A new month, and a new release of LibreOffice, the open-source office suite installed by default in Ubuntu.
LibreOffice 4.3 is the eighth major release of the software since its split from OpenOffice back in 2010 and the third minor release in the 4.x release series.
What’s New?
Every major release of the office suite sees a huge set of changes, fixes and updates included. If you have a spare couple of hours you can pour over the
entire changelog for this latest update on the Document Foundation wiki at
wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.3.
To save you some time we’ve put together a brief summary of the more user-facing and headline features new to this update.
Document interoperability
As one of many office suites LibreOffice comes with improvements in handling, opening and saving to and from other office file formats.
In 4.3, this results in a raft of OOXML improvements, including DrawingML features, theme fonts, and file embeds. Theme colours on fonts, paragraphs and table cells are now preserved, as is styling, fill and other effects on images and shapes.
Microsoft Office users will find support for 30 additional Excel formulas. Mac users chancing upon old ClarisWorks, MacWorks and SuperPaint files will be pleased to know these can now be opened in LibreOffice.
Nested comments in documents benefit from a formatting tidy-up and may now be both imported and exported as .doc, .rtf and .docx files (among others).
Other Notable Changes
- Support for animated 3D models in Impress
- Support for Collada and .kmz files
- Initial HiDPI support on Windows & Linux
- Start center now previews all files, not just .odf
- Progress bar for .docx imports
- PDF Import tweaks, including rotated text support
Finally, an 11 year old bug that prevents ‘monster’ paragraphs of more than 65,000 characters being entered has finally been solved. TDF say this is down to “the modernization of the OOo source code, which is an exclusive function of LibreOffice.”
Download LibreOffice 4.3
LibreOffice 4.3 is available to download from the official project website at
libreoffice.org/download, or direct through the following links:
If you don’t fancy upgrading you can expect to find the release included in Ubuntu 14.10, due for release later this year.
Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/
