LibreOffice 4.2 focuses on performance and interoperability

BERLIN, GERMANY: The Document Foundation announced LibreOffice 4.2, a new major release targeted to early adopters and another significant step forward for the best free office suite ever.

LibreOffice 4.2 features a large number of performance and interoperability improvements targeted to users of all kinds, but particularly appealing for power and enterprise users. In addition, it is better integrated with Microsoft Windows.

Calc has gone through the largest code refactoring ever, giving major performance wins for big data (especially when calculating cell values, and importing large and complex XLSX spreadsheets), while an optional new formula interpreter enables massively parallel calculation of formula cells using the GPU via OpenCL. The latter works best with a Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) such as the new AMD Kaveri APU.

Round-trip interoperability with Microsoft OOXML, particularly for DOCX, as well as legacy RTF, has also improved considerably. Also, new import filters for Abiword documents and Apple Keynote presentations have been added.

LibreOffice 4.2 offers two Windows specific improvements for business users: a simplified custom install dialog to avoid potential mistakes, and the ability to centrally manage and lock-down the configuration with Group Policy Objects via Active Directory. All users benefit from better integration with Windows 7 and 8, with thumbnails of open documents now grouped by application and a list of recent documents, both showing on the task bar.

Power users on all platforms will like the flexibility of the Expert Configuration window, which has been added to the Advanced Options tab. This feature can be easily turned off, for large deployments and basic users.

LibreOffice 4.2 offers a new Start screen, with a cleaner layout that makes better use of the available space - even on small screens - and shows a preview of the last documents.

On the mobile side, LibreOffice now supports an Impress Remote Control for iOS - in addition to the already available Impress Remote Control for Android - which allows visual management of presentation delivery on the laptop using the screen of an iPhone or iPad. The app is currently waiting for review from Apple, and will be announced as soon as it is available on iTunes Store.

LibreOffice 4.2 is the first open source suite to ship a new Windows (IAccessible2 based) accessibility feature developed by IBM. This is considered experimental for this release, but will replace legacy Java based accessibility in the next major release.

The LibreOffice User Interface continues to undergo significant cleanup with 70 percent of our dialogs now refreshed and many distributed UI tweaks. This release also includes a beautiful new "flat" icon theme - Sifr - and an updated set of default document styles.