Libre Office (Beta) 3 Launched

Larry Ellison crop — Image via Wikipedia

The guys who forked off Larry Ellison‘s Open Office launched Beta 3 .

Whats new-

DDE reconnect – the old DDE implementation was very quirky in that, opening and closing a DDE server document a few times would totally disconnect the link with the client document. Plus it also causes several other side-effects because of the way it accessed the server documents. The new implementation removes those quirkiness plus enables re-connection of DDE server client pair when the server document is loaded into LO when the client document is already open.

External reference rework – External reference handling has been re-worked to make it work within OFFSET function. In addition, this change allows Calc to read data directly from documents already loaded when possible. The old implementation would always load from disk even when the document was already loaded.

Autocorrect accidental caps locks – automatically corrects what appears to be a mis-cap such as tHIS or tHAT, as a result of the user not realizing the CAPS lock key was on. When correcting the mis-cap, it also automatically turns off CAPS lock (note: not working on Mac OS X yet). (translation)(look for accidental-caps-lock in the commit log)

Swapped default key bindings of Delete and Backspace keys in Calc – this was a major annoyance for former Excel users when migrating to Calc.

(look for delete-backspace-key in the commit log)

In Calc, hitting TAB during auto-complete commits current selection and moves to the next cell. Shift-TAB cycles through auto-complete selections.
and lots of bugs squashed….

_Announcement_

The Document Foundation is happy to announce the third beta of
LibreOffice 3.3. This beta comes with lots of improvements and
bugfixes. As usual, be warned that this is beta quality software –
nevertheless, we ask you to play with it – we very much welcome your
feedback and testing!

Please, download suitable package(s) from

http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/

install them, and start testing. Should you find bugs, please report
them to the FreeDesktop Bugzilla:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org

A detailed list of changes from the past four weeks of development is
to be found here:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Weekly_Summary

If you want to get involved with this exciting project, you can
contribute code:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/develop/

translate LibreOffice to your language:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/LibreOffice/i18n/translating_3.3

or just donate:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/