LibreOffice's latest release provides easier ways of working with spreadsheets and the ability to insert 3D models into presentations, along with dozens of other changes.

LibreOffice was created as a fork from OpenOffice in September 2010 because of concerns over Oracle's management of the open source project. LibreOffice has now had eight major releases and is powered by "thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers," the Document Foundation, which was formed to oversee its development, said in an announcement today. (OpenOffice survived the Oracle turmoil by being transferred to the Apache Software Foundation and continues to be updated.)

In LibreOffice 4.3, spreadsheet program Calc "now allows the performing of several tasks more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it, and being able to fully select text conversion models by the user," the Document Foundation said.

For LibreOffice Impress, the presentation application, users can now insert 3D models in the gITF format. "To use this feature, go to Insert ▸ Object ▸ 3D Model," the LibreOffice 4.3 release notes say. So far, this feature is available for Windows and Linux but not OS X.

New features also include improved comment management and interoperability with a variety of document types. The new interoperability includes "support of OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support of 30 new Excel formulas, support of MS Works spreadsheets and databases, and Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and more."

LibreOffice developers have also worked on a version of the office suite for Android, but so far only a remote for controlling presentations has been released.