LibreOffice just received a major update that adds new privacy, security, productivity and accessibility features to all apps. It is a free and open source productivity suite that includes a Word, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing app and supports both open source and proprietary (mostly from Microsoft Office) file formats.
LibreOffice claims it is “the only software for creating documents that may contain personal or confidential information that respects the user’s privacy.” To this end, LibreOffice 24.8 introduces a new privacy feature that allows you to remove personal and traceable information from any file before exporting it. Metadata such as timestamps, version history, printer tags, and author information are usually embedded in most documents. Exporting via this privacy feature makes them harder to trace. In addition, LibreOffice offers another mode for encrypting ODF files with passwords (an open source document format).
The new LibreOffice Writer interface gets new formatting, linking, and search features. New bullet styles and a search stack have been added to the Navigator. It also offers finer control over hyphenation and drag-and-drop navigation.
Calc, the spreadsheet editor, has nine new features (many of them for better sorting and filtering). Calc also supports two new chart types (pie-of-pie and bar-of-pie) and makes them compatible with proprietary Microsoft Office chart formats. The text in these charts can now be easily formatted using the dedicated drawing window. It has also been optimized for better overall performance.
Impress (the presentation app) also gets some minor updates. You can scroll between slides and changes to a presentation are immediately reflected in a running slideshow. The new LibreOffice 24.8 is now available for Windows, macOS and Linux. This new version is also the first to offer native support for Windows PCs based on the ARM architecture.
Source: LibreOffice
