Five Big Reasons to Download LibreOffice 3.6

Posted: August 08, 2012

If you're looking for an office suite, without the pricetag of MS Office, take a look at the features included in LibreOffice 3.6 .

It was just about two months ago that the beta version of LibreOffice 3.6 arrived, but on Wednesday the Document Foundation announced the release of the final version of the office productivity suite.

LibreOffice 3.6 is the fourth major release of the free and open source software, and it provides “a large number of new features and incremental improvement over the previous versions,” wrote Florian Effenberger, chairman of the Board at the Document Foundation, in the official announcement.

New innovations in the software 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,” Effenberger added.

Ready for a quick overview? Here's a rundown of some of the software's key new highlights.

1. Writer

LibreOffice's Writer word processor has been updated with myriad new enhancements in this latest release, including support for contextual spacing, the addition of Word Count to the software's status bar, and support for importing Microsoft Office SmartArt. Numerous other tweaks have been made to the software as well, as well as to the LibreOffice label/business card wizard.

[caption id="attachment_10386" align="alignleft" width="180"]LibreOffice's Impress presentation module now includes 10 new master pages (Click image to enlarge.)[/caption]2. Calc

New in the Calc spreadsheet module, meanwhile, are improved CSV file importing, support for color scales and data bars, and an option to specify a custom sheet name prefix in new documents, among many other changes. New spreadsheet functions have also been added in accordance with the ODF OpenFormula specification.

3. Impress

Then there's LibreOffice's Impress presentation module, which has been tweaked to add a widescreen format for slideshows as well as 10 new master pages, as shown in the screenshot at left.

Click to read the remaining Five Big Reasons to Download LibreOffice 3.6.