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 Community’s new features. In addition, 202 other volunteers have committed localizations in 160 languages.
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 “Page Number Wizard” has been added in the “Insert” menu for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer.
Another new feature in Writer is the Formatting toolbar’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
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 “?” 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 “Import Text” dialog has a new option not to detect numbers in scientific notation.
Impress & Draw
LibreOffice 7.6’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 “Navigator,” 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 project’s website. As always, rolling release Linux distributions users will be among the first to get the new version.
LibreOffice is just too complicated for use by mortal men. Moreover — and this is a problem with modern apps in general — the sheer number of distracting “advice” popups is taking its tole when all you want to do is concentrate on what you’re doing and LibreOffice is no exception. You can see the little annoying “Learn what’s new” hectoring in the second screenshot above which you must click to make go away.
I’ve switched to ONLYOFFICE which is far more comprehensible and, for the time being at least, far far better.