LibreOffice 26.8.1 is now available as the first maintenance update in the 26.8 series, bringing about 40 bug fixes across Writer, Calc, Impress, and the suite’s import and export filters.
A significant part of this update focuses on compatibility with Microsoft Office documents, especially files using DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats. According to The Document Foundation, the fixes aim to make documents look and behave more consistently when exchanged between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office.
In Writer, LibreOffice 26.8.1 fixes an issue where hyperlinks in a DOCX table of contents could stop working until the table was updated. The update also addresses differences in text alignment, paragraph wrapping, and line spacing that could make documents appear different compared with Microsoft Word.
Calc receives several fixes. Rotated drawing objects in XLSX spreadsheets should now retain correct dimensions, while editing database ranges in XLSX documents works again. The release also fixes a crash when creating a pivot table with two data fields, along with an issue where using “search in all sheets” could affect data on another sheet.
Impress users should see better reliability when opening PowerPoint files. Two bugs could cause the application to crash when loading certain PPTX documents, including presentations with unusual table style definitions or malformed comment data. Both are addressed in 26.8.1.
PDF export also gets attention. One fix restores named hyperlinks that could stop working after exporting a document to PDF, while another addresses unwanted numbering that could appear in the PDF even though it was not visible in the original document.
On the text and CSV importing side, LibreOffice 26.8.1 fixes problems with UTF-16BE and ISO Latin-1 encoded files, along with garbled Chinese text and Japanese character handling. The automatic character-set option in the CSV import dialog has also been adjusted after previously producing misleading results.
On top of that, Linux users get a fix for semicolon-separated font substitution involving Fontconfig, while KDE Plasma users should no longer encounter missing buttons in dialogs when LibreOffice uses native Qt 6/KF6 message boxes.
On macOS, the release addresses an intermittent Writer issue where interacting with the vertical scrollbar could freeze the interface for anywhere from several seconds to nearly a minute.
Other fixes cover crashes involving custom number formats, ODF saving, macro handling, database connections, Find and Replace behavior, and several smaller UI and formatting regressions.
For a full rundown of everything that’s been fixed in LibreOffice 26.8.1, check out the release notes for the RC1 version. The official announcement is here.
