LibreOffice 24.8: More privacy, interoperability improvements

LibreOffice 24.8, the new major release of the free Windows, macOS, and Linux office suite, is now available. This is the first to provide an official package for Windows PCs based on ARM processors.

The LibreOffice advantage

LibreOffice is the best option for the privacy-conscious office suite user and provides a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market. It also offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to contemporary, and makes the most of different screen sizes by optimizing the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.

The biggest advantage over competing products is the LibreOffice Technology engine, the single software platform on which desktop, mobile, and cloud versions of LibreOffice – including those provided by ecosystem companies – are based.

This allows LibreOffice to offer a better user experience and to produce identical and perfectly interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the Open Document Format (ODT, ODS, and ODP) and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX). The latter hides a large amount of artificial complexity, which may create problems for users confident that they are using an open standard.

New Features of LibreOffice 24.8

• Privacy
  • If the option Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Security ▸ Options ▸ Remove personal information on saving is enabled, then personal information will not be exported (author names and timestamps, editing duration, printer name and config, document template, author and date for comments and tracked changes)
• Writer
  • UI: handling of formatting characters, width of comments panel, selection of bullets, new dialog for hyperlinks, new Find deck in the sidebar
  • Navigator: adding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, indicating images with broken links
  • Hyphenation: exclude words from hyphenation with new contextual menu and visualization, new hyphenation across columns, pages or spreads, hyphenation between constituents of a compound word
• Calc
  • Addition of FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH functions
  • Improvement of threaded calculation performance, optimization of redraw after a cell change by minimizing the area that needs to be refreshed
  • Cell focus rectangle moved apart from cell content
  • Comments can be edited and deleted from the Navigator’s right-click menu
• Impress & Draw
  • In Normal view, it is now possible to scroll between slides, and the Notes are available as a collapsible pane under the slide
  • By default, the running Slideshow is now immediately updated when applying changes in EditView or in PresenterConsole, even on different Screens
• Chart
  • New chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office)
  • Text inside chart’s titles, text boxes and shapes (and parts thereof) can now be formatted using the Character dialog
• Accessibility
  • Several improvements to the management of formatting options, which can be now announced properly by screen readers
• Security
  • New mode of password-based ODF encryption
• Interoperability
  • Support importing and exporting OOXML pivot table (cell) format definitions
  • PPTX files with heavy use of custom shapes now open faster

LibreOffice 24.8 is available here. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple MacOS 10.15.