Software Update: LibreOffice 4.2 Beta 2

The Document Foundation has released the second beta release of version 4.2 of LibreOffice. This open source office package originated as a fork of OpenOffice and comes with the word processor Writer, spreadsheet program Calc, presentation program Impress, drawing program Draw, database program Base and Formula, an application for creating scientific notations. An overview of the changes and improvements we made in version 4.2, which if all goes well in late January available comes, to look forward to is on this page to find, this is a small part of it:

writer

• Embedding images into HTML files enables sending merge mails with images in HTML format fdo#63211
• Character border: format one or more characters with a border.
• Select-All now works in the special situation when the document starts with a table fdo#37606
• Spellcheck popup menu now allows change tracking operations. For more details, see this blog entry.
• Multiple selection of styles in the Style and Formatting window allow to delete or hide them fdo#67461
• RTF import: added initial support for group shapes fdo#66040
• Writer can now create DOT files. For more details, see this blog entry.
• AutoCorrection of border enhanced: differences are more visible fdo#71740.
• A New default template designed for Writer based on feedback from discussions Default LO Style and Default Writer Template

calc

• Added WEBSERVICE and FILTERXML spreadsheet functions for access to web data.
• Added LFTB, LENB, MIDB and RIGHTB spreadsheet functions working on DBCS double byte character strings.
• Added COVARIANCE.P and COVARIANCE.S spreadsheet functions for MS-Excel interoperability. fdo#70000
• Added STDEV.P and STDEV.S spreadsheet functions for MS-Excel interoperability. fdo#44134
• Added VAR.P and VAR.S spreadsheet functions for MS-Excel interoperability. fdo#61002
• Added BETA.DIST and BETA.INV spreadsheet functions for MS-Excel interoperability. fdo#71008
• Added BINOM.DIST and BINOM.INV spreadsheet functions for MS-Excel interoperability. fdo#71081
• Added CONFIDENCE.NORM and CONFIDENCE.T spreadsheet functions for MS-Excel interoperability. fdo#71350
• Added F.DIST, F.DIST.RT, F.INV, F.INV.RT and F.TEST spreadsheet functions for MS-Excel interoperability. fdo#71436
• Added EXPON.DIST, HYPGEOM.DIST, POISSON.DIST and WEIBULL.DIST spreadsheet functions for MS-Excel interoperability. fdo#71722
• Improved CRITBINOM spreadsheet function to handle large sample quantities.
• Right-click context menu on bottom left scrollbar arrows to switch sheets
• Extend formula range from all corners fdo#67592
• Random number generation (Menu ? Edit ? Fill ? Random Number…) fdo#66477
• Statistics functions Menu ? Dates ? Statistics (alternative to Excel’s Add-in “Analysis ToolPak”) fdo#66477
  • sampling
  • Descriptive Statistics
  • Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
  • correlation
  • Covariance
  • Exponential Smoothing
  • Moving Average
• Implemented ‘Find All’ also in case of ‘search in all sheets’ option – creates a dialog describing matching cells fdo#39881

Impress / Draw

• Visual clue in Slide Sorter when a Slide has a Transition or Animation(s) fdo#65456
• Adding icons to slides having custom animation or transition set, in presenter view, makes easier to present the whole content of the slides fdo#65457
• Impress remote control for iOS
• The side bar is now enabled by default (only in Impress)
• New Custom Animation toolbar fdo#62082

Base

• INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: a checkbox bound to a (var)char (string) field will now write ‘true’ or ‘false’, whereas up to LibreOffice 4.1 it wrote the strings ‘1’ or ‘0’. The read behavior is backwards compatible and will recognize values ​​’1′ or ‘0’.
• NEW FEATURE: reference values ​​in checkboxes are now honoured. This allows to have again the old behavior of writing ‘1’ or ‘0’ if desired. It also allows eg to invert the behavior of the checkbox (bound to a boolean field) by setting the checkbox properties as follows ‘Reference (on): false’ and ‘Reference (off): true’
• NEW FEATURE: Firebird SQL connector for LibreOffice Base. When creating a new Database, select Firebird Embedded in the drop down menu. This allows creation of databases that perform many times faster than the previous built-in HSQLDB. We plan to phase HSQLDB out over the next few releases, and provide a smooth migration path to Firebird.

chart

• Import charts from xlsx which don’t have proper references but have internal data
• Toolbar button for vertical grid and change behavior to variate grid between major, major&minor and off for horizontal and vertical grid. fdo#66422
• Support more than one trend line per chart
• Polynomial trend lines fdo#35712
• Moving average trend lines fdo#40315
• Force intercept for trend lines fdo#40314
• Extrapolation of trend lines fdo#40316

core

• Upgrade internal XPDF to Poppler fdo#38878
• Support for undocumented SOLAR_USER_RTL_TEXTENCODING environment variable has been removed, core commit 668c627eb4e66208738d5acdecbcad106efa8252
• Added support for BCP 47 language tags. fdo#37496 (Eike Rathke)
  • Including reading and writing ODF 1.2 fo:script and *:rfc-language-tag attributes.
  • Including reading and writing tags from/to OOXML.
  • See also http://erack.org/blog/archives/30-LibreOffice-goes-BCP-47.html