Open Source LibreOffice 3.3.2 Free Office Suite Now Available for Download

The Document Foundation has launched LibreOffice 3.3, a maintenance release of their open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms. The next major release, LibreOffice 3.4 is projected for release in mid-May.

LibreOffice is a comprehensive, professional-quality productivity suite that you can download and install for free – available in more than 30 languages and for all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, …).

You can download, install and distribute LibreOffice freely, with no fear of copyright infringement.

Why LibreOffice?

Well, the price is right, with no worry about license costs or annual fees, and LibreOffice is a feature-packed and mature desktop productivity package with some other significant advantages.

You can use LibreOffice, customize it, hack it and copy it with free user support and developer support from our active worldwide community and our large and experienced developer team. The software is tested and used daily by a large and devoted user community

The roots of LibreOffice go back 20 years, and this long history means it’s a stable and functional product. Thousands of users worldwide regularly take part in beta testing of new LibreOffice versions. Because the development process is completely open, LibreOffice has been extensively tested by security experts, giving you security and peace of mind.

LibreOffice is user-friendly, with a simple-to-use yet powerful interface that is easy to personalize. Microsoft Office users should find the switch relatively easy and painless, with a familiar look and feel to what they’re used to.

LibreOffice is Compatible with all major competitors’ file formats. You can easily import files from Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint and many other formats, and can save to Microsoft Office and other formats when needed.

LibreOffice is supported by a big worldwide community: volunteers help newcomers, and advanced users and developers can collaborate with you to find solutions to complex issues.

LibreOffice Modules

Writer is the word processor inside LibreOffice, useful for everything from dashing off a quick letter to producing an entire book with tables of contents, embedded illustrations, bibliographies and diagrams. The while-you-type auto-completion, auto-formatting and automatic spelling checking features make difficult tasks easy (but are easy to disable if you prefer). Writer is powerful enough to tackle desktop publishing tasks such as creating multi-column newsletters and brochures.

LibreOffice Calc tames your numbers and helps with difficult decisions when you’re weighing the alternatives. You can analyze your data with Calc and then use it to present your final output. Charts and analysis tools help bring transparency to your conclusions. A fully-integrated help system makes easier work of entering complex formulas. Add data from external databases such as SQL or Oracle, then sort and filter them to produce statistical analyses. Use the graphing functions to display large number of 2D and 3D graphics from 13 categories, including line, area, bar, pie, X-Y, and net with the dozens of variations available, you’re sure to find one that suits your project.

LibreOffice Impress is the the suite’s presentation module for creating multimedia presentations. It supports animation and special effects to help you convince your audience and create presentations that professional.

LibreOffice Draw lets you build diagrams and sketches from scratch, from simple illustrations with box and line diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations and special effects.

LibreOffice Base is the database front-end of the LibreOffice suite. With Base, you can seamlessly integrate your existing database structures into the other components of LibreOffice, or create an interface to use and administer your data as a stand-alone application. You can use imported and linked tables and queries from MySQL, PostgreSQL or Microsoft Access and many other data sources, or design your own with Base, to build powerful front-ends with sophisticated forms, reports and views. Support is built-in or easily addable for a very wide range of database products, notably the standardly-provided HSQL, MySQL, Adabas D, Microsoft Access and PostgreSQL.

LibreOffice Math is a simple equation editor that lets you lay-out and display your mathematical, chemical, electrical or scientific equations quickly in standard written notation.

LibreOffice also comes configured with a PDF file creator, so you can distribute documents that you’re sure can be opened and read by users of almost any computing device or operating system.

New in LibreOffice 3.3.2 Final:

This is the second update to the stable version of LibreOffice. It contains only safe code fixes and translation updates, and is considered safe for production use.

The following notes apply:

• This release is bit-for-bit identical to the 3.3.2 Release Candidate 2, so you don’t need to download or reinstall if you have that version already.
• The distribution for Windows is an international build, so you can choose the user interface language that you prefer. Help content is available via an online service, or alternatively as a separate install.
• For Windows users that have OpenOffice.org installed, we advise uninstalling that beforehand, because it registers the same file type associations.
• If you run Windows 2000, you may require this update before being able to install LibreOffice.
• If you run Linux, the GCJ Java variant has known issues with LibreOffice, we advise to e.g. use OpenJDK instead.
• LibreOffice contains all the security fixes from OpenOffice.org in 3.3.0, and perhaps more as a side-effect of the code clean-ups.
• There are a few non-critical issues still contained in this release, which will be addressed soon with upcoming bugfix versions.

If you install third-party extensions that bring their own help, you may only be able to view that after installing the separate helppacks on Windows.

For more information, visit:
http://www.documentfoundation.org/
and
http://bit.ly/id31WC