Performance-focused LibreOffice 6.4 is available for download - The Document Foundation Blog (original) (raw)

Berlin, January 29, 2020 – The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 6.4, a new major release providing better performance, especially when opening and saving spreadsheets and presentations, and excellent compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.

LibreOffice offers the strongest compatibility in the office suite arena, starting from native support for the Open Document Format (ODF) – with superior security and interoperability features over proprietary formats – to almost perfect support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. In addition, LibreOffice includes filters for many legacy document formats, and as such is the best interoperability tool in the market.

In addition, the new version provides some interesting new features [1]:

GENERAL

• Application icons have been added to document thumbnails inside the Start Center, making it easier to recognise the different types of documents.
• A QR Code generator has been added to the suite, making it easy to add QR codes – that can be read by mobile devices – to documents.
• Hyperlink context menus have been unified throughout the suite, and now provide the following menu entries: Open Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink, Copy Hyperlink Location and Remove Hyperlink.
• The new Automatic Redaction feature lets your hide classified or sensitive data in a document based on text or regular expression matches.
• The help system provides faster and more precise search results, while many help pages have localized screenshots for a better user experience.

WRITER

• A Table panel has been added to the Sidebar.
• Comments can now be marked as resolved. In addition, it’s now possible to add comments to images and charts inside text documents.
• Cutting, copying and pasting of tables has been improved, with a new Paste Special menu option “Paste as Nested Table”.

CALC

• Spreadsheets can be exported into a single PDF page, to get an overview of all content without it being spread over multiple pages.

IMPRESS & DRAW

• In the Shape menu, a new option called Consolidate Text combines multiple selected text boxes into a single one. This is useful if you’re importing a PDF and the text content is split across many boxes.

LIBREOFFICE ONLINE

• In Writer, table properties can be easily modified from the sidebar, and the document Table of Contents can be fully managed by users.
• In Calc, the Function Wizard is now offering full features, and a wide range of options for selected charts has been added to the spreadsheet sidebar.

LibreOffice 6.4 is the first new release available in 2020. During the year, the community will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the best free office suite ever at several Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) events in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Several volunteers will present the project milestones and discuss the future of the office suite, on the desktop and in the cloud.

LibreOffice 6.4’s new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 75% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB, plus other organizations, and 25% are from individual volunteers.

In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy.

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 6.4 is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4boEj8S2JQ

LibreOffice for individual users

LibreOffice 6.4 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. The Document Foundation does not provide any technical support to users, although they can get help from other users on mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org
For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 6.3 family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 6.3.4.

LibreOffice in business

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

For migrations and training from proprietary office suites, professional support should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.4

LibreOffice 6.4 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.9. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate

LibreOffice 6.4 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org

[1] A more comprehensive list of LibreOffice 6.4 new features is available on the Release Notes wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.4

Press Kit

The press kit, including the white paper on document formats and high-resolution screenshots, is here: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/ZA4Y67yz6jBJSqz