Latest News on LibreOffice | Updates and New Features

The LibreOffice 2022 Annual Report highlights the key events, software updates and community contributions of LibreOffice during 2022. On April 19, 2023, Mike Saunders published an article summarizing the main events of the year. This year was particularly significant as it marked the twelfth anniversary of LibreOffice. Two major new versions were introduced, each bringing a host of new features, while several minor versions contributed to enhancing the stability and performance of the office suite.

On February 2, 2022, LibreOffice 7.3 was officially launched after six months of intensive development. Developers from Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ, The Document Foundation, along with numerous volunteers, collaborated to integrate many new features. Notable improvements include better change tracking, support for color filters in Calc, and enhanced compatibility with PowerPoint screen sizes in Impress. Additionally, this version benefited from numerous optimizations in terms of performance, compatibility, and stability.

The Document Foundation (TDF) promotes open source software and free software through its public activities, community engagement and support for user freedom. TDF is a globally recognized free and open-source software (FOSS) organization, well-known for the popularity of its flagship project, LibreOffice, especially in Europe where it was founded over 20 years ago.

Focus on Free Software Adoption

TDF is committed to promoting the adoption of free software and the freedom of users to choose their hardware, operating systems, and software, particularly in public administrations (especially in schools and universities).

This focus includes practical issues that affect users every day: access to software, the ability to work with open tools, and the possibility for public organizations to choose solutions that match their needs. In this context, LibreOffice is presented as TDF's flagship project and as a concrete example of free and open-source software used for office productivity.

Strengthening Public Policy Activities

In December 2022, the TDF board decided to enhance its public policy activities in Europe by sponsoring travels to events organized by Open Forum Europe (OFE) and the European Commission on public policy-related issues.

These public policy activities are connected to discussions that may affect free software projects, communities and users. By taking part in events and meetings, TDF can contribute comments and raise issues related to free software adoption, user choice and public administration use.

Impact on Cyber Resilience Act

TDF's activities have primarily focused on amending the proposal for the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), which could negatively affect free software in general.

The Cyber Resilience Act is therefore a central topic in this article. The information below summarizes the steps mentioned: a commentary document, meetings with other free software projects, participation in a FOSDEM roundtable, discussions with DIGIT and a planned meeting organized by the Swedish government.

LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community is the second minor version of the free and volunteer-supported office suite for desktop productivity. This version is available for download for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux.

The most significant enhancements in the LibreOffice 7.5 family are detailed in the following paragraphs. They concern the general interface, PDF export, accessibility, and the main applications included in the suite: Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw.

LibreOffice 7.5.1 Community, the first minor version of the 7.5 series of the free office productivity suite, is available for download for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux.

Here are the main new features of LibreOffice 7.5

General Improvements

• Significant improvements have been made to dark mode support. • Newer, more colorful and vibrant application and MIME type icons have been added. • The Start Center can filter documents by type. • An enhanced version of the single toolbar user interface has been implemented. • PDF export has been improved with several fixes, options, and new features. • Support for font embedding on macOS has been included. • Enhancements to the font feature dialog with several new options. • A zoom slider has been added to the bottom right of the macro editor.

LibreOffice 7.5 is a free and open-source office suite offering numerous features for creating, editing, and sharing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. This version includes significant enhancements to improve user experience, security, and compatibility with common file formats, such as those used by Microsoft Office.

New features in LibreOffice 7.5 include improved paragraph styles, sorting and filtering options for tables, an image editing toolbar, mind mapping support, and enhancements in font and color management. Furthermore, the suite provides increased compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats.