The Document Foundation (TDF) on Wednesday released LibreOffice 5.1, the latest version of its full-featured open source office suite.
LibreOffice 5.1 "offers a completely reorganised interface," aiming to offer more convenient access to its most-used features. New menus have been added to its Writer, Calc and Impress applications and several icons and menu commands have been added or repositioned.
While the 4.x cycle of LibreOffice primarily focused on code-cleaning, meaning the most noticeable change in LibreOffice 5.0 was drastically improved speed, the 5.x cycle focuses on streamlining the software's user interface, adding new features and making it more intuitive for Microsoft Office natives, says Italo Vignoli, founder and marketing director at TDF.
Another focus point for the 5.x cycle is improving interoperability, particularly making the software adapt more easily to the wide array of different screen sizes on which it is used, says Vignoli.
LibreOffice 5.1 also makes the process of accessing remote files via the cloud easier and more intuitive, he adds.
Progress for TDF
TDF schedules new software releases based on regular time intervals rather than the number of new features added per release, in order to make the update cycle more predictable for its users, explains Vignoli. This is particularly important for large organisations, he adds.
Since the release of LibreOffice 5.0 in August 2015, the software has reached what TDF now estimates to be around 100 million users worldwide.
LibreOffice has also just capped a total of 1 000 developers who have contributed to the code since the software forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010.
The software is available for free download at LibreOffice.org.
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