The Document Foundation recently announced the launch of the new version of "LibreOffice 24.8" and it presents major improvements, changes and above all various bug fixes. Among the new features that LibreOffice 24.8 presents
This release involved 166 developers, of which 108 are volunteers. Of the total changes, 57% were made by 49 employees of the companies overseeing the project, 20% by eight employees of The Document Foundation, and the remaining 23% were added by 115 independent enthusiasts.
LibreOffice 24.8 main new features
One of the main new features introduced in this new version of LibreOffice 24.8 is the personal information deletion function in the export of documents. And it is now possible remove personal metadata such as the author's name, creation or modification time, the printer name, the duration of the edition and the associated templates. This option is available for several formats, including ODF, ODS/UOS, OOXML, RTF, DOC, PPT, PPTX and XLS(X). To activate it, go to Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Security ▸ Options ▸ Delete personal data on save.
Another of the changes that stands out is the New encryption mode for ODF documents, it uses the AES-GCM encryption mode which offers more complete metadata concealment and greater resistance to brute force attacks thanks to the implementation of the Argon2id hash-based key generation function.
Regarding the specific changes for each LibreOffice 24.8 product, it is highlighted for example that In Writer, the options for automatically adjusting the end of words to another line have been expanded. l has been addedthe ability to prohibit the hyphenation of selected words without changing the language, which previously made it difficult to spell check such words. This feature can be accessed from Format ▸ Character… ▸ Position ▸ Exclude from hyphenation.
In addition to that, nowa hyphenation can be avoided in words that contain hyphens Through a context menu option, an option has been added in Format ▸ Paragraph… ▸ Text Flow ▸ Hyphenation to prevent part of a word from being carried over to another page, spread or column.
Also, now It is possible to change the width of the comments panel, Improvements have been made to support for tables that span multiple pages, and support for legal numbering, common in legal documents, has been implemented.
Regarding the changes andIn Calc, improvements in importing and exporting pivot tables are highlighted, as they are now supported in OOXML format. The dialog for icon sets now allows you to select different operators, as well It is now possible to define specific ranges when exporting sheets to PDF and improvements have been implemented in the status bar and sidebar.
Have been implemented New functions such as LET, XLOOKUP, XMATCH, FILTER, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY and UNIQUE. Interoperability with Google Sheets has been improved, as it is now possible to copy and paste content between LibreOffice Calc and Google Sheets via the clipboard, and calculations in multithreaded mode have been optimized and redrawing after switching cells has been accelerated.
En Impress has added a separate collapsible notes panel below the slide area (View ▸ Notes Pane). In Expert mode, you can change the default number of slides in the slide sorter view.
By default, Running presentations are updated instantly when changes are made in Edit mode or in the Presentation Management Console, even if the presentation is displayed on a different screen. This behavior can be modified through the “Slide Show ▸ Slide Show Settings… ▸ Live Mode” setting.
Text formatting tools are displayed on the second line of the panel when editing a text block, and a dialog box has been added to jump to a specific slide.
En Draw now supports tiled patterns when importing PDF files, hovering over a layer tab highlights the objects covered by that layer. Additionally, a dialog box has been added to go to a specific page.
En Base now supports automatic data saving mode in Firebird, support has been added for connecting to MS Access .mdb files using the ACE.OLEDB.12.0 provider.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Object search support has been added to the Gallery sidebar.
- Added option to change the default marker for list items.
- It is now easier to maintain aspect ratio when resizing objects.
- Unicode character input: In the Special Characters dialog box, Unicode character input (U+NNN) is allowed to filter glyphs.
- The state of the buttons that control background colors, fonts, and backlighting is saved between sessions.
- The Sheet ▸ Insert Cells interface now allows you to add multiple rows or columns at the same time.
- An option has been added to highlight the active cell in edit mode (Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice Calc ▸ View ▸ Edit Cell Highlight).
- Improved support for UCP authentication used in Microsoft SharePoint.
- Support for exporting to SVG has been expanded.
- When you press an opening character (parentheses, brackets, braces, or quotes), the selected text is automatically enclosed.
- New search page in the sidebar with a quick search results list.
- The ability to insert cross-references and remove footnotes directly from the Navigator has been added, along with an indicator for images with broken links.
- You can save the default background when exporting to DOCX.
Finally, if you are interested in being able to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link
How to install LibreOffice on Linux?
First We must first uninstall the previous version if we have it, This is in order to avoid later problems, for this we must open a terminal and execute the following:
sudo apt-get remove --purge libreoffice*
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoremove
Now we will proceed to go to the official website of the project where in your download section we can get deb package to be able to install it in our system.
Done the download we are going to unzip the content of the newly purchased package with:
tar -xzvf LibreOffice_24.8.0_Linux_x86-64_deb.tar.gz
We enter the directory created after unzipping, in my case it is the 64-bit:
cd LibreOffice_24.8.0_Linux_x86-64_deb
After we enter the folder where are the LibreOffice deb files:
cd DEBS
Y finally we install with:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
Si you are using a system that has the support to install rpm packages, You can install this new update by obtaining the rpm package from the LibreOffice download page.
Obtained the package we unzip with:
tar -xzvf LibreOffice_24.8.0_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz
And we install the packages that the folder contains with:
sudo rpm -Uvh *.rpm
In the case of Arch and its derived systems We can install this version of LibreOffice, we just open a terminal and type:
sudo pacman -Sy libreoffice-fresh