The Document Foundation announced today the general availability for public testing of the first alpha release of the upcoming LibreOffice 7.0 open-source office suite.
After several months in the works, LibreOffice 7.0 is now finally ready for public testing. The Document Foundation released the first alpha build for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.
Development kicked off in early June 2019 and more than 1200 bugs were squashed and 6200 commits have been submitted to the code repository during all this time.
This means that we should expect LibreOffice 7.0 to be a massive release with numerous new features, optimizations, and improvements all over the place.
Among the highlights, there will be new spreadsheet functions, improved support for XLSX files that include many images, a padded numbering in Writer’s lists, glow effect on objects, and native 2013/2016/2019 saving mode of DOCX files.
“This mode is intended to ensure users of different versions of Microsoft Office can continue working together and documents created with older versions of Office won’t look any different when they’re opened in future versions of Office,” said The Document Foundation.
A new Sukapura icon theme will be present as well in LibreOffice 7.0, along with basic HiDPI scaling for Qt 5 on KDE Plasma 5 or later and numerous other performance improvements.
Of course, there will be a lot more changes and new features including this massive release, which will be announced when the final release hits the streets in early August 2020.
Until then, you can get an early taste by downloading and testing the first alpha version of LibreOffice 7.0 from here. But please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use!
I do recommend using the AppImage binary file to install LibreOffice 7.0 alpha on your GNU/Linux distribution without affecting your system. If you want to report bugs, do it here.
