LibreOffice 3.6 is the fourth major release of the free and open source software, and it provides a large number of new features and incremental improvement over the previous versions, wrote Florian Effenberger, chairman of the Board at the Document Foundation, in the official .

New innovations in the software range from invisible features such as improved performance and interoperability to the more visible ones such as user interface tweaks, where theming has improved to more closely match current design best-practice, Effenberger added.

Ready for a quick overview? Here's a rundown of some of the software's key new highlights.

1. Writer

LibreOffice's Writer word processor has been updated with myriad new enhancements in this latest release, including support for contextual spacing, the addition of Word Count to the software's status bar, and support for importing Microsoft Office SmartArt. Numerous other tweaks have been made to the software as well, as well as to the LibreOffice label/business card wizard.