LibreOffice 4.0 Gets Released

As planned, The Document Foundation finally released LibreOffice 4.0, their major release since LibreOffice 3.x and this is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.

Released as a major release, LibreOffice 4.0 brings a lot of new features as well fixing numerous bugs that has been reported by their users. Here are the highlights of this release:

• Integration with several content and document management systems - including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others - through the CMIS standard.
• Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink annotations and attaching comments to text ranges.
• Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version (just announced).
• Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a personalized look.
• Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface.
• Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style.
• Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions as defined in ODF OpenFormula.
• First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android, supported only on some Linux distributions. (The second release, coming soon, will be supported on all platforms: Windows, MacOS X and all Linux distros and binaries.)
• Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX spreadsheets and RTF files.
• Improved code contribution thanks to Gerrit: a web based code review system, facilitating the task for projects using Git version control system (although this is not specific of LibreOffice 4.0, it has entered the production stage just before the 4.0 branch).

LibreOffice is not only targeting users, but also developers. Under the hood, a lot of API changes has been introduced to make this product even better in the future.

Go get LibreOffice in their Download page and extend your LibreOffice by adding more extensions.