A new Release Candidate has been made available

Jul 28, 2015 08:07 GMT  ·  By

The fourth Release Candidate for LibreOffice 5.0 has been released by The Document Foundation and it looks like the development cycle is coming to an end.

LibreOffice 5.0 will be the biggest release in the series and developers have already made a large number of changes and improvements. This latest RC is not all that impressive, which means that we are very close to a final release. In fact, developers have another RC planned and the stable version of LibreOffice 5.0 should be here on August 3, if everything goes according to plan.

The devs who are working on the new LibreOffice version are quite interested to fix the interaction with the file formats used by Microsoft office, and from the looks of it, LibreOffice 5.0 is an important step in that direction.

LibreOffice 5.0.0 RC4 is here

According to the changelog, the Pictures on buttons, created in forms, are no longer gone after reopening a form, the Impress/Draw toolbars and context menu have been enhanced, the Calc Function suggestion is no longer too aggressive, ODF functions have been extended to support some special scientific formats, the Style preview in "Styles and Formatting" sidebar is now optional, bold headings are no longer used in dialogues, and a crash that occurred when automatically launching the table creation wizard after registration of database has been fixed.

Some of the features that are going to land in the 5.0 branch include style previews in the sidebar, Word-compatible text highlighting, image cropping, DOC improvements, OOXML improvements, drag and drop for images, Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) support, and various GUI changes, just to name a few.

You can download LibreOffice 5.0.0 RC4 right now from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that it's not a stable version. The Windows and Mac OS versions are also available.