As every six months, The Document Foundation (TDF) released a new version of the office suite LibreOffice. Just don’t let the numbers fool you. This is not the first time that the organization has not followed the set system of the version numbering system. Jumped from 3.6 to 4.0, 4.4 to 5.0, 5.4 to 6.0, 6.4 to 7.0 and now we go from version 7.6 to version 24.2.
This time, TDF is directly changing the way of marking. It is intuitive. The version number consists of the year and month of release. Manufacturers getting ahead of themselves with numbering is nothing new in the computing world, and The Document Foundation at least got ahead of itself when it released LibreOffice 24.2 last January. Realistically, most people won’t notice the new version until February at the earliest.
But enough is enough of fiddling with something that is hardly a marketing change from the user’s point of view. LibreOffice is still the same office suite, just a bit better. It was working again on better compatibility with OOXML formats from Microsoftwhich is therefore infinite work:
- Writer imports headers and footers of the first pages in documents with better quality.
- Writer handles importing objects in documents better. Imports the background, color transitions are not lost, text in objects bends according to the shape of the object, etc.
- The tools import images in SVG format instead of converting it to PNG.
LibreOffice is moving from version 7.6 to version 24.2. It’s just a number
The development team points out that Microsoft is still relying on the original version of the formats from 2015 instead of the newer revision that was standardized by ISO. Therefore, it is difficult for office tool manufacturers to achieve perfect compatibility.
Files in formats You can encrypt ODF with a new mechanism. It is more nimble, yet safer. But older versions of LibreOffice will understandably not read files encrypted in this way, so the original type of encryption will be used by default.
Other news are of a smaller nature. To reduce the risk of data loss, LibreOffice backs up data needed for recovery automatically. It is no longer just an optional feature that few people turn on. Care has been taken to create a custom ribbon variation from LibreOffice that can be used by those who prefer or are simply used to Office from Microsoft.
However, the ribbon and all other variations on it are still optional. The default UI style does not change. Writer adds a separate style for comments, so you can easily visually differentiate comments by type when you create multiple styles or simply change their formatting at once. Fewer problems should arise when working with multi-page tables in documents.
You can in Calc in the sidebar search functions by typing. The spreadsheet calculator also supports the scientific notation of numbers, which it also saves to ODF. Impress once again understands what capital letters are. Support for assistive functions has been improved. Complete list of changes available at The Document Foundation Wiki.
TDF presents selected news on video:
Resources: The Document Foundation Blog
2024-02-04 18:45:06
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