LibreOffice 7.6 Is Here, Bringing Improvements Across All Its Apps

Support for zoom gestures and document themes and improvements to font handling are among the highlights of the new LibreOffice 7.6.

LibreOffice, maintained by The Document Foundation, is a comprehensive open-source office suite of productivity software applications encompassing word processing, spreadsheet creation, presentation design, drawing, and database management.

With each new release, it continues to enhance its suite of applications, striving to provide users with a comprehensive and efficient platform for all their document-related needs.

The latest iteration, LibreOffice 7.6, has arrived with many improvements spanning its entire suite of apps, promising to make your productivity experience even more seamless and enjoyable.

What’s New in LibreOffice 7.6

One hundred forty-eight contributors have developed LibreOffice 7.6 Communityโ€™s new features. In addition, 202 other volunteers have committed localizations in 160 languages.

LibreOffice 7.6
LibreOffice 7.6

In general, this release brings the following significant changes:

  • 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.

Let’s now see in more detail what has changed in the main applications of this popular open-source office suite.

Writer

A new โ€œPage Number Wizardโ€ has been added in the โ€œInsertโ€ menu for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer.

LibreOffice 7.6 Wtiter
LibreOffice 7.6 Wtiter

Another new feature in Writer is the Formatting toolbarโ€™s Paragraph Style dropdown that displays a list of styles used in the document rather than available styles.

Moreover, the bibliography entries can be edited directly from a bibliography table, and bibliography marks hyperlink by default to the matching row in a bibliography table.

Calc

LibreOffice 7.6 Calc
LibreOffice 7.6 Calc

A convenient new feature of the LibreOffice 7.6 Calc application is that it retains a user-defined print range when a spreadsheet is copied to another document.

We continue by saying that the โ€œ?โ€ symbol 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.

There is also a new compact layout for pivot tables, and the โ€œImport Textโ€ dialog has a new option not to detect numbers in scientific notation.

Impress & Draw

LibreOffice 7.6 Impress
LibreOffice 7.6 Impress

LibreOffice 7.6โ€™s Impress introduces a new navigation panel for switching slides while viewing a presentation. On top of that, the objects can now be listed in front-to-back order in the โ€œNavigator,โ€ with the top-most object at the top of the list.

This release also supports free text annotations to PDFium import and ink, free text, and polygon/polyline annotations in PDFium export.

Finally, the modified auto-fitting text scaling algorithm works similarly to MS Office. That means 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.

You can refer to the release notes for detailed information about all changes in LibreOffice 7.6. The office suite is already available for download from the projectโ€™s website. As always, rolling release Linux distributions users will be among the first to get the new version.

Bobby Borisov

Bobby Borisov

Bobby, an editor-in-chief at Linuxiac, is a Linux professional with over 20 years of experience. With a strong focus on Linux and open-source software, he has worked as a Senior Linux System Administrator, Software Developer, and DevOps Engineer for small and large multinational companies.

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