The development of LibreOffice, the default office suite for almost all Linux distributions , is moving at a frantic pace. This week, LibreOffice has 3.5.5 RC1 and 3.6 Beta 1 available for testers to download and test.
LibreOffice 3.5.5 is the bugfix release for the current 3.5 series. There are a huge list of bugs fixed in this release, compared to 3.5.4. The most notable fixes are for Microsoft Office format files. Detailed release note can be found here.
LibreOffice 3.6 is the new series which will succeed 3.5. This series will introduce far more improvements and bug fixes. A list of features to be introduced in 3.6 are:
- Writer: support for contextual spacing
- Writer: DOCX import now handles GetExpression and SetExpression fields
- Writer: RTF/DOCX import/export now handle the document zoom setting
- Writer: Word count (whole document and selection) in status bar
- Support for importing Smart Art (only as pictures, not editable)
- Label / business card wizard improvements
- Calc: New option to specify a custom sheet name prefix in new documents
- Calc: Export conditional formatting to xlsx
- Calc: Improved CSV file import
- Calc: Support field items in cells
- Calc: Allow sorting of data from the autofilter menu
- Calc: Quickly allow pasting only text, value, or formula from the context menu
- Impress: Added widescreen format for impress-slides
- Misc: Import filter for Corel Draw documents
- Misc: PDF Export with Watermark option
- Misc: Rulers are now much cleaner and more light-weight
- Misc: GTK themes are now able to render background gradient
- GUI: The About dialog has been redesigned for a cleaner look
- Performance improvements
Detailed release notes for LibreOffice 3.6 with expected features can be found here.
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| Import MS Office SmartArt |
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| Word Count |
Important: These releases, as usual, are for testers and developers and are not recommended for production systems.
Installation in Ubuntu based distributions
If you want to test LibreOffice 3.6, for Ubuntu based distributions you can install the ppa.
If you have the LibreOffice PPA, you will need to remove the ppa before adding the new ppa, otherwise there may be conflicts while installation of packages.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-prereleases
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
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