The Document Foundation has released the first Release Candidate for LibreOffice 5.0.2, the second maintenance release for the incredibly successful 5.x branch of the office suite.

Usually, maintenance releases are all about fixes, and the same can be said about the 5.0.2 version. From the looks of it, it's going to be bigger than the 5.0.1 version, which landed just last week. The first RC in the series incorporates a huge number of changes and various fixes that will definitely make this office suite even better.

On the other hand, you shouldn’t get too excited about the prospect of a big release, because there are no new features, just fixes for the problems reported by the community or by the developers. This is after all a community driven project, and The Document Foundation doesn't employ any developers. Any work that’s being done come from volunteers, and this actually makes it all better.

LibreOffice 5.0.2 RC1 has arrived and is ready for testing

All of these release candidates are very important because it allows users and developers alike to test the upcoming version and see if everything is in working order.

According to the changelog, the Calc header background image saving function has been fixed, an issue regarding DOCX import has been fixed, Styles have been added to the Properties tab, DOCX files with a footnote no longer hangs, the text in shapes is no longer pointing in the wrong direction for DOCX documents, the dialog for Advanced filter is no longer transparent, and some problems with ODF import have been corrected as well.

If you have an Ubuntu OS, you can try the new branch by installing it from a PPA. Just open a terminal and enter these commands:

sudo apt-get purge libreoffice-core
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-prereleases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libreoffice