14 DAY TRIAL // The next major LibreOffice version is scheduled to launch this Wednesday, August 5, so we'll take a closer look at what the new 5.0 branch will bring to the table.
Each new edition of LibreOffice has been hailed as the best one, and there is no reason to believe this one will be any different. The developers have announced ahead of time what they plan to implement and it's an impressive list, to say the least. The team has been working on a lot of new stuff that should really turn some heads.
LibreOffice is not a complete office suite and the developers from The Document Foundation know this all too well. That is one of the reasons why they have a feature comparison list with Microsoft Office. In some ways, Microsoft is the direct competitor and that has become abundantly clear after LibreOffice was adopted in city administrations and offices around the world, as an alternative to the office suite from the Redmond-based company.
LibreOffice 5.0 is a huge release
Sometimes it's difficult to fully appreciate what an application brings just by looking at an arid and uninteresting changelog that most of the time is just aimed at other developers. The Document Foundation knows this very well and they've put together a comprehensive list of improvements and fixes that anyone can understand.
The cool thing about open source projects is that sometimes the release notes are made available ahead of time. The Document Foundation explains that the Writer is now capable of better dealing with Emojis and the in-word replacement support has been drastically improved, the Style previews are now displayed in the Sidebar, and highlighting and shading are now preserved after the handling of Word documents.
Another important feature is the new implemented ability to crop images right inside documents, which is extremely useful. Other improvements include refined table management, fixes for DOC improvements, conditional formatting, XSLX enhancements, changes to the Formula engine, new spreadsheet functions, support for Time-Stamp Protocol in PDF documents, Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) support, import filters, and lots of GUI changes.
More details about the new features in the upcoming LibreOffice 5.0 branch can be found in the official release notes. You can download the latest LibreOffice 5.0 RC for Linux, LibreOffice 5.0 RC for Windows and LibreOffice 5.0 RC for Mac from Softpedia. The final versions will very likely be identical to the release candidates.
