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.
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.
To dive in deeper, you can check out LibreOffice 7.6 release notes.
How to Upgrade/Install?
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.
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 *.rpmsudo dpkg -i *.deb💬 What do you think about the latest LibreOffice release? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below.
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