The developer has made a lot of UI improvements

Jan 29, 2015 14:16 GMT  ·  By

The Document Foundation has just announced that a new major update has been released for LibreOffice and it brings important UI improvements, enough for them to call this the most beautiful version ever.

The Document Foundation doesn't usually make the UI the main focus of an update, but now the developers are saying that this is the most beautiful release made so far and that says a lot. Fortunately, this version is not just about interface fixes and there are plenty of other major improvements that should really provide a very good reason to get LibreOffice 4.4.

LibreOffice has been gaining quite a lot of fans and users, and the past couple of years have been very successful. The office suite is implemented by default in most of the important Linux distributions out there and it was adopted by numerous administrations and companies across the world. LibreOffice is proving to be a difficult adversary for Microsoft's Office and each new version makes it even better.

LibreOffice 4.4 brings a lot of new features

If we move aside all the improvements made to the interface, we're still left with a ton of fixes and changes. The Document Foundation takes its job very seriously and all upgrades really improve the users' experience tremendously.

"LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever. We have completed the dialog conversion, redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today’s UX trends," says Jan "Kendy" Holesovsky, a member of the Membership Committee and the leader of the design team.

Some of the other improvements include much better support for OOXML file formats, the source code has been "groomed" and cleaned after a Coverity Scan analysis, digital signatures for exported PDF files, improved import filters for Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Publisher and AbiWord files, and Microsoft Works spreadsheets, and much more.

For now, the PPA doesn't have the latest version, but that should change soon. For the time being, you can download the LibreOffice 4.4 source packages from Softpedia, if you want to compile them yourself.