LibreOffice 4.4 Is Coming Soon With New Features

Written by Michael Larabel in LibreOffice on 25 January 2015 at 10:28 AM EST. 64 Comments
LIBREOFFICE
The release plan puts the LibreOffice 4.4.0 as being just days away, but what features are in store for this open-source office suite? Let's take a brief look.

The 4.4 release plan for LibreOffice puts the 4.4.0 release as coming between 26 January and 1 February. For those that haven't been closely following the 4.4 development cycle and trying the earlier development releases, there is the in-progress 4.4 release notes.


Among the changes for LibreOffice 4.4 Writer is support for Master Document Templates, improvements to track changes, toolbar improvements, better auto-correct, and status bar improvements.

LibreOffice 4.4 Calc has improvements to the statistics wizzard, direct conversion of formulas into static values, and an AGGREGATE spreadsheet function to match Microsoft Excel.

LibreOffice 4.4 for Impress and Draw has improved OpenGL transitions via a new OpenGL framework in VCL. Previously on Phoronix I talked about the new OpenGL back-end in LibreOffice for this release.

Other changes include LibreOffice 4.4 Math supporting the basic 16 HTML colors, LibreOffice 4.4 bundling some new libre-licensed fonts, support for digitally signed PDF exporting, and LibreOfficeKit supports tiled rendering when navigating documents on mobile devices. LibreOffice 4.4 now bundles JPEG-Turbo as an underlying change to provide a ~2x performance improvement for loading and de-compressing JPEG images.

Again, the very exhaustive list of changes can be found via the LibreOffice Wiki.

What are you looking forward to most with LibreOffice 4.4? Or what do you wish would be added or improved upon within this open-source office suite? Let us know by commenting on this article.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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