OpenOffice 4.0 was released yesterday by the Apache Software Foundation, bringing with it a new sidebar designed to make better use of widescreen monitors and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.

The sidebar is a contribution from IBM, taken from "IBM’s short-lived Lotus Symphony office suite, which was a 2007 fork of OpenOffice that IBM contributed back to OpenOffice in 2012," the IDG News Service noted.

The sidebar is "the first radical improvement to the OpenOffice user interface in years," Apache OpenOffice VP Andrea Pescetti said in the announcement of version 4.0. With the sidebar, "[u]sers may easily edit their document properties in-context, with the most-frequently needed controls available in panels," the announcement said. There is also a new framework allowing application developers to build extensions for the sidebar, "enabling applications that integrate business application data, seamlessly integrate with cloud and mobile document editing environments, and automate common document workflow tasks."

While the pace of development at OpenOffice has been a bit slower than that of LibreOffice since the projects forked, OpenOffice has beaten its newer rival to the punch in implementing the sidebar. The sidebar did not make it into LibreOffice 4.0 and is just an experimental feature in LibreOffice 4.1, which can be enabled in the settings. A release candidate of LibreOffice 4.1 is out and a stable release is planned for sometime between July 29 and August 4.

In addition to the sidebar, the OpenOffice 4.0 release notes detailed graphics and performance improvements as well as about 20 improvements to interoperability with Microsoft Office documents. These improvements span Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Here are a few examples from Excel:

And a few more from PowerPoint: