LibreOffice 7.0 Released: Free Alternative To Microsoft Office Suite
LibreOffice is one of the best free and open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office suites. To further enhance the LibreOffice experience, The Document Foundation has released a new version, LibreOffice 7.0.
LibreOffice 7.0 is now the latest release superseding the previous version 6.4. It comes with major changes that mainly include bug fixes, improvements, and some other new features. Let’s see what new it has to offer:
LibreOffice 7.0: New Enhacements
Starting with the first significant feature, 7.0 has added support for its new and native Open Document Format (ODF) 1.3 format. With the new OpenDocument, you can now have digital signatures for documents and OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents.
Another major addition to LibreOffice is the open-source Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration with high performance. You can use Skia 2D graphic library to draw text, shapes, images, and Vulkan 3D graphics and compute API to access modern GPUs.
For better interoperability with multiple versions of Microsoft Office, 7.0 has further improved its compatibility with DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files. Subsequently, instead of 2007 compatibility mode, DOCX now saves in native 2013/2016/2019 mode, exports to XLSX files with sheet names longer than 31 characters, and checkboxes are also now possible, and finally, it has better PPTX import/export filter.
On the graphical interface side, LibreOffice 7.0 has a new default icon theme, Sukapura, for macOS. And for Windows OS, the default Colibre icon theme has received a refreshed look with new monoline style iconography similar to MS Office 365.
Speaking of specific LibreOffice apps, 7.0 has added lots of new features and improvements. For instance, better handling of quotation marks and apostrophes in Writer, keyboard shortcut ( alt + =) for autosum in Calc, and support for semi-transparent text in Impress and Draw.
For full details of the new enhancements, read the official release notes for 7.0 here.
How To Download LibreOffice 7.0?
The new version of LibreOffice is available to download from the official download page for Linux, macOS, and Windows. For Linux, you can also download LibreOffice as AppImage, Snap, and Flatpak package.
