LibreOffice turns 3.3, now ready for general use

The Document Foundation, which coordinates development of LibreOffice, a new, free and open office suite, has reached an important development milestone significantly ahead of schedule. LibreOffice 3.3 shipped this week; it's the first, stable, road-ready version of the suite. A large, 100+ community of developers has been attracted to the project, and while it's still clearly under construction, it's an impressive showing in a short time.

LibreOffice 3.3 brings several unique new features. The 10 most-popular among community members are, in no particular order: the ability to import and work with SVG files; an easy way to format title pages and their numbering in Writer; a more-helpful Navigator Tool for Writer; improved ergonomics in Calc for sheet and cell management; and Microsoft Works and Lotus Word Pro document import filters. In addition, many great extensions are now bundled, providing PDF import, a slide-show presenter console, a much improved report builder, and more besides. A more-complete and detailed list of all the new features offered by LibreOffice 3.3 is viewable on the following web page: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/new-features-and-fixes/
LibreOffice 3.3 also provides all the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.3, such as new custom properties handling; embedding of standard PDF fonts in PDF documents; new Liberation Narrow font; increased document protection in Writer and Calc; auto decimal digits for "General" format in Calc; 1 million rows in a spreadsheet; new options for CSV import in Calc; insert drawing objects in Charts; hierarchical axis labels for Charts; improved slide layout handling in Impress; a new easier-to-use print interface; more options for changing case; and colored sheet tabs in Calc. Several of these new features were contributed by members of the LibreOffice team prior to the formation of The Document Foundation.

The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3 (Thanks, Ben!)

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zyodei

This is wonderful news. However, I won’t sleep well at night until there is the same sort of assurance with MySQL :(
- djn
  
  Relax, in the worst case you can move to PostgreSQL, which is arguably better anyway. (Or Firebird, if you prefer.)
  
  OpenOffice is kind of harder to replace, since the competitors (KOffice, Abiword+Gnumeric) aren’t exactly drop-in substitutes.
holtt

So this really isn’t an “anti-Oracle” thing – it’s just anti-corporate involvement with an open source project?
- dragonfrog
  
  Not even anti-corporate involvement in free software projects, really. More, anti-free software project foundations set up in a way that makes them completely run by a corporate entity that has a long history of hostility to free software, and has begun to show very clearly the same hostility on this project. The issue was that the OpenOffice foundation had a constitution that gave Sun complete control. Under Sun, this was apparently tolerable, but under Oracle it became unacceptable to many developers.
  
  A new foundation was set up with a constitution meant to ensure it would remain community-run, and any corporate members would be just that – members, like anyone else.
  
  Oracle was invited to join the LibreOffice project – but they would have had to join it under a constitution set up by the community, which would have prevented them from muscling out all the community members and turning them back into basically labour working at Oracle’s whim. Oracle declined to join.
  
  Corporate involvement, under an appropriate constitution, is fine. Linux accepts lots of code contributions from corporate entities – IBM, Red Hat, lots of developers of chips and embedded devices who want to make sure they can say Linux will run well on their products…
- Anonymous
  
  Problems with the management of openoffice go back to the Sun days. hence go-oo. There have always been lots of barriers to developers getting patches into openoffice: complex build system, copyright assignment, the child workspace (CWS) system. (compared to the linux kernel were you just send a patch to the mailing list, and if its any good it will go in).
  
  go-oo collected lots of interesting patches, but sun mostly ignored them.
  
  the oracle deal was enough to galvanise the unhappiness of the developers to make a real break, and start a full fork. lots of devs have joined in.
  
  currently for a user this is not much different from openoffice or go-oo. but with the surge in developers, and the freedom to clean up the build system and old code, it should begin to improve quickly.
Paulwh80

I installed it, saw that the default font was Times New Roman, tried to change that, spent four hours searching settings menu/documentation/ website/ mailing list/ google/blekko how to do this, got no solution other than go to tools… options… THERE IS NO OPTIONS MENU!

Deleted it.
- Anonymous
  
  Sorry that you ran into a problem here. I suggest you modify the Default style, which cascades to all other styles.
  
