Open Source OpenOffice 4 Gets a New Sidebar

The Apache Software Foundation is out with a major new milestone release of the open source OpenOffice suite. The new OpenOffice 4 release marks a major new stage in the evolution of the open source project at Apache.

“This is a big update, a release nearly a year in the making,” Rob Weir, Apache OpenOffice Project Management Committee, told Datamation. “The volume of changes in Apache OpenOffice, the more visible ones as well as the many improvements behind the scenes, justifies a major version increment.”

OpenOffice came to Apache after being donated by Oracle in June of 2011. OpenOffice became a top-level project at Apache in October of 2012.

One of the major new features in OpenOffice 4.0 is the sidebars capability. The general idea behind sidebars is to make it easier for users to access commonly needed tools. In a way, it’s somewhat analogous what Microsoft has introduced in Office with its Ribbon approach

Read the full story at Datamation:
Apache Releases Open Source OpenOffice 4

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.