14 DAY TRIAL // The first major point release for LibreOffice, the 5.1 branch, is being worked on this weekend during the 1st Bug Hunting Session. This promises to be an important upgrade that should really make a difference.
The LibreOffice 5.0 launch has been the most successful one so far, and the office suite has been downloaded millions of times. The popularity of LibreOffice has been increasing steadily in the past couple of years, and the developers from The Document Foundation have made sure that they keep up with the demand.
Each new release of LibreOffice has been better than the previous one, and each time a major branch arrived for users, it packed a huge number of features and improvements. Now, the developers are working on LibreOffice 5.1, and they are already reporting a significant increase in the start speed, not to mention all of the interoperability improvements with MS Office file formats.
LibreOffice 5.1 is coming soon
LibreOffice 5.1 is expected to land on February 1, 2016, and the developers haven't given us reasons to think that it will be late. If anything, they have been really punctual.
"LibreOffice 5.1 starts twice as fast than the previous version, and adds to the usual incremental interoperability improvements with MS Office file formats (including MS Office 2016) some nice features, such as the Chart Sidebar to change settings in a more intuitive way, an easier workflow with Google Drive, OneDrive and SharePoint, and a Style Menu in Writer which will help user to access this fundamental LibreOffice feature," reads the announcement made by The Document Foundation.
The team is now gathering their collective power for the 1st Bug Hunting Session organized from Friday, October 30, to Sunday, November 1. These kinds of sessions are put together so that many of the major problems are fixed right away, leaving some of the smaller stuff for the rest of the cycle.
The Document Foundation has also revealed that around 300 developers have hacked the LibreOffice source code, and they have contributed with over 19,000 commits, which is quite impressive.
We'll be able to test the first RC for LibreOffice 5.1 on December 14.