LibreOffice 4.2 Office Suite Boasts New Features, Performance Boost

By Sean Michael Kerner

While LibreOffice is widely deployed on Linux systems, there are both Windows and Mac OS X installers, enabling users of proprietary operating systems to benefit from a freely available office suite.

One of the first and most visible things that users will see when running LibreOffice is the Start screen, which has been cleaned up in the 4.2 release. The Start screen provides easy access to the core applications within the LibreOffice suite. The new Start screen has a cleaner layout that makes better use of the available space.

LibreOffice 4.2 includes an updated set of icons throughout its application, improving the look and feel of the office suite.

Among the incremental improvements in the Writer word processing application is the ability to place a border around a character.

With LibreOffice 4.2, users now have the ability to import and export as a Microsoft Word template (.dot) file.

The Calc spreadsheet application within LibreOffice 4.2 gains new statistics features, including sampling, correlation, covariance and moving average capabilities.

Data analysts sometimes have a need for random number generation capabilities, which are now included in Calc.

The Impress presentation application within LibreOffice 4.2 now has the ability to handle presentations originally created in Apple’s Keynote presentation software.