suitable partner, can be considered “enterprise-ready”, it is clearly only one more milestone on our march towards ever greater stability, with the 3.4.3 release to incorporate further stability improvements and security fixes by the end of August.
LibreOffice 3.4.2 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.
off-topic, but: why is the font so friggin’ small?
thats a good question i hope this will change
thats a good comment.i hope this will change
Just type CTRL and “+” in your browser window. That will increase your font size. To decrease type CTRL and “-“
Great post, I just wish you had not used the 3D pie charts for two reasons:
a) The 3D effect makes it very difficult to correctly compare segment size since the perspective of the slices is distorted. A plain 2D pie chart is better readable in basically every single application, it does not add anything useful except for looking fancy.
b) Even in a 2D pie chart, comparing several segments of similar size is difficult at best. For example, it’s impossible to tell if any significant difference in contribution between Petr, Frank and Thomas. Pie charts are great for 2-3 slices and even when just 3 are involved exact ratios are difficult to determine, putting the percentages next to each slide can help with that but in most instances like the above a bar chart (here probably horizontal) is of more value than a pie chart.
The chart designer has forgotten the color aspects too. It’s impossible to identify the segment related to some specific contributors if you (as myself) have problems with color vision. Almost 9% of Caucasoid male are colorblind.
(Refer to http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/)
is it similar to 3.4.2 RC 3? or i should download the final release? thanks
thanks to all contributors. good job!
Release notes answer your question:
This release is bit-for-bit identical to the 3.4.2 Release Candidate 3, so you don’t need to download or reinstall if you have that version already.
Well done to all the Libreoffice developers. Thank you for your hard work. 🙂
As usual, Linux users (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian) can check my installation guide:
http://www.libre-software.net/how-to-install-libreoffice-on-ubuntu-linux-mint
Congratulations to TDF!
Why the heck does this still not save correct ppt files when a bug fix has been available for weeks? Bug 32709 – https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32709
How many times can LibreOffice shoot itself in the foot? There are thousands of people who want this to succeed, but a minority who are determined to press ahead with timed releases, consequences be damned. How idiotic is that approach?
Whatever you do, don’t dare to call this “Enterprise Ready”. It is far from it.
It should be noted that on Windows, Java 7 will not work with LibreOffice.
On which windows version?
Just checked with Java 7 on Win7 64bit (LibreOffice 3.4.2 crashes while starting)
Though, 3.4.1 seemed to work (did not crash on start-up)
There is a bug for it: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39659
Interesting that RedHat and SUSE are the only two distributions that actually commit a substantial amount of code to the project. I would have expected Canonical to be an equal partner, as they rely so heavily on the office suite as the main productivity platform for their releases.
@Johannes: Thanks for the link! I didn’t know I had to remove the previous version first.
The information is clear and very descriptive, rather than the last post.
And I like how you explain it with the pie chart …Thanks!
Why is this being released without the bug fix for 32709 applied when the fix has been available for weeks? Why does libreoffice keep shooting itself in the foot by not fixing such simple regressions?
Call it what you like, but don’t call it enterprise ready when it can’t export ppt files correctly.
This is great news! Where can we find who the TDF partners are? imho , such information should be part of the announcement.
Users who aren’t careful, could get scammed and be left with bitter feelings towards the suite for the wrong reasons. Please include it here or perhaps on the Libreoffice homepage.
LibreOffice for companies? Not with professional font families!
I’m working with Linux in my small company office and have many Problems with professional fonts in writer.
LibreOffice (LO) does not correctly recognized the fonts and does not store the different font settings in the document. After reopening information is lost and the font in LO’s content is misinterpreted as Medium instead of correct Book!
This is a old problem herited from OpenOffice (reported in 2007 and not fixed http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=82986 )
After switching to LO i had to recognize that the Bug still exists in current versions of LO.
I reported the problem for LO as https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35538
It’s a little bit strange, that DTP programs like Scribus have the ability to store font settings in the document for different fonts.
Quando vai sair a versão 4.0 do LibreOffice?
Marcus, follow this link:
> http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan#3.4_release <
the new release is the best
Well, finally I won the Lotto : P :
LO 3.4.2 – installed in PC with Winbugs XP Professional SP3 – does not detect the language extensions and automatic review of the text is impossible.
Unfortunately, serious regressions with pivot tables are still there. Libreoffice 3.4.2 still constantly crashes on opening complex spreadsheets with tens of pivot tables created in previous versions of the program and pivot table converts text values in header rows into numbers (date). The last one can be solved with workarounds, but the crashes of previously created files working with all previous versions of the openoffice.org and libreoffice until the 3.4 branch is very, very serious problem for commercial or academic use.
Memoria Activa – Contabilidade, Lda também usa a suite LibreOffice 🙂
Great website. The last one can be solved with workarounds, but the crashes of previously created files working with all previous versions of the openoffice.org and libreoffice until the 3.4 branch is very, very serious problem for commercial or academic use.
Gracias por el duro trabajo que significa editar este programa e implementar nuevas funciones, me encanta y espero que pronto, no haya muchos reclamos de algunos de los usuarios que reportan fallos o reclaman nuevas funciones, pero creo que con eso, el programa ira mejorando más y más. Hasta el momento uso LO español en el Win7 64, y todo de maravilla, equipo LO. gracias desde Guatemala
There are few bugs and missed functions:
1. It would be grate to have global cross references like in word to add the references on to literature from global document to local.
2. It would be grate to have global command define for formulas to define your own symbols in formulas like in TeX, for example “define bf = {bold f}”
3. There is a bug in inline formulas, they are not on the same line as the text. for example enter formula in text with subscript and you will see that the bottom formula line is not on the same line that the text tin the line.
I’m going to be volunteering for a non-profit organization, and they have a very, very, very old database program that they are using, so would Base be a great replacement for them?
Asi es, muchas gracias por el duro trabajo que significa editar este programa e implementar nuevas funciones, me encanta y espero que pronto, no haya muchos reclamos de algunos de los usuarios que reportan fallos o reclaman nuevas funciones, pero creo que con eso, el programa ira mejorando más y más.
After I originally commented I appear to have clicked the -Notify me when
new comments are added- checkbox and now every time a comment is added I get
4 emails with the same comment. There has to be a means you can remove me from that service?
Many thanks!