For those that are fans of the Free Software Office Suite, Open Office, a release candidate has been made available for version 3.2. This version improves a number of features in all areas of the tool. Some of the highlights are:
- Faster startup times: both Calc and Writer have cold-boot start times improved by 46%!
- Improved ODF standards support
- Improved proprietary file support including MS Excel, MS Word, MS Powerpoint, OLE Objects, Encryption support, and much more
- Support for Postscript based OpenType fonts
- Improved autocorrect word completion
- Mediawiki support moved to extension
- A number of Calc improvements including: improved sort, better merged cell handling, complex copy/paste,
- much more!
If you’d like to see the complete list, visit: http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.2/rc1.html
For those wanting to upgrade to the Release Candidate (Final release is scheduled for January), you can download the latest packages at the link below. It should be noted that 3.2 final release should be included in the next Ubuntu release, 10.04, due this April.
http://download.openoffice.org/all_rc.html
You’ll want to select the .deb package from your preferred language. Enjoy.