LibreOffice 7.0 Officially Released, This Is What’s New

The LibreOffice Project announced today the general availability of the LibreOffice 7.0 office suite series for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS and Windows.

Many months in development, the LibreOffice 7.0 open-source and free office suite is finally here and will soon be available for installation from the stable software repositories of many popular GNU/Linux distributions, so you can enjoy a better and more modern office suite experience.

As you can imagine, this is a major release that adds numerous new features and improvements over previous versions. Highlights include ODF 1.3 support with the ability to add visual digital signatures in existing documents, encrypt XML documents with the OpenPGP/GPG standard, change tracking, and additional details in the description of elements in first pages, text, numbers and charts.

For Linux systems, LibreOffice 7.0 introduced basic HiDPI scaling for Qt5/KDE 5 environments and better support for accessing shared files via the SMB protocol. On Windows, there’s a new Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration for faster performance, and on macOS there’s a new default icon theme called Sakapura.

LibreOffice Writer received improvements to the navigator, making it easier to use, with more context menus, the ability to add semi-transparent text, support for displaying in-line bookmarks in text, support for padded numbering in lists, and better handling of quotation marks and apostrophes.

LibreOffice Calc comes with new functions for non-volatile random number generation and keyboard shortcut for autosum, while LibreOffice Impress & Draw received support for semi-transparent text, the ability to generate PDF files larger than 500 cm, and support for subscripts to return to the default of 8%.

• 

• 

Interoperability with MS Office and compatibility with proprietary document formats like DOCX, XLSX and PPTX continues to see important improvements in this new LibreOffice release. Users are now able to save DOCX files in a native MS Office 2013/2016/2019 mode, export XLSX files with sheet names longer than 31 characters, as well as to export XLSX files with shapes and export checkboxes into XLSX files.

Also implemented is support for exporting DOCX files with non-default cell margins, better support for Impress math objects from PPTX files, improved handling of predefined table styles for imported PPTX files, as well as glow and soft edge effects for objects in the XLSX and DOCX export filters.

“LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite arena, starting from native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – with better security and interoperability features over proprietary formats – to almost perfect support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files,” said The Document Foundation.

The EMF+ import filter has been improved as well, now supporting linear gradient imports, support for the BeginContainer record to properly display images, as well as the ability to import and display custom labels from charts in OOXML format and store them in the ODF format.

Among other noteworthy changes, LibreOffice 7.0 removes the Macromedia Flash export filter as the Adobe Flash Player will reach end-of-life by the end of 2020, adds support for Java modules using JRE 9 or higher, locks all toolbars by default on fresh user profiles, adds new shapes galleries, and further improves LibreOffice Help.

You can download LibreOffice 7.0 right now from the official website. Check out the video summarizing the major new features in LibreOffice 7.0 below, courtesy of The Document Foundation. LibreOffice 7.0 will be supported with up to six point releases until May 29th, 2021.

Last updated 4 years ago