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The Document Foundation announced today the general availability of the LibreOffice 6.4 open-source and cross-platform office suite for all supported platforms.
LibreOffice 6.4 has been development during the past five months, but the final release is now available to download for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems. This is a major release that introduces several new features, multiple performance improvements, especially when working with presentations and spreadsheets, as well as better compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.
“LibreOffice 6.4 is the first new release available in 2020. During the year, the community will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the best free office suite ever at several Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) events in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Several volunteers will present the project milestones and discuss the future of the office suite, on the desktop and in the cloud,” said The Document Foundation.
What’s new in LibreOffice 6.4
Highlights of LibreOffice 6.4 include a QR code generator to make it easier to add QR codes to your documents, a new Automatic Redaction feature that lets you hide sensitive or classified information in your documents, and unified hyperlink context menus as Copy Hyperlink Location, Edit Hyperlink, Open Hyperlink, and Remove Hyperlink.
The built-in help system has been updated as well to provide faster and more precise search results, and several help pages now offer localized screenshots for a better user experience. Other than that, this release introduce application icons to document thumbnails inside the Start Center, which makes it easier for users to recognize documents.
Writer received a Table panel in the Sidebar, the ability to mark comments as resolved and add comments to images and charts inside word documents, as well as improved copying, cutting, and the selection of drawing objects anchored at-paragraph should now work more consistently.
Moreover, a new wrap option automatically avoids overlapping shapes in Writer, which should perform better when importing files with many bookmarks. Table handling has been dramatically improved allowing faster table and table row/column moving and deletion. Also, pasting of tables inside text documents thanks to a new “Paste as Nested Table” menu option.
Calc now lets users export screenshots into a single PDF page, offers faster sorting, and improves scalability of formula-groups computation on multi-core CPUs. Impress and Draw get a new “Consolidate Text” option in the Shape menu that combines multiple selected text boxes into a single one, which might come in handy if text content is split across multiple boxes when importing PDF documents.
LibreOffice Online also received some improvements, among which we can mention the ability for users to more easily modify table properties in word documents from the sidebar and fully manage the document’s Table of Contents (ToC), full featured Function Wizard in Calc, along with several new options for selected charts in the spreadsheet sidebar.
The Excel 2003 XML import filter, DOC and DOCX import/export filter, and PPT and PPTX import/export filter have also been improved in LibreOffice 6.4, which also features a new menu option to hide the ruler and a dropdown option in the statusbar to allow users to quickly switch the document language.
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