Latest News on LibreOffice | Updates and New Features

When working with spreadsheets in LibreOffice Calc, knowing how to insert line breaks and wrap text is essential. This skill allows you to organize your data more effectively and make long cell content easier to read. In this article, I will explain various methods for wrapping text in the LibreOffice spreadsheet, including manual line breaks, row height adjustment, merged cells, and automatic text wrapping.

Using the "Enter" Key

The simplest method to wrap text in LibreOffice Calc is to use the "Enter" key on your keyboard. When entering data into a cell, press "Enter" to move to the next line. This will create a line break within the cell, allowing you to continue typing text on the next line.

This method is useful when you want to separate short pieces of information inside the same cell, such as a name and an address, a title and a note, or several items that must stay grouped together in one spreadsheet cell.

LibreOffice Writer is the word processing component of LibreOffice. This presentation and introduction to LibreOffice Writer part 2 follows the first part.

In this section, we will explore the context menus, dialog boxes, different views of a document, as well as creating, opening, and saving a document. These essential features help you work with text documents, manage files, use templates, protect documents, and move quickly through long documents.

Figure 1: Parts of Writer's main window

LibreOffice 7.3.4 Community, the fourth minor version of the LibreOffice 7.3 family, aimed at technology enthusiasts and experienced users, is available for download at https://en.libre-office.fr/staticpages/index.php/download-libreoffice-for-free.

The LibreOffice 7.3 family offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market, starting with native support for the OpenDocument (ODF) format - outperforming proprietary formats in terms of security and robustness - to superior support for DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files.

Microsoft files still rely on the outdated proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008, which is unnecessarily complex and not on the ISO-approved standard. This disregard for the ISO standard can create problems for LibreOffice and presents a significant barrier to seamless interoperability.

This LibreOffice update is intended for users who need a complete open-source office suite with strong document compatibility. It is suited to everyday productivity tasks, including creating text documents, working with spreadsheets, preparing presentations, and exchanging files in widely used office formats.

LibreOffice for Enterprise Deployments

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise application family from ecosystem partners, offering long-term support options, professional assistance, customized features, and service level agreements.

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise product family are built on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts aimed at providing a cutting-edge office suite not only for desktop but also for mobile and cloud.

Products based on LibreOffice technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and the cloud. They may have different names depending on each company's branding strategy, but they share the same unique benefits, robustness, and flexibility of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 7.3 Community, the new major version of the free office suite supported by volunteers for desktop productivity, is now available at https://www.libreoffice.org/download. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile, and cloud, it provides a wide range of enhancements aimed at users transitioning from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice or exchanging documents between the two office suites.

This LibreOffice 7.3 release focuses on practical improvements for everyday office work: opening and saving common Microsoft Office document formats, improving performance with large files, enhancing help pages, and extending macro development features through ScriptForge.

Types of Interoperability Improvements

There are three different types of interoperability enhancements:

New Feature Development

Development of new features, such as the new management of change tracking in tables and when text is moved, which positively impacts interoperability with Microsoft Office documents.

Performance Improvements

Performance enhancements when opening large DOCX and XLSX/XLSM files, improved rendering speed of certain complex documents, and new rendering speed improvements when using the Skia back-end introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.

Import/Export Filter Improvements

Improvements to import/export filters: DOC (greatly improved list/numbering import); DOCX (greatly improved list/numbering import; hyperlinks attached to shapes are now imported/exported; edit permission fixes; paragraph style change tracking); XLSX (decreased row heights for Office XLSX files; cell indentation does not increase on each save; edit permission fixes; better support for XLSX charts); and PPTX (fixed interactions and hyperlinks on images; corrected incorrect import/export of PPTX slide footers; fixed hyperlinks on images and shapes; transparent shadow for tables).

These improvements are especially useful when documents move between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office. They concern text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, charts, hyperlinks, permissions, styles, slide footers, and tables. The goal is to make common exchange scenarios easier for users who work with DOC, DOCX, XLSX, XLSM, and PPTX files.

Additionally, LibreOffice help has also been improved to support all users, with particular attention to those transitioning from Microsoft Office: search results—now using FlexSearch instead of Fuzzysort for indexing—are focused on the user's current module, while help pages for Calc Functions have been reviewed for accuracy and completeness and are linked to the Calc Function wiki pages. Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library have also been updated.

LibreOffice Writer is the word processing component of LibreOffice, a comprehensive and free office suite. This first part introduces the main Writer window, its sidebar, toolbars, rulers, status bar, and the document editing features used to create, format, revise, export, and manage text documents. In addition to the usual features of a word processor (text entry, editing and formatting, spell checker, thesaurus, hyphenation and auto-correction, search and replace...), Writer provides the following important functionalities:

• Track changes during revisions
• Layout methods, including styles, frames, columns, and tables
• Export to PDF and ePub
• Document digital signatures
• Templates and styles
• Built-in drawing tools
• Lists
• Data tables
• Mail merge and merging documents
• Automated tables of contents and indexes
• Master documents for grouping a set of documents into one document
• Fields and forms
• Database integration, including a bibliographic database
• Embedding or linking spreadsheets, equations, and other objects
• And much more