Remember OpenOffice?

It was the office suite we all used before The Document Foundation forked it into LibreOffice to give the suite a ‘brighter future’.

Which was a polite way of saying “getting bugs fixed and features added faster”.

Although LibreOffice may have forked off from it and picked up developers and innovation by the bucket load, the faithful old brand, now under the direction of Apache Software Foundation, has seen its first release since January 2011.

Apache OpenOffice 3.4 doesn’t do anything drastic, but does iterate nicely upon that which was there before. Changes include: –

Faster startup times

Improved ODF Encryption

Various minor additions to Calc

Support for SVGs in all apps

New look color picker

The release notes for the update detail these, and more, further.

Looking Forward

Apache OpenOffice has announced initial aims for future releases. These include adding ‘new features and improvements from the upcoming IBM Lotus Symphony contribution’, ‘additional native languages’ and ‘enhanced accessibility, usability and performance improvements’.

Download

OpenOffice 3.4 can be downloaded @openoffice.org in .Deb installer format.