LibreOffice 6.1

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LibreOffice is a cornerstone open-source app and a longestablished rival to Microsoft Office. Version 6.1, far from being just a point release of LibreOffice 6, is a major update with a host of improvements that make it worth looking at here.

The most visible change in 6.1 is that LibreOffice apps now use different icon themes, specifically the elementary set for GTKbased Linux desktops and the brand new Colibre theme for Windows.

There are other more serious changes as well, the most notable of which are stunning improvements in image handling, a long-standing shortcoming of the office suite up to now. LibreOffice now loads DOCX documents with lots of embedded images faster than before, and it can also sort cells in Calc by the size of images pasted there! Cell resizing now respects the image ratio, while all new images inserted in a spreadsheet are now anchored to their cells by default. Another feature is the new ePub export dialog. Users of Writer, perhaps the most popular part of LibreOffice, can now create professional e-books with embedded fonts and cover images, as well as huge sets of metadata. A killer feature for wannabe writers.

Regular users of LibreOffice will quickly detect various minor fixes and enhancement here and there, like the new page number insertion dialog in the header/footer menu, or the new ‘spell out’ chapter numbering styles in Writer.

As with any major release, the list of improvements in LibreOffice 6.1 is long and time-consuming to read through, so much so, in fact, that we recommend you simply try the new version in your established workflow and just enjoy the experience.

The new LibreOffice 6.1 can be easily installed from Flathub (https://flathub.org), as well as via traditional packages in many Linux distros that provide the hottest open source releases with no delays.