If you’re one of those who has declared war on the Office package and that’s why you don’t use Microsoft Word or Excel, the LibreOffice and OpenOffice options will surely sound familiar to you. Well, today we focus on the first.
There are many options for writing, presenting or doing calculations on the computer. But they are worth not so much. Although Microsoft Word is the queen of text editing tools, like Excel in its field, there are many others that are almost equal to it. LibreOffice is one of them, without a doubt.
LibreOffice has two things that are different: it is open source, so it is constantly improved by volunteers and collaborators; and that it is free, so there are no licenses or monthly subscriptions to pay.
Well, LibreOffice has just been updated to version 7.4 and can be downloaded immediately and for free from its website. If you are thinking of changing to an Open Source option, we leave you the news that comes with the update:
- Support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files
- Help pages for the ScriptForge script library
- Search field for the Extension Manager
- Performance and compatibility improvements
- Better tracking of changes in the footnotes area
- Edited lists show original numbers in change tracking
- New typographic settings for hyphenation
- Support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets
- Additional features in the dropdown AutoSum widget
- New menu item to find sheet names
- New support for document themes
According to its creators, LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF), with superior support for Microsoft Office files.
Microsoft’s files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by the ISO in 2008, and not the ISO-approved standard, so they hide a lot of artificial complexity.
This, according to those responsible for LibreOffice, causes handling problems with LibreOffice, which uses a true open standard format by default. Click here to download it.
The new features of LibreOffice 7.4 Community have been developed by 147 contributors: 72% of code submissions come from the 52 developers employed by three companies that are part of the TDF Advisory Council and 28% from 95 individual volunteers.
Additionally, 528 volunteers have provided localizations in 158 languages. LibreOffice 7.4 Community is released in 120 different language versions, more than any other free or proprietary software, and as such can be used in the native language by more than 5.4 billion people around the world.