Productivity Sauce

Good news for those who have been waiting for a stable release of the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice.org. The wait is over: The Document Foundation has announced the availability of LibreOffice 3.3.

Although at first sight LibreOffice 3.3 looks pretty much like the previous versions, the new release sports a handful of new features and under-the-hood improvements. The most notable additions include new Microsoft Works and Lotus Word Pro document import filters, support for SVG graphics, an improved Navigator tool in Writer, and a slew of tweaks in the Calc spreadsheet application. A list of all tweaks and improvements is available for your perusal at the project's official Web site.

The download page provides binary packages of the latest LibreOffice release for major Linux distributions along with the source code for those who are brave enough to compile the productivity suite on their machines.

Ubuntu users will appreciate the fact that LibreOffice can be installed using a dedicated PPA. So if you are running Ubuntu Linux or any of its derivatives, you can install LibreOffice using two commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libreoffice libreoffice-gnome

In case you are using a KDE-based Ubuntu spinoff, you need to install the libreoffice-kde package instead of libreoffice-gnome. Note that this will automatically remove OpenOffice.org from your system. Personally, I consider it a convenience, since I don't have to do it manually.