Libreoffice 7.1

www.snipca.com/37340 What you need: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10

Our favourite free office suite just got even better, with improvements to existing tools and some handy new features. Version 7.1 is officially called Libreoffice Community, indicating that it’s intended for home users rather than business. Libreoffice recommends that business users should download version 7.0.4 (also via the link above), which doesn’t have the latest features but has been tested for longer (not that we’ve encountered any problems with version 7.1).

The ‘Find & Replace’ tool in Writer (press Ctrl+h) now works much faster than before – it’s particularly noticeable when you’re working on large documents. In the previous version, adjusting every incorrect use of a capital letter in a 20,000-word document took 15 seconds. When we carried out the same test in this version, it completed in just under seven seconds. Although a definite improvement, we’d like to see it speeded up further, especially as Microsoft Word does this in under a second.

Version 7.1 also includes a small but important update to how the clipboard works in Calc. In previous versions, pressing

Enter after cutting (press Ctrl+x) or copying (Ctrl+c) a cell automatically pasted the contents into the selected cell then cleared the clipboard – something we often did by accident. The latest version still does this by default, but you can now turn it off (as explained below).

Impress (Libreoffice’s alternative to Microsoft Powerpoint) also gets some new features. The most interesting is the ability to create physics-based animations, such as a group of objects that drop from the top of the slide, colliding with each other as they fall (see below). Additionally, it’s now much easier to control the playback of presentations, with new Pause, Resume and Exit buttons in the console window (if you’re presenting to a second screen, the console appears on your primary monitor).

1 To add a physics-based animation to an object in Impress, click the Animation button on the right (or press Ctrl+f5), select the object you want to animate, then the ‘+’ button. 2 Now select Emphasis in the Category menu. In the Effect dropdown box scroll down to the Exciting heading, then select ‘Fall simulated’ or one of the ‘Shoot left/right and return’ options. 3 You can now repeat the process on other objects. To start the animation for each at the same time, set the Start option for the first object to ‘On click’ and the rest to ‘With previous’. 4 To avoid accidentally pasting the contents of your clipboard in Calc, select the Tools menu, Options, Libreoffice Calc, General, then untick ‘Press Enter to paste and clear clipboard’.