Announcement of LibreOffice 7.6 Community - The Document Foundation Blog (2023)

Berlin, August 21, 2023 – LibreOffice 7.6 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, and the last based on the historical release numbering scheme (first digit for release cycle, second digit for major release), is immediately available from www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple and Intel processors), and Linux. Starting from 2024, TDF will adopt calendar based-release numbering, so the next major release will be LibreOffice 24.2 in February 2024.

LibreOffice is the only open source office suite for personal productivity which can be compared feature-by-feature with the market leader. After twelve years and five release cycles – code cleaning, code refactoring, polishing the user interface, extending to new hardware and software platforms, and optimizing interoperability with OOXML to support users – it is increasingly difficult to develop entirely new features, so most of them are refinements or improvements of existing ones.

Highlights of LibreOffice 7.6 Community

GENERAL

• Support for zoom gestures when using touchpads in the main view.
• Support for document themes, and import and export of theme definitions for ODF and OOXML documents.
• Many improvements to font handling, especially for right-to-left scripts, CJK and other Asian alphabets.

WRITER

• New Page Number Wizard in the Insert menu, for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer.
• The Paragraph Style dropdown in the Formatting toolbar shows a list of styles used in the document, rather than the full list of the available styles.
• Tables of Figures can be generated more flexibly based on paragraph styles, and not only from categories or object names.
• Bibliography entries can be edited directly from a bibliography table, and bibliography marks hyperlink by default to the matching row in a bibliography table.
• Highlighting for used paragraph and character styles and direct formatting in text.
• Phrase checking: multi-word dictionary items of Hunspell and custom dictionaries are now accepted.

CALC

• Number format: “?” is now supported when exporting to ODF to represent an integer digit, replaced by blank if it is a non significant zero, and decimals for formats in seconds without truncation like [SS].00 are now accepted.
• Spreadsheets copied to another document now retain a user-defined print range.
• Solver settings are saved with documents, and page styles are exported even if they are not in use.
• Support for drawing styles for shapes and comments, including a dedicated style for comments that makes it possible to customize the default look and text formatting of new comments.
• New compact layout for pivot tables.
• Autofilter support for sorting by colour. Filter/sort by color considers colours set by number format.
• The Import Text dialog (as CSV file or as unformatted text) has a new option to not detect number in scientific notation (only if “Detect Special Numbers” is off).

IMPRESS & DRAW

• New navigation panel for switching slides while viewing a presentation (option is enabled by flagging a checkbox in Slide Show Settings).
• Objects can now be listed in front to back order in the Navigator, with the top-most object at the top of the list.
• Support for free text annotations to PDFium import, plus support for ink, free text and polygon/polyline annotations in PDFium export.
• Modified the auto-fitting text scaling algorithm to work in a way similar to MS Office. Text scaling now separates scaling for space (paragraph and line) and scaling fonts, where space scaling can be 100%, 90% and 80%, and font scaling is rounded to the nearest point size. Horizontal spacing (bullets, indents) is not scaled anymore.
• Several improvements to font management for CJK and Arabic languages.

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.6 Community is available on YouTube and PeerTube..

A description of all new features is available in the Release Notes. [1]

Contributors to LibreOffice 7.6 Community

LibreOffice 7.6 Community’s new features have been developed by 148 contributors: 61% of code commits are from the 52 developers employed by three companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and allotropia – or other organizations, 15% are from 7 developers at The Document Foundation, and the remaining 24% are from 89 individual volunteers.

Other 202 volunteers – representing hundreds of other people providing translations – have committed localizations in 160 languages. LibreOffice 7.6 Community is released in 120 different language versions, more than any other free or proprietary software, and as such can be used in the native language (L1) by over 5.4 billion people worldwide. In addition, over 2.3 billion people speak one of those 120 languages as their second language (L2).

LibreOffice for Enterprises

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLA (Service Level Agreements): www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for their enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code repository, and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and for the cloud.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of an LTS (long-term support) version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer value-added solutions and services in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

Indeed, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and LTS options from certified partners – is the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data, and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Interoperability with Microsoft Office

Based on the advanced features of the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, LibreOffice 7.6 provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with MS Office or migrating from MS Office. These users should check new releases of LibreOffice on a regular basis, as the progress is so fast, that each new version improves dramatically over the previous one.

A few of the most significant improvements:

• Writer
  • Several fixes for frames in DOCX files, for lost frames, combined frames that should be separate, split frames that should be combined, overlapping frames, ignored parent styles, lost relative positioning, wrong absolute positioning, and lost rotation.
  • Character properties of DOCX paragraph markers are now also stored in ODT files.
  • Significant handling improvements for multi-page floating tables, especially when importing/exporting files from/to DOCX/DOC/RTF.
• Calc
  • Fixed export of conditionally formatted cell border colours to XLSX.

LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, with native support for the Open Document Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to superior support for MS Office files, along with filters for a large number of legacy document formats, to return ownership and control to users.

Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008, and not on the ISO approved standard, so they hide a large amount of artificial complexity. This causes handling issues with LibreOffice, which defaults to a true open standard format (the Open Document Format).

Availability of LibreOffice 7.6 Community

LibreOffice 7.6 Community is available from: www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.15. LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here: www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/.

For users who don’t need the latest features, and prefer a version that has undergone more testing and bug fixing, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 7.5 family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 7.5.5 Community.

The Document Foundation does not provide technical support for users, although they can get it from volunteers on user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at www.libreoffice.org/donate

[1] Release Notes: wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.6

Press Kit

Download link: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/k7kZDbx8HTWmZ8N