In Good Shape

In early February 2012, LibreOffice developers published a new release candidate of the free office package. Its components introduce new features or improvements, including the Draw drawing program and the Impress presentation software. One function that featured prominently on the community wish list for Draw in the past was the ability to edit Microsoft (MS) Visio files. The developers created an import feature for VSD files, and the presentation tool now also has an import function for drawing objects. To test the new features, I installed LibreOffice 3.5 (RC3 from 2 February) on an Ubuntu system (11.10). Before installing, you need to uninstall version 3.4 as recommended in the wiki. I created two documents to test the maturity of the new features: a network diagram created with Visio and a PowerPoint presentation with editable shapes imported into Impress.