LibreOffice 3.6 Available For Download

LibreOffice 3.6 has been released today with some interesting new features and improvements, such as a new CorelDRAW importer, improved auto-format function for tables in text documents, SmartArt import support, improved CVS import, PDF export with watermarking and more.

Improvements in LibreOffice 3.6:

• Support for importing Office SmartArt
• PDF Export with Watermark option
• Added Word Count to status bar
• 10 new Impress master pages
• Support for color scales and data bars. Import from .xlsx and import/export from/to .ods in ODF 1.2 (extended)
• Import Filter for Corel Draw documents
• Writer: Support for contextual spacing
• Writer: Format paintbrush can now differentiate character automatic formating applied to paragraphs from those applied to text portion inside the paragraph
• Writer: VML import now handles lines, rotations and flips
• Writer: RTF/DOCX import/export handles document zoom settings
• Calc: New option to specify a custom sheet name prefix in new documents
• Calc: Merge cells option added to right-click menu.
• Calc: "Ctrl+D" fills down in more familiar ways, filling with contents of the cell above if no cell is selected, and, filling down multiple cells with larger selections
• Calc: Export conditional formatting to .xlsx
• Calc: Improved CVS file import
• Calc: Added support for field items in cells
• Calc: Sorting of data from the autofilter menu
• Calc: Support for pasting only text, value, or formula from the context menu
• Impress: Added widescreen format for Impress slideshows
• Impress: Impress now correctly detects the external display and puts the presenter console on the local display
• GUI: New Splash Screen and About dialog
• GUI: Rulers are now much cleaner and more light-weight
• GUI: New artwork for the Start Office
• GUI: GTK themes are now able to render background gradient and have a way for tab prelight rendering.
• Performance improvements and many bug fixes
• More

Install LibreOffice 3.6 in Ubuntu

LibreOffice 3.6 final isn't yet available in the LibreOffice PPA, but if you can't wait, you can use the LibreOffice Prereleases PPA, which currently provides LibreOffice 3.6.0 RC1 (RC4 which is identical to the final release should be available soon) for Ubuntu 12.04. Add the PPA and upgrade to LibreOffice 3.6 RC1 using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-prereleases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

For experimental GTK3 support, also install the following package (if LibreOffice doesn't work after installing it, simply remove the package):

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gtk3

The packaging bugs I was telling you about back when LibreOffice 3.6.0 beta 1 was released have been fixed.

Ubuntu users can also download LibreOffice 3.6 .deb files from the LibreOffice download page.

According to the release notes, if you're updating from an older LibreOffice version, the spellchecking might be broken. Fix it using:

rm -r ~/.config/libreoffice/3/user/extensions

Download LibreOffice 3.6 for Linux, Windows or Mac OS X