Category: Announcements

Berlin, August 29, 2012 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.1, a new and improved version of the best free office suite ever. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, solving a number of issues and regressions, plus further improving the stability of the program. LibreOffice 3.6.1 is offered in over 100 languages, covering all the countries of Europe and the Americas, and many countries in Africa and Asia/Pacific where it is often the only available native language suite.

LibreOffice 3.6.1 is announced within a month after the 3.6.0 release, which brings lots of new features and functionality: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-6-new-features-and-fixes/

LibreOffice is quickly becoming the de-facto standard for migrations to free office suites, thanks to the growing feature set and the improved interoperability with proprietary software file formats.

News also comes from the Regione Umbria, the first Italian region to recognize and support ODF in 2007, that has just announced a migration project to LibreOffice, which will start in autumn and involve 5,000 desktops in different organizations. The migration project has launched a blog in Italian at http://libreumbria.wordpress.com/

The Câmara Municipal de Vieira do Minho (county of Vieira do Minho) in Portugal has also announced its migration to LibreOffice: http://www.cm-vminho.pt/index.php?oid=9871&op=all

The growing number of adoptions of LibreOffice by private and public enterprises is testament to the improvements brought to the old code by TDF, thanks to over 500 developers and many testers and translators working on exciting new features, stability and quality.

While preparing the next major version, the LibreOffice community continues to work on the current 3.6 series of its software, and has also produced another maintenance release for the previous 3.5 series, to ensure continuity and stability for adopters.

TDF has also just announced a new “HardHacks” project at http://skyfromme.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/announcing-libreoffice-hardhacks/ and will be reporting progress on this on a regular basis.

LibreOffice 3.6.1 is available for immediate download from: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/
Extensions for LibreOffice are available at: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center

Change logs are available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-6-1-release-3.6.1.1.log (fixes in 3.6.1.1) and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-6-1-release-3.6.1.2.log (fixes in 3.6.1.2).

Your donation helps us to deliver a better product: http://donate.libreoffice.org

The Document Foundation is proud to announce that as of today, LibreOffice 3.5.6 is available.

The 3.5 series is currently being maintained in parallel to our newly released version 3.6, and is dedicated to more conservative users. Today’s release fixes a number of bugs, and is the recommended version for all users of the 3.5 series.

LibreOffice 3.5.6 is available for download on various platforms and in many languages at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

Detailed technical change logs are available at:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.6/RC1
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.6/RC2

The worldwide LibreOffice Conference will take place in Berlin, Germany, from October 17th to 19th, 2012. It is supported by the German Federal Ministries of the Interior and of Economics and Technology, Details are available at http://conference.libreoffice.org

The Document Foundation welcomes contributions and financial donations to the project: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/donate/

Berlin, August 8, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6, the fourth major release of the best free office suite ever, which provides a large number of new features and incremental improvement over the previous versions. Innovations range from invisible features such as improved performance and interoperability to the more visible ones such as user interface tweaks, where theming has improved to more closely match current design best-practice. A full list with screenshots is available here: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-6-new-features-and-fixes, because a picture says more than a thousand words.

Wherever you look you see improvements: a new CorelDRAW importer, integration with Alfresco via the CMIS protocol and limited SharePoint integration, color-scales and data-bars in spreadsheet cells, PDF export watermarking, improved auto-format function for tables in text documents,, high quality image scaling, Microsoft SmartArt import for text documents, and improved CSV handling. In addition, there is a lot of contributions from the design team: a cleaner look, especially on Windows PCs, beautiful new presentation master pages, and a new splash screen.

LibreOffice is becoming increasingly popular in corporate environments. During the last months, several large public bodies have announced their migration to the free office suite: the Capital Region of Denmark, the cities of Limerick in Ireland, Grygov in the Czech Republic, Las Palmas in Spain, the City of Largo in Florida, the municipality of Pilea-Hortiatis in Greece, and the Public Library System of Chicago.

Dave Richards of the City of Largo has commented about the new release on his blog: “I have been testing LibreOffice 3.6 and am happy to see the progress. At this time all of our showstoppers are fixed and we probably will upgrade almost immediately when it’s released. Nice work. CMIS is shaping up nicely. I’ll be looking at 3.7 when it appears in the daily builds”.

In France, the MIMO Working Group – the ministries of Agriculture, Culture and Communication, Defence, Education, Energy, Finance Interior and Justice – with a total of 500.000 end users, has certified LibreOffice for deployment on every desktop. At the same time, the OSB Alliance joined the efforts of German and Swiss cities and communities sponsoring development on the LibreOffice codebase.

Corporate users are joining consumers who quickly switched to LibreOffice. Giorgio Buccellati, Professor Emeritus of History and Near Eastern Languages at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles), says: “LibreOffice is wonderful software. I am an avid user of the Hybrid PDF feature, which allows to exchange PDF files with all other users while preserving the possibility of editing the same document like a native file”.

LibreOffice 3.6 has been developed by the growing community of hackers gathered around The Document Foundation, thanks to a friendly and welcoming environment, and the compelling Free Software ethos. The community has surpassed the threshold of five hundred developers providing new features and patches since the announcement of the project on September 28, 2010.

According to Ohloh, LibreOffice is the third largest developer community focusing on free software applications, after Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and the largest to be independent from a single corporate sponsor. This result has been achieved in less than two years, and is now a benchmark for free software projects.

The Document Foundation invites power users, able to help iron out any final wrinkles, to read the release notes carefully, install LibreOffice 3.6.0, and report any problems.  More conservative users should stick with LibreOffice 3.5. Corporate users are strongly advised to deploy LibreOffice with the backing of professional support, from a company able to assist with migration, end user training, support and maintenance.

LibreOffice 3.6 is available from: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/
To contribute to the further development of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, you can donate at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/donate/

Stability enhancements and bugfixes thanks to a large, diverse and rapidly growing developer community
Improvements in Calc, Impress, font handling and compatibility to third-party formats

Berlin, July 11th, 2012. The Document Foundation today announces the immediate availability of LibreOffice 3.5.5, the current version of the free office suite.

This release fixes a number of bugs and further improves the stability of the software, making it the best version available for corporate and enterprise adoption. Among the changes are improvements in Calc, Impress, in the handling of fonts as well as enhancements with regards to importing and exporting third-party formats.

LibreOffice 3.5.5 is available for download for various platforms and in many languages at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

Detailed technical change logs are available at:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.5/RC1
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.5/RC2
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.5/RC3

The worldwide LibreOffice Conference will take place in Berlin, Germany, from October 17th to 19th, 2012. It is supported by the German Federal Ministries of the Interior and of Economics and Technology, with the Call for Papers running until August 15th. Details are available at http://conference.libreoffice.org

The next major release 3.6 of LibreOffice, including new and exciting features, will be released within the next weeks, with the current 3.5 series receiving ongoing maintenance.