The latest version of LibreOffice can be downloaded from Softpedia

Jul 30, 2014 06:56 GMT  ·  By

The Document Foundation has announced that the final version for LibreOffice 4.3 is now available for all platforms, making this the most advanced release for the office suite.

The Document Foundation maintains quite a few concurrent branches and 4.3.x is the most advanced version they have right now. This is where all the new features are introduced and it's usually the version added the most in the Linux distributions out there.

There are other branches available for download, like 4.2.x or 4.1.x, but none of them is as exciting as this one. LibreOffice is one of the many open source applications that are being considered to replace Microsoft software in various city administrations, as we've recently seen in Toulouse, France. This puts some pressure on the developers to make the best software possible.

“The LibreOffice project shows that a large free software community can live and thrive without the patronage of a software vendor, to liberate PC desktops. Today, you can't own a better office suite than LibreOffice, in term of features, interoperability, support for document standards and independence. After many years, LibreOffice brings the control of the PC desktop back into the hands of the users,” says Thorsten Behrens, chairman of The Document Foundation.

According to the developers, support for OOXML Stricthas been added, a number of OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles, and attributes) have been implemented, embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file is now possible, support for 30 new Excel formulas has been added, support of MS Works spreadsheets and databases has been implemented, and Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and more are now supported as well.

Also, comments can now be printed in the document margin, Calc is now able to perform several tasks more intuitively, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it has been added, support of animated 3D models in the new open glTF format has been implemented, and the office suite now even supports huge, 65,000-character paragraphs (which can only be done in LibreOffice).

It will be a while until LibreOffice 4.3 arrives in the official repositories for various distros out there, but the PPA for Ubuntu-based systems should come much faster. It's likely that Arch Linux will be among the first to get it, although this is an important release and the other distros won't be too far behind.

More details about this release can be found in the announcement. You can download the packages from Softpedia, but these are only the source.

Download LibreOffice 4.3 for Linux Download LibreOffice 4.3 for Windows Download LibreOffice 4.3 for Mac OS X