Libreoffice
Version: 7.0 Web: www.libreoffice.org
O ne of the most successful and best-known open source software has recently seen a major release. Of course that’s Libreoffice,a must-have software for Linux productivity workstations and the closest rival to the commercial Microsoft Office.
In July there were some controversial rumours about labelling the 7.0 release as the ‘Personal Edition’, but shortly after developers the Document Foundation reverted their decision and left the branding intact (only updating the splash screen with stunning artwork). If you go to the ‘About’ dialogue, you’ll see that even the limitation to ‘individual use only‘ has also gone, which should further reassure plain mortals.
Libreoffice 7.0 brings sizeable changes, both visible and less obvious. These include padded numbering in
Writer (first numbers use 0 as a prefix), better autocorrection with respect to typographic rules in nonenglish languages, honouring case-insensitivity flags by regexp-capable functions in Calc, and many more. As usual, you’ll need to be a regular Libreoffice user in order to notice lots of the introduced changes, improvements and speed-ups. Different people use this software in their own manner and for different tasks.
Libreoffice is a complex and massive suite, and while we commonly think of it as Writer plus Calc, there are Libreoffice users that do publishing layouts and vector graphic artwork in Draw and prepare presentations in Impress. Draw is particularly worth trying if you enjoy vector images, as it is a powerful alternative to Inkscape. In Libreoffice 7.0, Draw has more cool effects, such as Glow and Soft Edge, semitransparency support for text and more.
Anyhow, whatever your workflow in Libreoffice, the new release is the recommended update. Another good reason for that is performance improvements throughout the suite’s many parts. For instance, opening a spreadsheet with a large number of embedded images is now a lot snappier than it used to be. Saving and exporting should be faster too.