12 replies to this topic 1 votes

[+Mephistopheles]

The Apache OpenOffice Project Announces Apache OpenOffice™ 3.4

Numerous enhancements to leading Open Source multi-platform, multi-lingual office productivity suite with over 100M users worldwide; downloads now available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh free of charge.

www.OpenOffice.org —8 May 2012— The Apache OpenOffice Project today announced the availability of Apache OpenOffice™ 3.4, the first release of OpenOffice under the governance of the Apache Software Foundation.

Apache OpenOffice is the original open source office productivity suite, designed for professional and consumer use.

"With the donation of OpenOffice.org to the ASF, the Foundation, and especially the podling project, was given a daunting task: re-energize a community and transform OpenOffice from a codebase of unknown Intellectual Property heritage, to a vetted and Apache Licensed software suite," said Jim Jagielski, ASF President and an Apache OpenOffice project mentor. "The release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 shows just how successful the project has been: pulling in developers from over 21 corporate affiliations, while avoiding undue influence which is the death-knell of true open source communities; building a solid and stable codebase, with significant improvement and enhancements over other variants; and, of course, creating a healthy, vibrant and diverse user and developer community."

Apache OpenOffice is the leading open source office productivity suite, with more than 100 million users worldwide in home, corporate, government, research, and academic environments, across 15 languages. Apache OpenOffice 3.4 is available for download free of charge. OpenOffice 3.4 features:

• word processing, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, databases, drawing, and mathematical editing applications support for Windows, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) and Macintosh operating environments
  
• native language support for English, Arabic, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese
  
• improved ODF support, including new ODF 1.2 encryption options and new spreadsheet functions
  
• enhanced pivot table support in Calc
  
• enhanced graphics, including line caps, shear transformations and native support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
  
• improvements in performance and quality

The complete list of new features, functions, and improvements is available in the Release Notes.
Apache OpenOffice users also benefit from a broad ecosystem of 3rd party products, including over 2300 templates and over 800 extensions.

Source and full announcement: OpenOffice.org
View: Release notes
Download: OpenOffice™ 3.4 (for Linux/OS X/Windows)

[.Neo]

Does it still look horrible?

[+Mephistopheles]

.Neo, on 08 May 2012 - 15:51, said:

Does it still look horrible?

Presumably yes. I'll leave it up to others to install it to find out.

[thealexweb]

.Neo, on 08 May 2012 - 15:51, said:

Does it still look horrible?

Is it still free though?

[Aethec]

thealexweb, on 08 May 2012 - 17:59, said:

Is it still free though?

Office Starter is free, if you don't need PowerPoint or advanced features.

[thealexweb]

Aethec, on 08 May 2012 - 18:07, said:

Office Starter is free, if you don't need PowerPoint or advanced features.

I looked at that on a friend's PC because it came pre-installed, it's horribly locked down, I use Office 2010 myself but if had to make a choice between Office 2010 starter and OpenOffice I would pick OpenOffice probably.

[+Brando212]

so now that OpenOffice isn't under the control of Oracle anymore what's going to become of the branched LibreOffice? are they going to join together again?

[+littleneutrino]

i thought they were not making open office anymore, and that the project had moved to libre office.

[+Brando212]

littleneutrino, on 08 May 2012 - 18:21, said:

i thought they were not making open office anymore, and that the project had moved to libre office.

they had split into two different groups because the team that made LibreOffice didn't like the direction Oracle was taking OpenOffice.

now that Oracle has abandoned OpenOffice and let it become truly open source again I wonder if they'll re-join up with the LibreOffice team again

[Ambroos]

I'm surprised not all the devs abandoned it yet. LibreOffice is now the 'new' OpenOffice.

[Avi]

Some nice changes here. One can only hope they will be "ported" to LibreOffice as well.

[Raa]

I'll stick with LibreOffice now, but thanks.

Unless there's a merge of course (good idea!)

[+Brando212]

Raa, on 09 May 2012 - 03:59, said:

I'll stick with LibreOffice now, but thanks.

Unless there's a merge of course (good idea!)

yeah, as I said I hope they do merge again now that Oracle is out of the picture (I wonder which name they'll stick with if a merger does happen)