Difference between revisions of "PR 2.3"

Revision as of 09:34, 31 August 2007

THIS IS A DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT PUBLISH!

OpenOffice.org Announces Version 2.3

September 12, 2007

The OpenOffice.org community is pleased to announce the release of
OpenOffice.org 2.3, the latest version of the leading open source office
productivity suite. Whilst continuing to build on the many enhancements
incorporated in recent versions, OpenOffice.org 2.3 now incorporates an
extensive array of new features and enhancements.

The charting component has undergone a complete revamp, adding a range
of new features as well as simplifying and streamlining chart
formulation. A new chart wizard, enhanced 3D chart designs, replacement
colour palettes, additional axis options and scaling, improved toolbars,
flexible data sources, as well as an improved data editor combine to
offer the user a smoother, efficient and accommodating charting
experience.

[WRITER - STILL NEEDS COMPILATION]
Usability enhancements to Writer, the word processing module, in
conjunction with the addition of a new MediaWiki export filter ... Zoom
Aligns to centre rather than left ... language guessing of unknown
text ... Smart Tag API Extended [LEAVE OUT?] ... separate
UI/configuration of XML Form Documents from Writer [LEAVE OUT?] ...
Simple Mail Merge now allows the saving of the merge to a single
document ... Support for ODF specification soft page breaks added.

A number of general productivity improvements to Calc, the spreadsheet
module, have been added. Most noticeable of these is that the default
print settings have changed to suppress the printing of blank pages and
to only print the selected sheets. Additional simplification of
shortcuts, the addition and improvement of various functions, changes to
context menus and dialogues, improvements to import filters,
modifications to toolbars, as well as the enhancement to the AutoSum
feature go a long way to easing the day to day use of Calc.

[IMPRESS - PROBABLY WANT TO LEAVE THIS OUT OR DRAMATICALLY REWORD]
Impress, the presentation module, has had the ability of an object to
move along a curve, which was broken in 2.0, reimplemented.

The database module, Base, continues to evolve with improvements to
window handling, support for keyboard shortcuts, the availability of a
report builder extension, and additional features for expert users and
developers.

OpenOffice Draw, the drawing and diagramming module, has been enhanced
to provide improved exporting to HTML/Web by adding support for
exporting the images to portable network graphics (PNG) format.
Accessibility improvements have also been made by providing alternate
text for image maps and layer titles and descriptions.

General improvements to the entire suite include a persistent stylist
filter, re-ordering of the PDF export dialogues, new shortcut keys,
easier keyboard customisation, previewing of web pages in a browser, a
number of enhancements for extensions and a high default macro security
level. In addition support for numerous languages and locales have
added.


About OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and
sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the leading
open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org's
leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers,
systems integrators, etc to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their
own applications.

OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications
(OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as legacy industry
file formats and is available on major computing platforms in over 70
languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU Lesser
General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any
purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a
number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor
and primary contributor.


Links

OpenOffice.org 2.3 may be downloaded free of charge from
http://download.openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org extensions can be downloaded from
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org

The OpenOffice.org community can be found at http://www.openoffice.org

To learn more about the community see http://about.openoffice.org

Your local native language project can be found at at
http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html


Press Contacts

Louis Suarez-Potts (UTC -04h00)
OpenOffice.org Community Manager
louis@openoffice.org
+1 (416) 625 3843

John McCreesh (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead
jpmcc@openoffice.org
+44 (0)7 810 278 540

Florian Effenberger (UTC +02h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Co-Lead
floeff@openoffice.org
+49 8341 9966 0880

Worldwide Marketing Contacts

http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html