You can test the office suite on Linux, Mac, and Windows

Mar 16, 2015 21:05 GMT  ·  By

A new development version for the next maintenance release of the acclaimed LibreOffice 4.4 office suite has been announced today, bringing a wide range of enhancements and bugfixes that improve the overall stability of the software on all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

According to the release notes, LibreOffice 4.4.2 RC1 (Release Candidate) adds backward compatibility for FDIST function in ODFF, addresses the wrong underlining in Reports, adds the libXinerama and libGLU libraries as dependencies to the DEB and RPM binary packages on Linux, and fixes some compilation issues with the GCC 4.9 compiler on GNU/Linux.

Boolean labels in the XLSX format have been partially fixed, the hard-coded character properties have been cleared in the table cells, power consumption has been reduced by minimizing the idle timers, users will be able to drag the same cell twice when editing a formula, and ISO 8601 datetime is now caught in all locales.

Users can test LibreOffice 4.4.2 RC1 right now on Linux, Mac, and Windows

In more technical terms, the expand reference edge is now handled correctly by the application, XAccessibleExtendedAttributes will now be exposed through GNOME’s ATK (Accessibility Toolkit), search results from Thunderbird address books are now prioritized, users can now navigate to list Files in LibreOffice dialogs, and a crash has been fixed when scaling large bitmaps.

Last but not least, LibreOffice 4.4.2 RC1 lets users paste an array formula into range pastes as a non-array formula, as well as paste images copied from web browsers into the Calc component. A performance regression that occurred when importing XLS files has been fixed, images are now correctly displayed in the Calc app, and ordinal numbers are no longer capitalized.

Anyone who wants to test this unstable release of LibreOffice can do so by downloading the 4.4.2 RC1 release for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia. Being an unstable release, it is not recommended to install LibreOffice 4.4.2 RC1 on production machines.