The Document Foundation has released the LibreOffice 7.4 office suite. Ready-made installation packages are prepared for various distributions of Linux, Windows and macOS. 147 developers took part in the preparation of the release, of which 95 are volunteers. 72% of the changes were made by employees of the three companies supervising the project - Collabora, Red Hat and Allotropia, and 28% of the changes were added by independent enthusiasts.
The LibreOffice 7.4 release is labeled "Community", will be supported by enthusiasts, and is not aimed at enterprises. LibreOffice Community is freely available for free to everyone, including corporate users. For enterprises that need additional services, products of the LibreOffice Enterprise family are being developed separately, for which partner companies will provide full support, the ability to receive updates for a long time (LTS) and additional features, such as SLA (Service Level Agreements).
The most notable changes:
- Improved rendering of document thumbnails in the Start Center.
- The add-on manager has a search field.
- The dialog for selecting font options has been redesigned.
- For Windows 10 and Windows 11, an experimental implementation of a dark design has been proposed.
- A dark variant of the default Colibre icon set in Windows has been proposed.
- Added support for importing and exporting images in WebP format, including this format can now be used to insert images into documents, spreadsheets, presentations and Draw drawings.
- Added support for EMZ and WMZ files.
- Improved document layout performance during operations such as loading a document and exporting to PDF.
- Added help information for the ScriptForge macro library.
- Changes in Writer:
- Added the ability to use the external LanguageTool toolkit to check grammar.
- New hyphenation options have been added to the typography settings for arranging text in a paragraph: Hyphenation zone (hyphenation limit), minimum word length for hyphenation, and disabling hyphenation of the last word in a paragraph.
- Changed the numbering of list items in the Show Changes mode, which now indicates both the current and original item numbers.
- Selecting an action from the "Tools ▸ Update ▸ Update all" menu now also updates the thumbnails of OLE objects.
- Closed to the behavior of MS Word handling of borders around tables and paragraphs.
- Implemented the ability to clean gaps in MS Word documents to improve layout accuracy.
- The Accessibility Check… dialog has been moved to asynchronous rendering.
- For documents loaded in read-only mode, it is possible to view changes both through the Edit ▸ Tracked Changes ▸ Manage… dialog and through the sidebar.
- Changes in the document related to the deletion and insertion of footnotes are now shown in the footnotes area.
- Added support for DOCX-compliant content controls for form fill elements in MS Word portability improvements: "Rich Text" (indicator for block of text), "Check Box" (select element selector), "Drop-Down" (drop-down list), “Picture” (button for inserting a picture) and “Date” (field for selecting a date).
- By default, auto-correction is disabled for "*bold*", "/italic/", "-strikeout-", and "_underline_" markdown tags in text.
- Added the ability to use the external LanguageTool toolkit to check grammar.
- Changes in the spreadsheet Calc:
- A new item "Sheet ▸ Navigate ▸ Go" has been added to the menu to make it easier to access sheets in large spreadsheets with many sheets. When you go to the menu, a new dialog for searching by sheet names is shown.
- Added setting "View ▸ Hidden Row/Column Indicator" to show a special indicator of hidden columns and rows.
- Simplified access to sorting options.
- The ability to work with spreadsheets with up to 16 thousand columns has been implemented (previously, documents could not include more than 1024 columns).
- The AutoSum widget provides new functions COUNTA, PRODUCT, STDEV, STDEVP, VAR, and VARP for use in formulas.
- The changed height of the formula input panel is saved in the document.
- Improved dialog for copying and moving sheets, the note for the "OK" button in which now changes depending on the selected operation.
- Provided automatic filling of the range of cells for formulas that return an array and a matrix, by analogy with the way it would be if the combination “Shift + Ctrl + ↵” was used for input. To save the old behavior, before entering the formula, it is enough to select the desired cell (previously, only one cell was filled in, in which the first top element was placed).
- Work has been done to improve performance. Optimized work in the presence of a large number of columns with data. Improved performance of the COUNTIF, SUMIFS, and VLOOKUP functions, especially when using unsorted data. Calculations are accelerated in documents with a large number of formulas. Improved download speed for large CSV files. Improved filter performance for exporting to Excel files. Speed up loading of spreadsheets that require recalculation.
- A new item "Sheet ▸ Navigate ▸ Go" has been added to the menu to make it easier to access sheets in large spreadsheets with many sheets. When you go to the menu, a new dialog for searching by sheet names is shown.
- Changes in Impress:
- Implemented initial support for themes, which allow you to define common colors and font settings used for text and shape fills throughout the presentation (to change the color of the presentation, just change the theme).
- To improve compatibility with PPTX files, the ability to use a slide background for filling shapes has been implemented.
- Implemented initial support for themes, which allow you to define common colors and font settings used for text and shape fills throughout the presentation (to change the color of the presentation, just change the theme).
- Filters:
- For the DOCX format, the import of text blocks with tables and pictures in grouped shapes has been implemented. Added the ability to unlock access to the password-protected history of document changes.
- For PPTX for basic shapes (ellipse, triangle, trapezium, parallelogram, rhombus, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon), fiducial points are supported. Issues with exporting and importing embedded media files to PPTX have been resolved.
- Improved export and import of RTF documents.
- Enhanced options for converting documents to PDF from the command line. Added support for exporting to PDF form fields for entering numbers, currencies, dates and times.
- When exporting to HTML, support for choosing a text encoding has been dropped. Encoding is now always UTF-8.
- Improved support for importing files in EMF and WMF formats.
- The filter for importing images in TIFF format has been rewritten (translated to libtiff). Added support for the OfficeArtBlip TIFF format variant.
Source: opennet.ru