LibreOffice v6.0.0

[Arthur]

Website / Blog / Download / Release Notes

 

Berlin, 31 January 2018 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.0, a major release and a dramatically improved free office suite, which celebrates the 7th anniversary of the availability of the very first version of LibreOffice. Today LibreOffice is more powerful, simple and secure, and offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents.

 

LibreOffice 6.0 is immediately available for Windows, macOS and Linux, and for the cloud. The new major release adds a large number of significant new features to the core engine and to individual modules (Writer, Calc and Impress/Draw), with the objective of providing users with the best in terms of personal productivity.

 

A video summarizing the top new features of LibreOffice 6.0 is available on YouTube:

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Power

The Notebook bar, although still an experimental feature, has been enriched with two new variants: Grouped Bar Full for Writer, Calc and Impress, and Tabbed Compact for Writer. The Special Characters dialog has been reworked, with the addition of lists for Recent and Favorite characters, along with a Search field. The Customize dialog has also been redesigned, and is now more modern and intuitive.

 

In Writer, a Form menu has been added, making it easier to access one of the most powerful – and often unknown – LibreOffice features: the ability to design forms, and create standards-compliant PDF forms. The Find toolbar has been enhanced with a drop-down list of search types, to speed up navigation. A new default table style has been added, together with a new collection of table styles to reflect evolving visual trends.

 

The Mail Merge function has been improved, and it is now possible to use either a Writer document or an XLSX file as data source.

 

In Calc, ODF 1.2-compliant functions SEARCHB, FINDB and REPLACEB have been added, to improve support for the ISO standard format. Also, a cell range selection or a selected group of shapes (images) can be now exported in PNG or JPG format.

 

In Impress, the default slide size has been switched to 16:9, to support the most recent form factors of screens and projectors. As a consequence, 10 new Impress templates have been added, and a couple of old templates have been updated.

 

Simplicity

The old WikiHelp has been replaced by the new Help Online system, with attractive web pages that can also be displayed on mobile devices. In general, LibreOffice Help has been updated both in terms of contents and code, with other improvements due all along the life of the LibreOffice 6 family.

 

User dictionaries now allow automatic affixation or compounding. This is a general spell checking improvement in LibreOffice which can speed up work for Writer users. Instead of manually handling several forms of a new word in a language with rich morphology or compounding, the Hunspell spell checker can automatically recognize a new word with affixes or compounds, based on a “Grammar By” model.

 

Security

OpenPGP keys can be used to sign ODF documents on all desktop operating systems, with experimental support for OpenPGP-based encryption. To enable this feature, users will have to install the specific GPG software for their operating systems.

 

Document classification has also been improved, and allows multiple policies (which are now exported to OOXML files). In Writer, marking and signing are now supported at paragraph level.

 

Interoperability

OOXML interoperability has been improved in several areas: import of SmartArt and import/export of ActiveX controls, support of embedded text documents and spreadsheets, export of embedded videos to PPTX, export of cross-references to DOCX, export of MailMerge fields to DOCX, and improvements to the PPTX filter to prevent the creation of broken files.

 

New filters for exporting Writer documents to ePub and importing QuarkXPress files have also been added, together with an improved filter for importing EMF+ (Enhanced Metafile Format Plus) files as used by Microsoft Office documents. Some improvements have also been added to the ODF export filter, making it easier for other ODF readers to display visuals.

 

Edited January 31, 2018 by Arthur

[6Foot2]

Link: LibreOffice 6.2.0 Downloads and release notes

 

[mavhc]

Deploy it by downloading the MSI, opening MSI editor, removing other languages. https://helgesverre.com/blog/libreoffice-msi-gpo-error/

 

Use https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/ADMX to configure, by default it doesn't take over any MSOffice filetypes, so easy to deploy SBS.

[mavhc]

Just did a lesson comparing the two. My question at the end: Shall we pay £1000 a year for MS Office, or use this free LibreOffice? So far 50/50

[mavhc]

6.4.0 is out. I wrote a thing to fix the >255 character language code list that breaks it for GPO deployment:

 

$file = "LibreOffice_6.4.0_Win_x64.msi"
$folder = "\\domain\share\SoftwareInstall\LibreOffice"

function Release-Ref ($ref) {

   ([system.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject([system.__ComObject]$ref) -gt 0)
   [system.GC]::Collect()
   [system.GC]::WaitForPendingFinalizers()

}

$windowsInstaller = New-Object -ComObject WindowsInstaller.Installer 
$MSI = $windowsInstaller.OpenDatabase($file, 1)
write-host $MSI
$SummaryInfo = $MSI.SummaryInformation(4)

write-host $SummaryInfo.Property(7)
$SummaryInfo.Property(7) = "x64;1033"
$SummaryInfo.Persist()
$MSI.Commit()
Release-Ref($SummaryInfo)
Release-Ref($MSI)
Copy-Item $file $folder

 

Doesn't seem possible to script Software Installation of GPOs, MS have published the .aas file format, but no one's made an editor

[6Foot2]

Link: LibreOffice 24.2 Will Succeed LibreOffice 7.6 - Phoronix

 

One nugget of information in the LibreOffice 7.6 release announcement for those who missed it and deserves calling out specifically... Succeeding LibreOffice 7.6 will not be v7.7 or v8.0 but rather v24.2.

 

LibreOffice developers are moving to a year.month based versioning system. Thus the next release with their six-month based release cadence will be LibreOffice 24.2 and in turn LibreOffice 24.8, 25.2, 25.8, 26.2, etc. Due to the maturity of the LibreOffice codebase, the current versioning system isn't really reflective of major changes and in turn can be hard to genuinely justify bumping the significant version number. By switching to a calendar-based numbering system it's now decoupled from features or not of that release.

 

There were some internal discussions whether it should move to say LibreOffice 2024.2 but in the end they decided for a YY.M-based scheme. There were also discussions whether to just always increase the major version number with each new release as Firefox and Google Chrome do now, but that too was decided against.

 

So next February, look forward to LibreOffice 24.2.