LibreOffice 3.5 Released

First time accepted submitter wrldwzrd89 writes "The Document Foundation, the team behind the free and open-source office suite called LibreOffice, has released their latest and greatest version. As is typical with major releases of LibreOffice, there are significant new features making their debut in this version. The component with the biggest upgrade is Calc, which now has support for up to 10,000 sheets per workbook among its new features. Also noteworthy among the new features is support for importing Microsoft Visio files in Impress and Draw. The full feature list is available in a PDF hosted on Dropbox; LibreOffice itself can be downloaded here."

Comments

10000 sheets per workbook?

[Quantum_Infinity]

10000 sheets per workbook? Yup, lack of sheets was exactly what was stopping me from using Calc.

Re:10000 sheets per workbook?

[Ginger Unicorn]

i find when i get up to about 100 sheets of no more than a screen full of data each, it takes so long to save the workbook, i just start a fresh one to break it into manageable chunks. 10000 would probably take longer than the heat death of the universe to save.

Re:10000 sheets per workbook?

[mspohr]

I guess it's time for me to repeat my rant about people using spreadsheets to do work which properly belongs in a database.
It's really impossible to properly audit or verify a spreadsheet. They are so easy to corrupt with improper references and random data entry. Spreadsheets are only widespread because most office drones don't have a clue about proper data management. I shudder whenever I see someone using a spreadsheet to make important business decisions because I know there are errors in every non-trivial spreadsheet.

Re:10000 sheets per workbook?

[jdgeorge]

No kidding... I used to use a hammer to write letters, too. Then I learned how to use the nailgun. Bam!

Re:DropBox?

[royallthefourth]

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-5-new-features-and-fixes/

Re:While, in the same time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Libreoffice basically shed its skin and left openoffice behind in the dust.
The new features already put libreoffice ahead of openoffice, but I think the changes that were most significant were under the hood.
It has been going under a massive cleanup effort making it easier for new devs to contribute and for existing bugs to get squashed.

Re:Here we go again

[dotancohen]

Great, a major LO upgrade. That means I download it, install it, and see how many minutes it takes me before I hit a large enough Office compatibility snag that makes me delete it and swear off giving it another shot.

Instead of swearing it off, get in touch with me and we will file bugs. Sure, it might take a year or three until they are fixed, but most of them _do_ get fixed in LibreOffice. I would say that the last year in LO has closed more of my bugs than the past five years of OpenOffice.org, including one very critical bug that has been open for almost _ten_years_:
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=5556

Fixed in LO six months after filing:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37978

You can contact me here, please have a file that demonstrates the issue handy or clear reproduction instructions:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/message.php

Thanks.

Re:docx support?

[dotancohen]

The .docx support is good enough that I am writing a book in collaboration with MS Office users, including change tracking and comments, and they don't know that I'm using LibreOffice 3.4. If you find any bugs in .docx compatibility, you can contact me here and we will file bugs:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/message.php

Thanks.

Re:Here we go again

[petermgreen]

Office documents are fundamentally fragile.

In a text processing program the tiniest change to character spacing rules or line breaking rules or margin rules or image placement rules can radically change the way a document is rendered. So the only way to keep complete compatibility is to NEVER change any existing behaviour of the rendering engine. In a calculation program the tiniest change in formula imlementation can change the calculated results.

The problem with word processors and spreadsheets is they blur the line between input and output. The user is continuously looking at the output so the user thinks of the file as storing the output but what is really being stored is the input. So they load the file into a program with a slightly different engine and get surprised when the results of thier poorly formed (remember the user doesn't see the input so they don't see how horriblly unstructured it is) turn into a mess.

Frankly I find it damn impressive that OOo/Lo do as good a job of dealing with MS office documents as they do.