The Document Foundation has updated the open source office suite LibreOffice to version 24.8. Since the May release, the version numbers for LibreOffice are no longer consecutive, but stand for the year and month of the release date.

The current release has a whole range of new features. These include a new search deck in the sidebar and improved data protection, which allows personal information to be removed from documents when saving. There are also various new features in the Writer, Calc, Impress & Draw and Chart apps. A detailed list of all the new features can be found on the LibreOffice homepage. In addition, as always, stability and compatibility with Microsoft's Office format have been improved.

What's new

PRIVACY

If the option Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Security ▸ Options ▸ Remove personal information on saving is enabled, then personal information will not be exported (author names and timestamps, editing duration, printer name and config, document template, author and date for comments and tracked changes)

WRITER

UI: handling of formatting characters, width of comments panel, selection of bullets, new dialog for hyperlinks, new Find deck in the sidebar Navigator: adding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, indicating images with broken links Hyphenation: exclude words from hyphenation with new contextual menu and visualization, new hyphenation across columns, pages or spreads, hyphenation between constituents of a compound word

CALC

Addition of FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH functions Improvement of threaded calculation performance, optimization of redraw after a cell change by minimizing the area that needs to be refreshed Cell focus rectangle moved apart from cell content Comments can be edited and deleted from the Navigator’s right-click menu

IMPRESS & DRAW

In Normal view, it is now possible to scroll between slides, and the Notes are available as a collapsible pane under the slide By default, the running Slideshow is now immediately updated when applying changes in EditView or in PresenterConsole, even on different Screens

CHART

New chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office) Text inside chart’s titles, text boxes and shapes (and parts thereof) can now be formatted using the Character dialog

ACCESSIBILITY

Several improvements to the management of formatting options, which can be now announced properly by screen readers

SECURITY

New mode of password-based ODF encryption

INTEROPERABILITY

Support importing and exporting OOXML pivot table (cell) format definitions PPTX files with heavy use of custom shapes now open faster

The Windows version of LibreOffice 24.8 is available for download here.