We reported earlier that The Document Foundation non-profit organization announced the first bug hunting session for the upcoming LibreOffice 5.1 open-source office suite.
Therefore, we thought that it will be the right moment to share with you guys some of the features that will be implemented in the major LibreOffice 5.1 release, which, as usual, will be available for the GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Among the highlights, we can mention new Styles menu, Spelling dialog improvements, and the addition of a "Hide Whitespace" option to the View menu for LibreOffice Writer, and support for adding columns right and rows below via the new commands implemented in LibreOffice Calc.
Moreover, the LibreOffice Impress and Draw components received a sorting commands and slide navigation, support for saving background images, support for equalizing width and height settings, support for viewing and editing control points in the Shape Properties dialog, and support for restarting the timer of the slideshow in the presenter console.
A new Chart sidebar has been added to LibreOffice Chart, support for WebDav has been greatly improved, it is now possible to input Unicode characters using the Alt+X keyboard shortcut, you can now open remote files from the Start screen and the File menu, the Sidebar received many enhancements, an AutoCorrect context menu was added for spell checking, and the overall performance of the software was improved.
LibreOffice 5.1 release schedule
The development cycle of LibreOffice 5.1 has begun and a first Alpha build will be available to public testers and developers during the first bug hunting session organized by LibreOffice community at the end of the month, between October 30 and November 1, 2015.
A first Beta build will be released sometime at the end of November, followed closely by a second Beta version on the first week of December, but the Beta 2 might be skipped if the developers think it's not necessary. Then, the first Release Candidate (RC) build should arrive near Christmas 2015.
The development cycle of LibreOffice 5.1 will continue with a second and a third Release Candidate versions, due for relese on January 17 and January 31 respectively. The final release of LibreOffice 5.1 is planned for Feburary 7, 2016, and the branch will have six maintenance releases until it reaches end of life on November 27, 2016.
