LibreOffice 7.0 is here, serving as the latest stable release of this hugely popular open source productivity suite.
As you’d expect, LibreOffice 7.0 boasts a raft of improvements and notable new features aimed at firming up the suite’s foundations but also keeping pace with closed-source competitors.
The Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation who drive development of the office suite, say LibreOffice 7.0 is a “new major release providing significant new features”.
If you want to download LibreOffice 7.0 for your Windows, macOS, or Linux system right now you can skip to the download section near the bottom of the post.
Otherwise read on for an overview of what’s new.
LibreOffice 7.0 Features
The headline change in LibreOffice 7.0 is support for ODF 1.3. This is the ‘Open Document Format’ that LibreOffice natively uses to save documents. The latest version of the spec includes support for digital signatures, OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, and better handling of elements within pages.
Another ‘big ticket’ addition comes courtesy of AMD. This sponsorship helped implement a new Skia graphics engine used for drawing text, shapes, and images in 2D. This is enabled by default on Windows with Vulkan GPU-based acceleration. This major change helps puts the suite on a good footing for future developments.
Each new release of LibreOffice refines the software’s ability to open, save, and read Microsoft Office documents in .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx. The former of these longer saves in 2007 compatibility mode, thus improving interoperability of documents created in LibreOffice with newer versions of Microsoft Office.
There is a new icon theme for macOS users called ‘Sukapura‘, and a much improved icon theme for Windows installs called ‘Neo Colibre‘. Linux users aren’t left out as both icon packs are available to use, and the default ‘Sifr‘ icon theme has improved fall backs.
Writer now supports semi-transparent text, can display bookmarks in-line in text, tweaks padding for numbered lists, and is said to better handle quotation marks and apostrophes.
Other general improvements include new shapes galleries with arrows, diagrams, icons, etc; support for soft edge effects for objects; Draw can now generate PDFs larger than 500 cm; there are updated Impress templates; and Flash support has been removed.
Want a deeper dive? Check over the official release notes for this update.
Download LibreOffice 7.0
LibreOffice 7.0 is free, open source software available on Windows, macOS and Linux. You can (as always) download the latest version of LibreOffice direct from the LibreOffice website.
If you run Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (or later) you can upgrade to LibreOffice 7.0 using the official LibreOffice PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
Finally, LibreOffice is available on Flathub as a Flatpak app, and on the Snap Store as a Snap package. Neither store has yet been updated with the 7.0 release, so keep that in mind.