LibreOffice 7.6 – free MS Office alternative major upgrade

The free LibreOffice 7.6 is a significant upgrade and a serious MS Office suite alternative. Hundreds of volunteers from 148 countries have spent the last 12 years and five release cycles in the making.

it may be worth first reading about the V7.5 features in LibreOffice – free and for those that can’t use Microsoft Office.

LibreOffice 7.6

The new features include:

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 lists styles in the document. Rather than the complete 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 not used.
  • Support for drawing styles for shapes and comments. Includes a dedicated style for comments that allows customisation of the default look and text formatting of new comments.
  • New compact layout for pivot tables.
  • Autofilter support for sorting by colour. Filter/sort by colour considers colours set by number format.
  • The Import Text dialogue (as CSV file or as unformatted text) has a new option not to detect numbers 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.
  • 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 similarly 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.

You can download V7.6 for Windows here https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/. You can install V7.6 and later uninstall V7.5.

Interoperability with Microsoft Office (Microsoft 365)

LibreOffice 7.6 provides many improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with MS Office or migrating from MS Office. 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.
  • Writer: character properties of DOCX paragraph markers are now also stored in ODT files.
  • Writer: 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 many legacy document formats, to return ownership and control to users.

Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008 rather than 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).

LibreOffice 7.6 for Enterprise

For enterprise-class deployments, the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – have many dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLA (Service Level Agreements).

Every line of code ecosystem companies develop 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), mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and the cloud.

Previous Post
Next Post