The Document Foundation: The best free office suite ever is here!

Feb 14, 2012 12:30 GMT  ·  By

With a one week delay, The Document Foundation company launched a few minutes ago the final and stable release release of the LibreOffice 3.5 open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms.

LibreOffice 3.5 brings lots of new and attractive features, as well as overall stability improvements to all its components, and the usual bug fixes.

"The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5, the third major release of "the best free office suite ever", which shows to end users the improvements derived from the development strategy adopted since September 2010."

"LibreOffice 3.5 derives from the combined effort of full time hackers - the largest group of experienced OOo code developers - and volunteer hackers, coordinated by the Engineering Steering Committee." said Italo Vignoli from The Document Foundation in the press release.

Highlights of LibreOffice 3.5:

· Writer:

· New built-in Grammar checker for English and various other supported languages; · Better typographical features, to easily create professional looking documents; · Interactive, real-time word count dialog; · New footer, header and page break user interface.

· Impress / Draw:

· Better importer of Smart Art and custom shapes from PPTX/PPT; · Support for embedding colour palettes and multimedia files into ODF documents; · New display switch for the presenter's console; · New line ends for better diagrams; · Added import filter for Microsoft Visio files.

· Calc:

· Support for up to 10,000 sheets; · New multi-line input area; · New Calc functions to conform with the ODF OpenFormula specifications; · Improved performances when importing files from other office suites; · Autofilter received multiple selections support; · Conditional formatting now supports unlimited number of rules.

· Base:

· New integrated PostgreSQL native driver.

To see the entire list of features, please take a look at the official release notes for LibreOffice 3.5.

Review image
Better UI for Header and Footers handling
Review image
Grammar checking improvements
For who is LibreOffice 3.5? Well, The Document Foundation invites power users to install LibreOffice 3.5, and urges conservative users to stick with the current LibreOffice 3.4 branch.

Download LibreOffice 3.5 sources and Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Mandriva binary packages right now from Softpedia.

Download LibreOffice 3.5 packages for Macintosh right now from Softpedia.

Download LibreOffice 3.5 executable for Windows right now from Softpedia.