Apache OpenOffice 4.1.14 arrives with 27 fixes

It was recently revealed availability of the new corrective version of the office suite Apache OpenOffice 4.1.14, that offers 27 corrections, in addition to adding some new features.

For those of you who are new to Apache OpenOffice, you should know that this is an open source office productivity suite that is used to create and edit documents (Writer), presentations (Impress), spreadsheets (Calc), graphics (Draw), mathematical formulas (Math) and databases (Base).

About Apache OpenOffice

Apache OpenOffice is a successor to OpenOffice, as are LibreOffice (the most actively developed, Collabora Online (enterprise-ready LibreOffice) and NeoOffice (commercial and available only for macOS).

OpenOffice files are based on the international standard OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) for office documents first created in 2006 (ISO/IEC 26300). This produces several new file extensions including .odt for documents, .ods for spreadsheets, and .odp for presentations.

Also, Apache OpenOffice supports other well-established file formats, such as those used with the Microsoft Office Suite (.doc, .ppt, .xls, and others). As an international standard, other productivity tools can also be designed to read or write ODF files.

Main new features of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.14

In this fix release released for Apache OpenOffice 4.1.14, The following changes are highlighted:

• Calc adds support for the DateTime type used in Excel 2010.
• Calc has improved the readability of text in cell comments.
• Calc fixed an issue with displaying the remove filter icon in the panel and menus.
• Fixed a bug in Calc that caused cell references to change incorrectly when copying and pasting across the clipboard between spreadsheets.
• Fixed a bug in Calc that caused the last line to be lost when importing from CSV files if that line used unclosed quotes.
• Writer fixed an issue with handling of apostrophes when importing HTML files.
• Writer now uses hotkeys in the "Frame" dialog, regardless of the use of the "auto" option.
• Resolved duplicate content issue when importing cell text from XLSX files.
• Improved import of documents in OOXML format.
• Improved import of SpreadsheetML files created in MS Excel 2003.

It is worth mentioning that the new version the method of encoding and storing the master password has changed, so users are advised to make a backup of their OpenOffice profile before installing version 4.1.14, as the new profile will break backwards compatibility.

If you are interested in knowing more about it of this corrective version, you can check the details In the following link.

How to install Apache OpenOffice on Linux?

For interested in being able to obtain the new version, they should know that the packages are prepared for Linux, Windows and macOS. For those of us who are Linux users, the installation from the provided source code will be quite familiar to LibreOffice.

The first thing we must do is install is java (if you already have it, you can skip this step).

In the case of Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, just type:

sudo apt install default-jdk -y

In the case of Arch Linux and derivatives of it:

sudo pacman -S jre-openjdk

In the case of Fedora, we must first search for the latest version available with:

dnf search openjdk

Once we know what version it is, we are going to install it with the following command:

sudo dnf install [package name]

It should look something like this:

sudo dnf install java-xxx-openjdk.x86_64

Now, it's time to get the latest available Apache OpenOffice package, from the following link

Once obtained, we proceed to unzip the package, for example if your distribution uses .deb:

tar -xvf Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.14_Linux_x86_install-deb_es.tar.gz

Or in your case for RPM:

tar -xvf Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.14_Linux_x86_install-rpm_es.tar.gz

After that, we proceed to carry out the installation by entering the directory and executing the installer:

cd es/DEBS/

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

cd desktop-integration/ && sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Or if it's RPM:

cd es/RPM/

sudo rpm -i *.rpm

cd desktop-integration/ && sudo rpm -i *.rpm

And we can run OpenOffice with:

openoffice4

In the case of Arch Linux and derivatives, the installation is easier, they only have to have the AUR repository enabled:

yay -s openoffice-bin