Hi folks,

Some interesting news we have here, that Oracle halting commercial interest for OpenOffice. And at the mean time we have beta 1 for LibreOffice, this is now great news. Some of the features are listed below for this release:

• added navigation buttons to writer
• Replaced unhide text button by icon buttons
• Mouse wheel scrolls whole slides
• Updated slide sorter icons
• allow ‘select as you type’ aka ‘quick selection’
• new ‘animated images’ for Throbber controls
• enable human icon theme
• treat Excel number format ‘General’ as standard format in Calc
• change the default sheet print option to “print entire sheet” in Calc
• don’t toggle the calc formula bar when activating and deactivating a chart in Calc
• Allow unused master pages to be deleted in master pages control in Impress
• enable full width by default for ‘Default’ style in Impress

Download it from here.

openSUSE users can follow these instructions, but i would recommend to read in openSUSE forums 1st and install from any beta repos.

More read at linuxjournal.com

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Note: 11.4 by default have LibreOffice, but one can use the repo below to get the stable updates.

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Hi folks,

As we know, LibreOffice stable release is available for use. I guess, you still have OpenOffice installed and using it. Why not lets try LibreOffice. It’s quite easy to install, lets go through step by step.

1- 1st add the following repo for your distro(11.3 or 11.4). Just open YaST and click on the software repositories, click on the Add button and the rest is self explanatory.

openSUSE 11.4 repo :

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/Stable/openSUSE_11.4/

openSUSE 11.3 repo :

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/Stable/openSUSE_11.3/

Give it any name of your choice like ‘LibreOffice Stable Repo’, Done? ok now lets go to next step.

2- Now open software management from YaST, and choose Repositories from the drop down menu if it is not there as a tab. Select the newly added repo, and you will see LibreOffice packages. Click on LibreOffice package for installation. At this moment if you already have OpenOffice installed, it will ask for replacing it in a pop up window, just choose to replace it with LibreOffice packages. If you are successfully done, you can click the Accept button. Wait and it will install LibreOffice for you.

Note: If you want to completely uninstall OpenOffice packages, just type openoffice in the search box in software management(YaST) and hit enter, it will give you the packages, if you see any installed packages, just right click,  choose delete and do it for the rest. That will completely remove OpenOffice from your pc.

If every thing goes fine, it will install LibreOffice and you can use it from now.

Hi geeks,

After announcement from Ubuntu that they will include LibreOffice with the up coming Ubuntu release and so on… in the next few days, LibreOffice announced its 1st final stable release for the world. LibreOffice have many new features over OpenOffice.

According to The Document Foundation,

“LibreOffice 3.3 also incorporates 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 decimals 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; new easier to use print interface; more options for Changing case; and colored sheet Tabs in Calc.”

It is available for all platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac.

Check out the screen shots with new features.

Update: Also check out this link from Linux journal pointing to new features.

Download it from here.

If you are a Linux user, there may be chances that most of the distro will have a repository for it OR will be there soon. So don’t forget to check out your distro news and forums sections for it.

I myself using openSUSE 11.3 and i will update it soon using the repo provided in the forum.

Good luck and enjoy new open source & free application.

Most of you may already read about the forking of OpenOffice.org into the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. As it’s still fresh and new in the market, so i guess not many many users are using it. A week ago i give it a try and was impressed. Not much new things over OpenOffice, but still things are quite new ATM.

LibreOffice is a productivity suite that is compatible with other major office suites, and available on a variety of platforms. It is free software and therefore free to download, use and distribute.

Document Foundation website

Download page

There are all formats available for almost every OS like Linux, OS X, Windows and even source code to compile from.

I had downloaded the Linux 64bit version and then extract the files from archive, added the directory in YaST to install it from there (mind you, i am using openSUSE 11.3 64bit). The latest sources are available for download on their site.

So why not give it a try and have some change.