Open Source Office Suite LibreOffice 7.6 is now available

The Document Foundation has released the open source office suite LibreOffice 7.6 Community Edition today. The new version is packed with new features and improvements. It is also the last major release that uses the traditional version scheme. From 2024 onward, LibreOffice will switch to a calendar-based release number scheme using the format YYYY-MM, e.g. 2024.02 for a February 2024 release.

LibreOffice 7.6 is available already. The new version may be downloaded from the official project website, either as a direct download or as a torrent to help the organization save bandwidth.

Selecting Help > About LibreOffice in any LibreOffice app displays the installed version. Users who have installed the online updating component may also select Help > Check for Updates to run a manual check for the update. An option to upgrade to LibreOffice 7.6 should then be displayed in the interface.

A summary of the highlights of the new LibreOffice 7.6 release is available on the official blog. The full release notes, which provide additional details on the changes, is linked here.

LibreOffice Writer received several improvements. Users find the new Page Number Wizard in the Insert menu, which simplifies adding page numbers to the header or footer of documents. Another helpful addition is the ability to edit bibliography entries directly from the bibliography table. Also new is that bibliography entries link to their row in the bibliography table automatically in the new version. Other changes include generating the table of figures based on a paragraph style, and no longer only based on categories and object names, and plumbing support to build Zotero-like functionality.

LibreOffice Calc supports a new compact layout for pivot tables and drawing styles for shapes and comments. Copied spreadsheets retain the user-defined page rank and solver settings are now saved with documents. There is also a new option to sort/filter by color and the text import dialog has a new "detect scientific notation" option to detect numbers in scientific notation.

LibreOffice Impress and Draw come with a modified auto-fitting text scaling algorithm that works similarly to the apps in Microsoft Office. There is also a new navigation panel for switching slides and improvements to CJK and Arabic languages font management.

All LibreOffice applications support documents themes, and the importing and exporting of theme definitions for ODF and OOXML documents. Support for right-to-left scripts, CJK and several Asian alphabets font handling is also improved across the board.

LibreOffice users interested in the full release notes can check them out by following the link to the detailed release notes page.

Now You: Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, or something else? What do you use?

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