Software Update: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.0 Beta

A beta of version 4.1.0 of OpenOffice has been released. This open source office suite started in 1984 as StarOffice. In 1999 it came into the hands of Sun Microsystems and then in 2010 it ended up with Oracle. After a number of developers switched to LibreOffice out of dissatisfaction with how Oracle managed this project, the source code was eventually donated to the Apache Software Foundation. OpenOffice comes with a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet program (Calc), a presentation program (Impress), a drawing program (Draw), a database program (Base) and a program for creating scientific notations (Formula). Detailed information about the changes in version 4.1 can here are found, these are briefly the most important changes:

The 4.1.0 Beta features:

• Mac OS X version is now 64-bit and requires OS X version 10.7 or above.
• integrated iAccessible2 support, offering better integration with screen readers.
• Annotations of text ranges in Writer.
• In-place editing of text fields in Writer.
• Interactive image crop feature for Impress and Draw.
• Enhanced support for 3D charts.
• New language translations: Bulgarian, Danish, Hindi, Norwegian Bokmål and Thai.
• Many bug fixes and smaller improvements as detailed in the Release Notes.