LibreOffice 3.5 Released, 'The Best Free Office Suite Ever'

The Document Foundation has just released LibreOffice 3.5 which is the third major release and tagged it as “The Best Free Office Suite Ever”.

During last 16 months, an average of 80 developers each month have provided a total of over thirty thousand code commits, introducing many new features to the popular office suite.

Writer

• A new built-in Grammar checker for English and several other languages
• Improved typographical features, for professional looking documents
• An interactive word count window, which updates in real time
• A new header, footer and page break user interface

Impress / Draw

• An improved importer of custom shapes and Smart Art from PPT/PPTX
• A feature for embedding multimedia/colour palettes into ODF documents
• A new display switch for the presenter’s console
• New line ends for improved diagrams
• Microsoft Visio import filter

Calc

• Support for up to 10,000 sheets
• A new multi-line input area
• New Calc functions conforming to the ODF OpenFormula specifications
• Better performances when importing files from other office suites
• Multiple selections in autofilter
• Unlimited number of rules for conditional formatting

Base

• A new integrated PostgreSQL native driver

Other Changes

• Online update checker, which informs users when a new version of the suite is available
• Full detailed changes with images here.

The infographic below nicely summarizes new features (click to enlarge).

LibreOffice PPA has not latest packages yet. However, add the PPA by running commands below to get automatic update when packages are available.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa

sudo apt-get update

In case you want to upgrade right now, download LibreOffice 3.5 Packages from here.