LibreOffice 5.0 Right Around the Corner
Major release LibreOffice 5.0 is due next Wednesday with a lot of new features. Italo Vignoli today posted The Road to LibreOffice 5.0 in which he looks back at all the added features since January 2015 with version 3.3. Today's summary shows "the impressive amount of new features added to LibreOffice since version 3.3."
LibreOffice 3.3 was released in January 2011. This release was significant in that the development and management of LibreOffice had come together in a short time and put out a release that brought several new features. SVG support, easier title and page formatting and numbering, improved ergonomics in Calc, and Microsoft Works support were among the newest features added by The Document Foundation.
LibreOffice 3.4 was the first release to have received the first major code clean-up, a process which took quite a while to (pretty much) complete but yielded a faster, easier compiling, better performing office suite. LibreOffice 3.5 brought a new built-in Grammar checker, an interactive word count window, a new header/footer interface, and support for 10,000 Calc sheets. LibreOffice 3.6 introduced a new splash screen and cleaner look.
LibreOffice 4.0 was released August 2013 and brought a whole list of improvements and new features. Some included Firefox Personas support, Unity integration, improved image quality in documents, improved media handling, integration with Content Management Systems and online storage, more code clean-up and performance enhancement, and new fonts. 4.1 concentrated on import/export filters and interoperability with other popular suites and 4.2 in January 2014 saw a lot more code clean-up especially in Calc netting further improvements in performance. 4.2 also got a new start screen, new expert configuration dialogs, experimental OpenOffice sidebar, and a new theme. 4.3 brought support for 65,000 character paragraphs, improved OOXML interoperability, more intuitive spreadsheet handling, new previews in Start Center, and 3D models in Impress. LibreOffice 4.4 was released in January this year bringing lots of interface improvements, OpenGL support added for Windows and improved for Linux, better Track Changes, and still more code clean-up.
LibreOffice 5.0 is to bring Style previews in sidebar, Word-compatible text highlighting, true mouse-cropping of images, improved calculation of page number, toolbar improvements to reflect frequently used commands, exporting to PDF supports the Time-Stamp protocol, new KDE Breeze icon theme, and more interface clean-up. Windows users will also get a 64-bit choice with LibreOffice 5.0. Look for the announcement next week.