The Libreoffice 7.6 community is here

Version 7.6 of the Libreoffice Community free office suite is available for download on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. With the release, a number of new functions and improvements have been introduced into the solution. For example, zoom gestures are supported across groups in the main view when using touchpads. Document (image) attributes and import and export of attribute definitions for ODF and OOXML documents are also supported. In addition, general improvements in font handling are promised.

In the Writer application, paragraph formatting and the characters used can be distinguished, as well as direct formatting in text. A new Page Number Wizard has been added to the Insert menu to make it easier to add page numbers to the header/footer in one step, and the Paragraph Formats drop-down menu on the Formatting toolbar displays a list of formats used in the document instead of the full list of available formats. There are also improvements in Writer regarding figure tables, reference entries, and dictionary entries.

Some details in Calc have also been improved. For example, the number format “?” Now supported when exporting to ODF to represent an integer replaced by a space if a non-significant zero. Another example is spreadsheets copied to another document that now hold a dedicated print area. There’s also new drawing styles support for shapes and comments, a new compact layout for pivot tables and automatic filter support for sorting by color.

Impress & Draw includes a new navigation panel for changing slides while viewing a presentation, support for free text annotations when importing PDFium, and support for free text and polygon/multiline annotations when exporting PDFium. Objects can now be inserted in front-to-back order in the browser, and the automatic text-sizing algorithm has been changed to work similarly to MS Office.

A video summarizing the main new features in the Libreoffice 7.6 community can be found below. An overview of the innovations can be found at Release notes. Download Libreoffice for Windows can be found in the well-categorized library of freeware from “Swiss IT Magazine”.

With the release of version 7.6, the Documentfoundation, which is behind the collection, also announces that a new version numbering scheme will be introduced with the next version. Starting in 2024, LibreOffice will adopt calendar-based version numbering, so the next major release will be LibreOffice 2024.02 (February 2024). (MW)