LibreOffice 4.3 Open-Source Office Suite Enhances the User Experience

by Sean Michael Kerner

LibreOffice provides its users with a fully featured, freely available, open-source office suite that includes Writer document, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation, Draw drawing, Math formula and Base database applications.

While LibreOffice is the default office suite for a number of Linux distributions, it is also available for Windows and Mac users.

LibreOffice 4.3 fixes a flaw in all previous versions of LibreOffice that limited paragraphs to a maximum of 65,000 characters. According to the Document Foundation, the ability to have long paragraphs is “especially useful in locales where there is a requirement to record minutes of meetings in a single paragraph.”

With LibreOffice 4.3, comments in the margins of documents now get properly imported into Writer. Users now can actually print comments as part of a document as well.

Among the incremental improvements in LibreOffice 4.3 is image handling within the Writer document application. Images are now scaled properly, and users can resize images by holding the Shift key and dragging the corner of the image with a mouse.

3D models in the glTF format can now be imported into Impress presentations, providing a new media option for users.

Spreadsheets can get very busy, making it difficult for users to identify where they are. With Calc spreadsheets in LibreOffice 4.3, the row, column and cell that a user is in is highlighted to help make the spreadsheet more usable and navigable.