  Go to Format > Styles and Formatting. This opens the small Stylist window. Right click on Default and choose Modify. Click the Font tab and set your preferred default font.
  
  That should be it!
  
  For more, try http://www.odfauthors.org , a group of volunteers writing excellent documentation for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.
- Anonymous
  
  I see Tools > Options in front of me right now. Options is the second menu entry from the bottom.
  
  In the Options dialog, under LibreOffice Writer, choose “Basic Fonts (Western)”. You can change your default font right there. (As well as several others.)
- Daemon
  
  Are you, by any chance, blind?
purple-stater

I really miss Lotus WordPro, but Open Office, and now LibreOffice, has been a seriously excellent replacement.
Gloo

To Mark Shields : “Vive LE libre ! ” ;o)
brian rutherford

I help run a business that uses only Open Office (we have 4 full time employees).It took a bit of getting used to but we truly don’t need MS Office at all as most of the time we are either sending documents to each other or creating training materials (which OO is perfect for as it never crashes unlike its rival ‘MS Word’ which can’t handle large documents with lots of graphics over 100 pages.) If its for clients we simply use the ‘export to pdf’ option and send them this instead. Thanks BoingBoing for the heads up on LibreOffice. I wondered what would happen when Oracle bought Sun. Now I know.
ericroded

I use my macros.
dainel

Problem downloading it. Direct download link stopped working after I got about 20% (windows exe). Webpage is there, but download link stopped working.

So I tried the bittorrent. After 3 hours or so, I got 27%. Then all the seeds dropped off. I have 27% and the health is 27% as well. After 2 more hours, I see 200 peers, but no one is downloading from me either … which means we all have 27% … if there’s any seed out there PLEASE get back online. :) That’s for LibO_3.3.0_Win_x86_install_multi.exe. The other package LibO_3.3.0_Win_x86_install_all_lang.exe is even worse. I can’t even download the .torrent file. :(
Anonymous

So then, what are the differences between LibreOffice and NeoOffice?
djn

You can get it from a number of mirrors if the one it picked for you didn’t work. If you go here, find the file you want, and click Details, you can scroll down a bit to get a list of all known mirrors for it. One of those should work for you.

(And no, I don’t think this is meant to be obvious.)
Anonymous

And no ribbon – yay!!
Anonymous

Would someone deeply familiar with both projects explain concisely and accurately what the key differences are between the products that LibreOffice and OpenOffice make available to users? Why might one prefer to use one over the other?
- Anonymous
  
  OpenOffice is an abomination – so I assume this is not?
  
  Seriously though, OpenOffice is horrible.
BDiamond

I’m an OpenOffice user. How does LibreOffice compare? (In simple terms, please, I’m not a power user. Thanks.)
- dainel
  
  For me, the biggest thing would be importing Lotus Wordpro files. We have a lot of old files, created from way back before Star Division ever existed.
- Brainspore
  
  I second BDiamond’s question.
- Anonymous
  
  LibreOffice is much less buggy and quirky. OpenOffice has a lot of outstanding bug-reports unpatched.
  
  LibreOffice has a few features but not many this time and mostly stuff that people wanted to incorporate ages ago, such as vector-graphics capabilities for highly scalable pictures. If your pictures got all messed up when zooming in then try using the svg format.
  
  Many people are working on both products but it tends to be easier to get patches bug-tested and approved in the LibreOffice Community so development tends to be faster. The 3.4 is likely to be very much sooner than OpenOffice’s and likely to contain more functionality.
  
  Regards from Tom :)
Anonymous

BDiamond – it’s not Oracle. Because, fuck Oracle.
Anonymous

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are essentially the same thing.

After Oracle bought Sun, they owned the OpenOffice brand, and it’s not clear what they’ll do with it. LibreOffice is the new name for the free/libre fork of OpenOffice and is the now the main version under development.
- BDiamond
  
  Thank you for this concise reply.
Anonymous

A little backstory:

Some developers who were working on openoffice saw that Oracle was going to buy Sun, the main company behind openoffice (I think they own the name). Now, Oracle has a bad reputation for not being friendly to open source projects, and since they were poised to own OpenOffice, these developers decided to take OpenOffice and rename it to LibreOffice, which is totally allowed under the license of OpenOffice. It’s the same program, just with a different name, and without Oracle’s meddling.
Mark Shields

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are not the same thing.

