LibreOffice 4.1 was released today, with the open source office suite borrowing a new sidebar from its rival, OpenOffice.

As we wrote yesterday, the sidebar was debuted in OpenOffice 4.0 after being contributed by IBM developers. In LibreOffice, it's only an experimental feature thus far, and it can be enabled in the settings.

"LibreOffice 4.1 is… importing some AOO [Apache OpenOffice] features, including the Symphony sidebar, which is considered experimental," the Document Foundation said in the LibreOffice 4.1 announcement. "LibreOffice developers are working at the integration with the widget layout technique (which will make it dynamically resizeable and consistent with the behavior of LibreOffice dialog windows)."

LibreOffice 4.1 was delivered a few days earlier than the date promised on the project's release schedule. According to the list of new features and fixes, 3,000 bugs were fixed, including 400 by developers with Apache.org e-mail addresses. Although Apache is responsible for OpenOffice, it seems many Apache developers are contributing to LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 4.1 also brings the ability to rotate images 90 degrees in Writer, the ability to embed fonts in documents, an easier way to create slideshows in Impress, and a variety of improvements to interoperability with Microsoft Office files.

"Numerous improvements have been made to Microsoft OOXML import and export filters, as well as to legacy Microsoft Office and RTF file filters," the Document Foundation wrote. "Most of these improvements derive from the fundamental activity of certified developers backing migration projects, based on a professional support agreement. Instrumental for interoperability are also new features such as font embedding in Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw—which helps in retaining the visual aspect when fonts used to produce the document are not installed on the target PC—and import and export functions new in Excel 2013 for ODF OpenFormula compatibility."