LibreOffice 7.6 is the next major upgrade for the open-source office suite.
With its previous LibreOffice 7.5 release, the developers unveiled new app icons and feature upgrades. And, this time, it includes a good set of new abilities.
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Starting in 2024, The Document Foundation will follow calendar-based numbering, i.e., the next version scheduled for Feb 2024 will be identified as LibreOffice24.2.
Let us take a look at what's new with the release.
LibreOffice 7.6: What's New?
As expected, there are refinements across all the tools, with highlights for the Writer, Calc, and Impress; they are:
Support for document themes
Improvements to Help
Compatibility improvements
New Page Number Wizard (Writer)
Navigation panel for slides (Impress)
Auto-filter support for sorting by color (Calc)
Writer Improvements
The highlight feature update is the support for document themes. In other words, when needed, you can select a preset of color combinations for your document's title, text, and subheadings.
You can find the option via Format → Themes.
A subtle but significant addition is adding a page number to the header/footer using a new wizard under the Insert menu.
You also get a new option to enable the spotlight for the paragraph styles or direct formatting in text.
For a UX-focused improvement, you can find the "Accesbility Check" from the sidebar for quick access while editing a document.
Other changes include:
Table of figures can now be generated more flexibly using a paragraph-based style
Bibliography entries can now be directly edited from its tables
Writer warns if you try accidentally to delete a hidden section from your document
Custom dictionaries for phrase checking are accepted
Calc Improvements
Sorting has been made easy with the new ability to sort things by color.
In addition to this, you get a compact new layout for pivot tables. Other subtle and technical refinements include:
Spreadsheets copied to another file retain a user-defined print range
Ability to customize the default look of new comments
Solver settings are saved
If the sheet is empty, no confirmation is shown to delete it
Hyperlink formatting has been improved to make it look distinct
Impress & Draw Improvements
When you play a presentation now, you will get navigation buttons to go through them quickly. It is a small addition, but it should help you easily navigate through the slides.
Other refinements include:
Added support for multi-image tiff files
Objects can be listed in front-to-back order in the navigator
Other Changes
Along with the highlights, you also get an improved "Help" section, which displays information about commands/shortcuts you need to change layout or do many things quicker.
LibreOffice should already be pre-installed for most users. If so, you should wait for the update from your system repository, LibreOffice's PPA, or Flathub. It should take a few days.
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You can also choose to uninstall LibreOffice from your system and get the new version by following the steps below. We recommend you to wait if you can.
If you do not have it installed and want to get the new version, simply download the tar package as per your requirements (DEB/RPM).
Next, extract the package, and find all the .deb/.rpm files under a "DEBS" or "RPMS" folder.
Once you are in that folder, use the right-click menu to open it in the terminal (as shown in the image above) and type one of the following commands as per the package (Fedora and Debian-based distros):
sudo dnf install *.rpm
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
💬 What do you think about the latest LibreOffice release? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below.
