Libreoffice 6.4
www.snipca.com/33952 What you need: Wndows 7, 8.1 or 10
One thing we love about Libreoffice (the free alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite) is that it’s regularly updated with new tools. The eagle-eyed among you will immediately spot the first new feature in version 6.4 – small icons on the thumbnails of your recently opened documents, showing you which Libreoffice program they were created with.
Compatibility with Microsoft Office formats (DOCX, XLSX, etc) has also been improved, and you should no longer see errors when importing complex documents containing text boxes, section breaks and headers.
The release notes for this version also claim extensive spreadsheets in Calc will open faster, however this wasn’t borne out in our tests. Our test spreadsheet, packed with formulas, took five seconds to load on both this version and the previous (Excel beats Calc in this respect, taking just one second to open the same file).
Performance aside, Calc does get some interesting new features. We particularly like its new
‘Full-sheet preview’ option, which exports an entire spreadsheet as a single-page PDF. Previously, larger spreadsheets were split over multiple pages, making them difficult to view. Depending on the size of your spreadsheet, the resulting PDF may be very large and therefore not suitable for printing, but they’re great for viewing on screen.
This version also improves the redaction tool that was introduced in Libreoffice 6.3. Whereas previously you had to mark each section of your document that you wanted redacting, you can now run a search for specific words or phrases and have each instance redacted automatically. You can now also insert QR codes into your documents. This is useful when printing long web addresses – instead of having to type them into your browser, you can visit the site simply by scanning the QR code with your phone.
1 When you open Libreoffice, you’ll see thumbnails of your recently opened files now have an icon in the bottom-right corner, letting you see their file type (Writer, Calc and so on).
2 To export your spreadsheet as a single-page PDF, click File, then ‘Export as PDF…’. Now tick the ‘Full-sheet previews’ box, then click Export.
3 To redact specific words from documents, click Tools, Auto-redact, then Add Target. Type the word or phrase you want to redact (‘sensitive’ in the screenshot above), then click OK twice to open the document in Draw.
4 Each occurence of the words or phrases you selected will now be hidden under a black bar. To save your redacted document as a PDF, click ‘Redacted Export (Black)’.