LibreOffice is the best open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. It is available for all major platforms and the document foundation releases frequent updates.
With the new major update LibreOffice 7, it has got some nice features and performance improvements.
LibreOffice is an office suite developed by the document foundation. The look and features of every LibreOffice are identical to MS Office or even better. The Calc Spreadsheet that is the alternative to MS spreadsheet opens faster and, with the new update, it has got more performance improvements.
What’s new in LibreOffice 7?
So what’s new in this major release? LibreOffice 7 was released just a few ago with a number of visual changes and features. The majority of the changes lie in the back-end of the program that improve overall performance of the program.
So here is the list of changes in LibreOffice 7.
Writer
- Added padded numbering
Padded number is the style where 0 is inserted before each normal Arabic numbering to make sure the result always has N characters.
- Added bookmarks and fields protection to prevent any accidental changes
- Bookmarks are now visible in-line in the text. Turn the Toggle Formatting Marks on in the standard toolbar and check bookmark in Tools > options > LibreOffice Writer > Formatting Aids.
- Added semi-transparent support in writer
- Empty input fields are now highlighted with grey background
- Improved autocorrect for some languages
Accessiblity improvements
LibreOffice 7 Writer has a new but experiemental feature called accessbility checker. It checks for the common accessiblity problems and let user fix it easily. This is an experimental feature so it might have some bugs.
To enable accessbility check tool, go to Tools > Options > LibreOffcie > Advanced > Optional Features and Enable experimental features.
You should now have an option in the Tools > Accessibility checker.
Calc Spreadsheet
New & changed functions
- Added two new spreadsheet functions – RAND.NV() & RANDBETWEEN.NV().
- A few functions have also been changed in the new update among those functions are TEXT() and OFFSET(). TEXT() function can accept the second argument to be empty. OFFSET() 4th and 5th parameter must be greater than 0 else it’ll return Err:502.
- Add Alt+= keyboard shortcut for autosum
Performance improvements
- Improved opening speed of XLSX files with many pictures
- Improved searching speed in autofilter pulldown
- Improved Calc autofill speed
- Decreased a time for a sheet deleting’s undoing operation
Impress Presentation
Impress receives only a few visual updates. In Impress and Draw, subscripts now return to the default 8%. Added support for semi-transparent in both, Impress and draw.
Performance improvements
- Speed up: Long operation during typing in list with animations
- Speed up: entering to table editing mode became faster
- Speed up: improved opening speed for some PPT files
Math Formula
- Added RGB personalized color. You should use syntax like color rgb 0 100 0 { your_symbols } in Formula editor. That “color” is available in Element’s Attributes pane too
- Added a Laplace symbol
Base Database
- Macro signatures are now evaluated on document load
Download LibreOffice 7
LibreOffice is available to download from the official website. Click the download button and select the files extension of LibreOffice 7.