Posted on 01/30/2020 8:05:33 AM PST by ShadowAce
The Document Foundation announced today the general availability of the LibreOffice 6.4 open-source and cross-platform office suite for all supported platforms.
LibreOffice 6.4 has been development during the past five months, but the final release is now available to download for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems. This is a major release that introduces several new features, multiple performance improvements, especially when working with presentations and spreadsheets, as well as better compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.
“LibreOffice 6.4 is the first new release available in 2020. During the year, the community will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the best free office suite ever at several Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) events in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Several volunteers will present the project milestones and discuss the future of the office suite, on the desktop and in the cloud,” said The Document Foundation.
Highlights of LibreOffice 6.4 include a QR code generator to make it easier to add QR codes to your documents, a new Automatic Redaction feature that lets you hide sensitive or classified information in your documents, and unified hyperlink context menus as Copy Hyperlink Location, Edit Hyperlink, Open Hyperlink, and Remove Hyperlink.
The built-in help system has been updated as well to provide faster and more precise search results, and several help pages now offer localized screenshots for a better user experience. Other than that, this release introduce application icons to document thumbnails inside the Start Center, which makes it easier for users to recognize documents.
Writer received a Table panel in the Sidebar, the ability to mark comments as resolved and add comments to images and charts inside word documents, as well as improved copying, cutting, and the selection of drawing objects anchored at-paragraph should now work more consistently.
Moreover, a new wrap option automatically avoids overlapping shapes in Writer, which should perform better when importing files with many bookmarks. Table handling has been dramatically improved allowing faster table and table row/column moving and deletion. Also, pasting of tables inside text documents thanks to a new “Paste as Nested Table” menu option.
Calc now lets users export screenshots into a single PDF page, offers faster sorting, and improves scalability of formula-groups computation on multi-core CPUs. Impress and Draw get a new “Consolidate Text” option in the Shape menu that combines multiple selected text boxes into a single one, which might come in handy if text content is split across multiple boxes when importing PDF documents.
LibreOffice Online also received some improvements, among which we can mention the ability for users to more easily modify table properties in word documents from the sidebar and fully manage the document’s Table of Contents (ToC), full featured Function Wizard in Calc, along with several new options for selected charts in the spreadsheet sidebar.
The Excel 2003 XML import filter, DOC and DOCX import/export filter, and PPT and PPTX import/export filter have also been improved in LibreOffice 6.4, which also features a new menu option to hide the ruler and a dropdown option in the statusbar to allow users to quickly switch the document language.
Tech Ping
I’m interested in the phone.
I’ve been using Office Libre for years on my OSX platforms. I’ve always liked it....works well. It gives the option to save files as a Microsoft Office file (for sharing with others that don’t have Libre).
LibreOffice doesn’t have Excel’s Date design flaw.
Thank you so much Ace. I am elated to see more work being done to make linux compatible software competitive!
I have numerous Word VBA macros and Excel custom functions (for Office 2010) that I wonder whether they would work with LibreOffice. The support for Office 2010 end this October 2010, so I need to decide which direction to go. Office Home & Student 2010 was nice in that it offered three licenses per purchase, allowing us to install it on two PCs and a laptop. Now, it is a single license per purchase. Plus, we now have a couple of our older computers with Linux Mint installed.
^October 2020
Still waiting for software like LibreOffice to come out with an email client like Outlook. So far, no one has come close.
I’ve been using OpenOffice for years. My spreadsheet needs are pretty basic so I haven’t felt the need to explore further. But I’m definitely going to this if I start having problems with OpenOffice.
It might be worth checking out the Opera email client. Last time I used it, it made more use of tags than it did folders to organize emails. which I consider a big plus.
It also had great filtering / auto-tagging features.
,.
I use it at work on a Linux VM. My company doesn't seem to notice that I do not use MS Office at all--and there are times I send out docs/spreadsheets to hundreds of internal customers.
“...I have numerous Word VBA macros and Excel custom functions (for Office 2010) that I wonder whether they would work with LibreOffice....”
Very good question.
You could always download that free copy of Libre and give it a try to see if it works with em.
“...Still waiting for software like LibreOffice to come out with an email client like Outlook. So far, no one has come close....”
I just use Thunderbird by Mozilla. It’s the closest thing I could find to Outlook. It’s certainly easier to add accounts to it compared to Outlook and it’s served my needs quite well ( 4 different email accounts on it) over the past 4 years since Microsoft decided to quit “dating” me.
It may behoove ya to maybe check it out and give it a try.
I can’t wean myself off OneDrive (with Office attached).
I had no idea how far back I am. I’m on 5.1.6.2. Probably missing lots of stuff. :-)
I have Thunderbird installed and I’ve been using it for a while. It serves my purposes. I just wish someone could come up with something along the lines of an Outlook-ish looking email client.
I thought Opera’s email client was discontinued months, or even years, back.
I tend to use Writer from Open/Libre Office, but for spreadsheets I like Planmaker from Softmaker. Both Calc and Planmaker do fine on normal day-to-day spreadsheet work, but neither has done well with massive spreadsheets, say tens of thousands of rows by 100 columns, especially with 50K-cell array formulas. Certainly Planmaker and I believe Calc don’t use multiple cores, where Excel does, so there have been a few tasks where I have to keep Excel around.
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