LibreOffice 3.6.0 enters beta testing

The LibreOffice development team has published the first beta of version 3.6.0 of its open source productivity suite. Aimed at developers and testers, the new milestone release is, says LibreOffice hacker Thorsten Behrens, nearly feature complete.

The Writer word processor includes whole document and selection word count in the status bar
Source: LibreOffice In LibreOffice 3.6.0, the Writer word processor supports contextual spacing and importing SmartArt graphic types, and has a word count displayed in the status bar. An option to use a custom sheet name prefix in new documents has been added to the Calc spreadsheet program and CSV file importing has been improved. The Impress presentation manager and Math formula editor have also received updates.

Other changes include new import filters for Corel Draw documents, the addition of a watermark option when exporting PDF documents and various user interface updates, such as a redesigned About dialog. The developers say that importing of some documents types has been "substantially improved", and that pivot tables in Calc, raw cell value import from xlsx documents, and merged cell and matrix range import from ods documents now perform better.

Users can now specify a custom sheet name prefix in new documents
Source: LibreOffice A full list of bug fixes and planned changes can be found in the change log and in the preliminary 3.6 release notes. LibreOffice 3.6.0 Beta 1 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the project's Pre-Releases download page. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

According to the project's 3.6 Release Plan, this release will be followed by two more betas and three release candidates. The final version is expected to arrive in late July or early August. Sponsored by The Document Foundation, LibreOffice is licensed under the LGPLv3. The current stable release of LibreOffice is version 3.5.4 from the end of May.

See also:

• LibreOffice 3.5 sharpens its grammar checking, a report from The H.

(crve)