LibreOffice 25.2 has been released, this year’s first major update to the leading open-source office software for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Image: The Document Foundation

As you’d expect, the update delivers a sizeable set of changes spread throughout the productivity suite, including notable UI changes, accessibility improvements, and more important interoperability buffs to support cross-suite workflows.

It’s important to remember that open-source software like LibreOffice doesn’t appear out of thin air; it’s made by humans, many unpaid, others paid to work on specific parts only.

We all have personal wish-lists of features and changes we want our favourite open-source apps to add, but we shouldn’t let that detract from appreciating everything present, working, and supported.

LibreOffice 25.2 features 6 months worth of development in total with 47 percent of code commits coming from devs employed by ‘ecosystem companies’, 31% from devs at The Document Foundation, the rest from volunteers.

Want to learn more about what they’ve been working on? Read on!

LibreOffice 25.2: What’s New?

LibreOffice 25.2 dishes up a smorgasbord of improvements

LibreOffice 25.2 is able to read and write to OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.4. This is the latest version of the file format spec and is already in use by Microsoft Office. Ensuring ODT, ODP, et al files work well in LibreOffice is important

Elsewhere, this update builds on the privacy changes LibreOffice 24.8 introduced by adding the ability to scrub all personal information associated with any document, such as author names and timestamps, editing time, document template, tracked changes, and so on.

Anyone working with lots of different document types will be sure to appreciate that the File > Recent Documents menu now includes a checkbox to only show files for the active app only.

UI changes include a major revamp to theming!

Themes are now a thing for LibreOffice

New themes can be downloaded in-app and applied quickly (there are just a handful right now but expect the number to grow as creatives get …Well, creative!)

If you’ve longed for the chance to change specific colours within LibreOffice’s UI independently of the system theme, you now can! Head to Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Appearance, pick ‘custom’ in the theme picker, and use the colour picker to adjust.

It’s possible to change everything from the document page colour, the main app background image, toolbar colour, and more – the app will ask to be restarted between changes which deflates the experimentation excitement a tad.

Updated bullet styles in LibreOffice 25.2

LibreOffice 25.2 Writer jots down the following improvements:

  • Updated default items for unordered lists (bullet points)
  • Tracked changes manager tweaks, including focus highlighting and sorting
  • Better support for toplevel line shapes imported from DOCX
  • Font fallback for DOCX files referring to unavailable fonts
  • Set default zoom levels for documents (overriding level stored in file)
  • Option to promote a reply comment into a root comment 
  • Inline headings now supported
  • Delete all content of a specific type (excluding headings) from the Navigator
  • Page Number Wizard option to fit numbers into existing margin
  • Comments background colour is now customisable
  • Hover over a heading in Navigator to see word and character count in a tooltip

LibreOffice 25.2 Calc adds:

  • Support import and export of connections.xml in OOXML
  • Statusbar icon indicates if AutoCalculate is turned off 
  • New “Handle Duplicate Records” dialog to select/remove duplicate records
  • Improved search in Function Wizard dialog and Functions Sidebar deck
  • ‘Select all’ in a cell with neighbouring data covers neighbouring cells by default1
  • “Summary below data” option added to Subtotals dialog
  • Solver models can be saved into spreadsheets
  • Sheet protection options for Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts and AutoFilters

LibreOffice 25.2 Impress showcases:

  • Improved Impress templates
  • Objects can be centred on the Impress slide in one step
  • Text frame objects now support Soft Edge and Glow effects
  • Per-paragraph semi-transparent shape text in SVG export
  • Auto-repeating slides can be activated in windowed mode
  • Overflowing text in presenter notes no longer cut off when printing

The official release notes for this release offer more information on these and other changes, including links to code commits, bug reports, and blog posts covering the technical reasoning.

Other changes

Small changes add up to big improvements

Beyond Linux, macOS users gain integration with the built-in Quick Look file previewing feature, allowing documents to be glimpsed prior to (and possibly negating the need for) opening them fully.

  • Draw: Support for clipping stroke paths in imported PDFs
  • Base: SQL dialog now retains user input during a session
  • Math: Formulas can be stored in a user-defined category
  • Interoperability tweaks with proprietary OOXML documents
  • Hyphenation can be controlled from the Properties deck of the Sidebar
  • Object boundaries now toggled independently of Formatting Marks
  • Support for pasting HTML strikethrough formatted text
  • libvisio updated to v0.1.8
  • Accessibility improvements

There’s also a new Ask LibreOffice website where users can seek feedback from other users.

Get LibreOffice 25.2

LibreOffice 25.2 is the latest stable release but not the only version of LibreOffice available. If you don’t need the latest features but do want a battle-tested base, stick with the LibreOffice 24.8.x series (included in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS).

But if your needs are for the latest and greatest, then download LibreOffice 25.2 for Windows, macOS, and Linux from from the LibreOffice website — DEBs provided for Ubuntu (the README in the extracted archive lists how to install them properly).

Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and other *buntu-based distro user? You can install the new build from the LibreOffice PPA. LibreOffice is also officially available through the Canonical Snap Store and Flathub, should you prefer those.

As Ubuntu won’t back-port this new series to its existing users on supported releases anyone wanting this release will need to go out of their way to get it themselves. If that sounds like hassle, LibreOffice 25.2 will be available in Ubuntu 25.04, due out in April.

  1. Using Select All again then selects the full sheet; can be reverted to old behaviour ↩︎