Berlin, July 30, 2014 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3, the 8th major release of the free office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010. The application includes the combined effort of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers, and has reached a point of maturity that makes it suitable for every kind of deployment, if backed by value added services by the growing LibreOffice ecosystem.
LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including:
- Document interoperability: support of OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support of 30 new Excel formulas, support of MS Works spreadsheets and databases, and Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and more.
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Comment management: comments can now be printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported – including nested comments – in ODF, DOC, OOXML and RTF documents, for improved productivity and better collaboration.
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Intuitive spreadsheet handling: Calc now allows the performing of several tasks more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it, and being able to fully select text conversion models by the user.
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3D models in Impress: support of animated 3D models in the new open glTF format, plus initial support for Collada and kmz files that are found in Google Warehouse, in order to add a fresh new look and animations to keynotes (support of this feature is currently on Windows and Linux versions only).
LibreOffice 4.3 also support “monster” paragraphs exceeding 65,000 characters (an example of an 11 years old bug solved thanks to the modernization of the OOo source code, which is an exclusive function of LibreOffice). In addition, the accessibility technology on Windows has become a standard feature, thanks to the improvements based on IBM’s IAccessible2 framework.
The entire list of new features and improvements of LibreOffice 4.3 is here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.3.
“The LibreOffice project shows that a large free software community can live and thrive without the patronage of a software vendor, to liberate PC desktops”, says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Today, you can’t own a better office suite than LibreOffice, in term of features, interoperability, support for document standards and independence. After many years, LibreOffice brings the control of the PC desktop back into the hands of the users”.
According to the Coverity Scan service, joined by LibreOffice in October 2012, the quality of LibreOffice source code has improved dramatically during the last two years, with a reduction of the defect density per 1,000 lines of code from an above the average 1.11 to an industry leading 0.08 (for more information: http://softwareintegrity.coverity.com/register-for-libreoffice-scan-report.html).
People interested in technical details about the release can access the change logs here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.3.0/RC1 (fixed in RC1), here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.3.0/RC2 (fixed in RC2), here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.3.0/RC3 (fixed in RC3) and here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.3.0/RC4 (fixed in RC4).
Download LibreOffice
LibreOffice 4.3 and LibreOffice 4.2.6 – which will be released on Friday – are available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions and templates to supplement the installation of the software and add specific features can be found here: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/.
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 enhance the project both at global and local level.
About The Document Foundation (TDF)
The Document Foundation is an independent, self-governing and meritocratic organization, based on Free Software ethos and incorporated in Germany as a not for profit entity. TDF is focused on the development of LibreOffice – the best free office suite ever – chosen by the global community as the legitimate heir of OOo, and as such adopted by a growing number of public administrations, enterprises and SMBs for desktop productivity.
TDF is accessible to individuals and organizations who agree with its core values and contribute to its activities. At the end of June 2014, the foundation has just over 200 members and well over 3,000 volunteer contributors worldwide.
Media Contacts: https://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/.
