LibreOffice 4.1 Approacheth

As Apache announced the release of OpenOffice 4.0 with handy sidebar, The Document Foundation was busy sweeping up the last bug reports for the upcoming LibreOffice 4.1 release. In a post to The Document Foundation blog, Italo Vignoli, founder and board member, acknowledged the contributions made by OpenOffice developers while taking stock of the achievements of the LibreOffice project the last couple of years.

Vignoli remembers early days at OpenOffice with fellow hacker Michael Meeks saying they spent five years, with other developers, "in endless discussions about a different vision for the future of OOo." A fundamental element of this envisioned future was a happy home for developers, and in providing that in the LibreOffice project has encouraged new developers to join in each and every month, so says Vignoli. In fact, he says LibreOffice benefits from contributions from 100 developers a month with a total active number of 350.

LibreOffice 4.1 is due any day now and some of the new features we can expect include:

• * Images in writer can now be rotated 90 degree
• * Writer textframes now support having a gradient as background
• * Embedding fonts
• * Comments bar toggled with the a button in the ruler
• * Improved Footnote and footer comment handling in Writer
• * Count the number of selected cells in Calc
• * Stepped Lines line type to Line and XY (Scatter) graphs
• * Several new spreadsheet functions
• * New Photo Album feature in Impress
• * Option to disable the bundled Presenter Console
• * 'Limit' combobox on the Query Design Toolbar in Base
• * New dialog adding limit and distinct values properties
• * New Elements docking windows added in Math
• * Lots of filtering and import/export improvements and fixes
• * New "clear" recent document list option
• * Improved dialog box appearance
• * Experimental Apache OpenOffice Sidebar

LibreOffice 4.1 is scheduled to be released anytime between July 22 and July 28, so again, any day now. 4.1.1 is expected the week of August 26 and followed by 4.1.2 around September 23. 4.1.4 should arrive just before Christmas and 4.1.5 the week of February 3, 2014. The final 4.1.x release, 4.1.6, is projected for the April 28 or so and will be supported through May 28, 2014 - long after 4.2.0 will have arrived around the end of January.

See Vignoli's post for more interesting tidbits and links as he looks back and ahead for LibreOffice.