LibreOffice 7.5 Community was released with the contribution of 144 individuals, with 63% of all commits coming from 47 developers employed by the three companies sitting on The Document Foundation Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat, and allotropia. 12% of the code was contributed by six developers directly from The Document Foundation, while the remaining 25% came from individual volunteers. Additionally, 112 enthusiasts worked on updating translations for 158 languages, resulting in 120 different language versions of the package. This means that LibreOffice can be used by 5.4 billion people in their native language, out of the 8 billion people on the planet (with an additional 2.3 billion people having access to LibreOffice in their second language).
The main highlights of version 7.5 include significant improvements to the dark mode support throughout the suite, updated icons for applications and MIME types, and the ability to filter the history overview of opened documents by type in the start screen. The Single Toolbar UI interface has been enhanced, as well as the PDF export feature with new options and bug fixes.
On the macOS platform, font embedding in documents is now supported, and font property dialogs have also been improved with new options. A zoom slider has been added to the macro editor in the bottom right corner.
In Writer, there are improved tab management systems, with objects now able to be marked as decorative for better accessibility. New types have been added to the content control management, including enhancements in PDF support for better handling of PDF forms.
Calc now offers support for data tables in graphs, the ability to search within function descriptions in the function wizard, and new numerical formats like „Spell out“ for numbers. Conditional formatting conditions are no longer case-sensitive, and the behavior when entering numbers enclosed in single quotation marks has been fixed.
Impress and Draw have received a new set of default table styles and the ability to create, edit, save, and export these styles. Objects can now be dragged in the Navigator window, and embedded videos in slides can be played back and trimmed.
A notable addition is the ability to launch the presenter screen as a regular window, not just in full-screen mode.
LibreOffice 7.5 continues to improve support for Microsoft Office formats, particularly MS Office Open XML (docx/xlsx/pptx). Better interoperability between OOXML and ODF formats is emphasized, although differences in rendering may still occur between the two. The root of these issues is attributed to Microsoft’s strategy to hinder the widespread adoption of the ODF format, which is an open and standardized format compared to Microsoft’s proprietary format.
In conclusion, the article expresses gratitude to all developers, contributors, testers, and translators who have worked on LibreOffice and the ODF specification. The author personally acknowledges the value of LibreOffice as a nearly full-fledged alternative to commercial office suites, despite some areas where Microsoft may excel. The clean karma of LibreOffice, in contrast to Microsoft’s history with the non-open OOXML format, is highlighted as a significant factor in choosing the open-source suite.
Overall, LibreOffice 7.5 brings a range of improvements and new features to enhance the user experience and interoperability with other office suites. The dedication and collaborative effort of the LibreOffice community continue to drive the evolution of this powerful open-source software.