LibreOffice 7.6 Open-Source Office Suite Officially Released, This Is What's New

The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 7.6 today as a major version of this popular open-source, free, cross-platform office suite that introduces several new features and enhancements.

Highlights of LibreOffice 7.6 include support for zoom gestures on touchpads in the main view, support for document themes, along with the ability to import and export theme definitions for ODF and OOXML documents, as well as many improvements to font handling, especially for right-to-left scripts, CJK, and Asian alphabets.

For LibreOffice Writer, this release introduces a new Page Number Wizard in the Insert menu to easily insert page numbers in the header or footer, an updated Paragraph Style dropdown in the Formatting toolbar that now displays a list of styles used in the document, and highlighting of used paragraph and character styles, as well as of direct formatting in text.

Furthermore, LibreOffice Writer gets multi-word dictionary items of Hunspell and custom dictionaries in phrase checking, the ability to generate Tables of Figures more flexibly based on paragraph styles and from more categories, and support for editing bibliography entries directly from a bibliography table.

LibreOffice Calc received a lot of changes too, including a new compact layout for pivot tables, autofilter support for sorting by color, support for drawing styles for shapes and comments, support for “?” number format when exporting to ODF to represent an integer digit, and the ability to save solver settings with documents.

LibreOffice Calc also gets the ability to export page styles even if they’re not in use, a new option in the Import Text dialog to not detect numbers in scientific notation, as well as support for spreadsheets copied to another document to retain a user-defined print range.

For LibreOffice Impress & Draw, this release brings a new navigation panel for switching slides while viewing a presentation, support for free text annotations, ink, free text, and polygon/polyline annotations to PDFium import, the ability to list objects in front-to-back order in the Navigator, and a revamped auto-fitting text scaling algorithm to work in a way similar to MS Office.

“Text scaling now separates scaling for space (paragraph and line) and scaling fonts, where space scaling can be 100%, 90%, and 80%, and font scaling is rounded to the nearest point size. Horizontal spacing (bullets, indents) is not scaled anymore,” said The Document Foundation.

As with all new LibreOffice releases, 7.6 also improves interoperability with MS Office documents. The most significant improvements include better handling for multi-page floating tables, especially when importing/exporting files from or to DOCX, DOC, and RTF formats, the ability to store character properties of DOCX paragraph markers in ODT files, better exporting of conditionally formatted cell border colors to XLSX documents, and several fixes for frames in DOCX files.

LibreOffice 7.6 is available for download right now from the official website as ready-to-install binaries for 64-bit DEB and RPM-based distributions like Fedora Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, etc. Of course, the source tarballs are also available for download for other GNU/Linux distributions.

LibreOffice 7.6 will be supported until June 12th, 2024. The first maintenance release, LibreOffice 7.6.1, will be available in about three weeks from now, in mid-September 2023. Keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your Linux distros for the new LibreOffice version and update as soon as possible.

Image credits: The Document Foundation

Last updated 9 months ago