LibreOffice 7.4 provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with – or migrating from – Microsoft Office, the LibreOffice team said.
LibreOffice provides native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF), while offering "superior" support for Microsoft Office files, as well as filters for a wide range of legacy document formats.
New features across LibreOffice 7.4 include support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files, help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library, a Search field in the Extension Manager, and performance and compatibility improvements.
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Changes to the Writer (word processing) module include better change tracking in the footnote area, the display of original numbers in edited lists when using change tracking, and new typographic settings for hyphenation.
The Calc spreadsheet gains support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets, extra functions in the drop-down AutoSum widget, and a new menu item to search for sheet names.
And the Impress presentation software includes new support for document themes.
Release notes describing all the changes can be found here.
The LibreOffice team points out that the new features were developed by 147 contributors, and that 72% of code commits came from developers employed by organisations including Collabora, Red Hat, allotropia and The Document Foundation, with the remaining 28% from 95 individual volunteers.
The Document Foundation strongly recommends that enterprises should use the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications which contain dedicated value-added features and come with other benefits such as service level agreements.
It warns that the increasing use of the Community edition by enterprises is slowing development, and means the LibreOffice project may fall short of its expectations and possibilities.
LibreOffice 7.4 Community is available immediately for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors) and Linux.