LibreOffice 3.5 Released

Today The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 3.5, dubbed "the best free office suite ever." The announcement contained nuggets of goodies that might please even the most casual of user.

One of these is an online update checker. This checks for updated version of LibreOffice and informs users when a new version is available. Next step, an actual updater. Developers and planners see an automatic updater as the brass ring. It's high on their wish lists, but most blamed the old code base and say it will come someday. Interestingly, Caolán McNamara, founder and developer, said

We inherited a 15 years old code base, where features were not implemented and bugs were not solved in order to avoid creating problems, and this - with time - was the origin of a large technical debt. We had two options: a conservative strategy, which would immediately please all users, leaving the code basically unchanged, and our more aggressive feature development and code renovation path, which has created some stability problems in the short term but is rapidly leading to a completely new and substantially improved free office suite.

Some of the other new features include:

- a new built-in Grammar checker for English and several other languages
- improved typographical features, for professional looking documents
- an interactive word count window, which updates in real time
- a new header, footer and page break user interface
- support for up to 10,000 sheets (Calc)
- better performances when importing files from other office suites

See the full announcement for more detail. Downloads available at www.libreoffice.org.