LibreOffice incorporates go-oo.org patches, which Sun refused to include in OpenOffice. See: http://go-oo.org/

LibreOffice will also be included in Ubuntu 11.04 (natty, or as I like to call it, natty light) instead of OpenOffice.

Viva la libre!
- Anonymous
  
  Many linux distros, not just Ubuntu, have already committed to making LibreOffice widely available. Many have even swapped to it as the default Office Suite.
  
  DistroWatch is probably the best place to compare different distros but notice that Ubuntu is top of their list for good reasons.
  http://distrowatch.com
  
  Regards from Tom :)
Anonymous

This is the next version of OpenOffice, pretty much. Most contributors left OpenOffice over conflicts with Oracle. They continue working on it under a new name. LibreOffice has also taken in a number of patches and additions that Sun never accepted into OpenOffice but that most distributors inlcuded afterwards, so in a sense LibreOffice is already closer to your current version of OpenOffice than Oracles version is.
Anonymous

If it’s anything like any of the other Linux applications that Oracle has acquired, my interpretation is that there will be a community & enterprise version. For example, MySQL has a community & enterprise version. Also MySQL Workbench, the gui tool to administer and develop with the database has a community & enterprise version.

Just speculating based upon past observance, Libre Office is the community version while Open Office in all likelihood will become the enterprise version.

Just from observing Oracle, they seem to want their own branding. The relationship they had with Red Hat (RH), perhaps even Novell’s Suse, those relationships require Oracle to continue to support that with an enterprise version. However, Oracle also explored a partnership with Canonical (Ubuntu). Oracle has made no secret by their actions that they want their software to run on Linux and openly have courted and developed relationships with the top (popularity) Linux distros. Going further, RH has even provided Oracle with the community & enterprise model, as several years back, RH announced Fedora as the community edition, while retaining RH as the enterprise version. I wouldn’t be surprised down the road, if Oracle didn’t change the name of Open Office to be more consistent with their other products. BTW, Oracle has their own brand/version of Linux too. This is why I indicated they still have to maintain relationships with the more popular & established Linux distros.

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/index.html
caseyd

Thanks for the explanation. Nice, timely move.
Tarliman

After years of using OpenOffice.org on Windows, two flavors of Linux, and a Mac, I’ve switched to LibreOffice. The development path for LibreOffice looks a lot better. The release of LibreOffice 3.3 came out well ahead of OpenOffice.org 3.3, there’s features in LibreOffice that OOo hasn’t even talked about, and the reputation of Oracle has pretty much scared me off from OOo at this point. When the first thing Oracle did with OOo was to slap an Oracle logo on the splash screen, it said to me that OOo’s days as a community-driven FOSS project were over, and that OOo would become just another corporate product, and as a free one, poorly supported and maintained just so the corporation could point to it as a public relations item.
Xenu

OOo/LibreOffice is quite trim compared to MS Office, but it still seems a bit heavier than need be.

But I really hope the interface gets a facelift sometime soon.
- Anonymous
  
  I believe LibreOffice is also very very much lighter on system resources than OpenOffice, or perhaps it is only that it takes up a lot less hard-drive space.
  
  However since it was only released a day or so ago it might still be slow to download on Windows platforms because of the high volume of traffic on the servers. The Document Foundation have got huge servers and many mirrors all around world but release day is difficult for most projects unless you can get there before everyone else!
  
  Regards from Tom :)
kylerconway

The main difference (as I understand it from the mailings a while ago) is that many of the contributers felt that their contributions were ignored (never included like go-oo above or extremely delayed) by Sun (first) and now (after the big sale) Oracle.

The developers believe they’ll be able to innovate (additional features, under-the-hood stuff, etc.) much faster than before.

Bottom line:
3.3 OOo vs. Libre = not all that different to most users
3.4 = hopefully very different indeed