LibreOffice 5.2 “Fresh” Released, For Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.2, targeted to early adopters and power users – with several user interface improvements and enterprise grade features.

At the same time, LibreOffice 5.1.5 has been released, for enterprise class deployments and more conservative office suite users.

LibreOffice 5.2 provides document classification according to the TSCP standard, and a set of improved forecasting functions in Calc. In addition, multiple signature descriptions are now supported, along with import and export of signatures from OOXML files.

“LibreOffice 5.2 is a significant step forward for Free Software on the desktop, and will soon be available as a full featured cloud office suite,” says Michael Meeks, a Director at The Document Foundation (TDF) and a leading developer of LibreOffice Online. “The tight integration between desktop and cloud will provide enterprises a value added experience, with the best of both platforms always available to all users.”

Interoperability features have also been improved, with better Writer import filters for DOCX and RTF files, and the added support for Word for DOS legacy documents. Additional type argument values for interoperability with other spreadsheets, along with wildcard support in formula expressions for compatibility with XLS/XLSX and ODF 1.2, have also been added.

In term of user experience, a single toolbar mode has been added to Writer and Calc to help users really focus on content, and some icons have been added to the default toolbars to make several frequently used functions – such as hide/show track changes, and freeze the first column or row of a spreadsheet – quicker to access. Also, most of the context menus can now be customized, for even greater control.

LibreOffice 5.2 has also been improved “under the hood,” thanks to the work of hundreds of volunteers. This translates into an open source office suite which is easier to develop, maintain and debug. Although this is not visible to users, it is extremely important for enterprise deployments.

According to Coverity Scan, the number of open issues for 1,000 lines of LibreOffice 5.2 source code at the time of release is a record setting 0.00 (for 7,8 million lines of source code), against an industry average of 0.61 for open source software and 0.75 for proprietary software.

“LibreOffice is growing fast, thanks to distinctive advantages such as the standard document format, which is recognized by a growing number of governments as the best solution for interoperability,” says Thorsten Behrens, a Director at The Document Foundation (TDF) and a member of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee.