03 Feb 2021

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released by The Document Foundation

Posted in Announcements, LibreOffice, Press Releases By Italo Vignoli On February 3, 2021

A brand new version of the best free open source office suite, based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for desktop, mobile and cloud productivity

Berlin, February 3, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1 Community, the volunteer-supported version of the best open source office suite for desktop productivity, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download. The Community label underlines the fact that the software is not targeted at enterprises, and not optimized for their support needs.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF has strongly recommended the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and other benefits, including SLA (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises have chosen the version supported by volunteers over the version optimized for their needs. This has had a twofold negative consequence for the project: a poor use of volunteers’ time, as they have to spend their time to solve problems for business that provide nothing in return to the community, and a net loss for ecosystem companies.

This has been a problem for the sustainability of the LibreOffice project, because it has slowed down the evolution of the software. In fact, every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for their customers is shared with the global community, and this improves the product and fosters the growth of the LibreOffice Technology platform.

Both LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, which is the result of years of sustained development efforts (see the white paper) with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud, following the evolution of the marketplace since 2010.

Today, products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and for the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

By using the Community label we underline the importance of enterprise customers contributing to our mission, according to their ability, and how much we appreciate their support.

LibreOffice 7.1 Community New Features [1]

LibreOffice 7.1 Community’s new features have been developed by a large number of code contributors: 73% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and CIB/allotropia – to serve their enterprise customers, plus other organizations (including TDF), and 27% are from individual volunteers.

GENERAL

  • New dialog to select the User Interface flavor, aiming to pick the right UI based on each user’s own preferences at first start
  • Improved search for a matching printer paper size for the printed document
  • Show all supported files when adding a new extension in Extension Manager
  • Print Preview is now updated asynchronously, to not block UI when adjusting settings in Print Dialog
  • Additions Dialog: to search, get and install extensions with one-click

WRITER

  • New Style Inspector to display the attributes of Paragraph and Character Styles, and manually formatted (Direct Formatting) properties
  • Default anchor for newly added images can be set using Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice Writer
  • Ability to detect Unicode, even if the imported text file does not have the BOM (Byte Order Mark)
  • Significant speed improvement of find/replace operations

CALC

  • Added an option to manage pasting with Enter key, which can be switched on/off in the Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice Calc ▸ General dialog
  • Added option to select items in Autofilter window clicking on all item’s row, in addition to the checkbox
  • Significant speed improvement of Autofilter and find/replace operations

IMPRESS & DRAW

  • Possibility to add visible signatures to existing PDF files in Draw
  • Possibility to change animations for several objects at once in Impress
  • Addition of “Pause/Resume” and “Exit”buttons to Presenter’s Screen
  • Addition of realistic soft blurred shadows to objects
  • Addition of new physics based animation capabilities and new animation effect presets that use them

MACRO

  • ScriptForge libraries: an extensible and robust collection of macro scripting resources for LibreOffice to be invoked from user Basic or Python scripts

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.1 Community is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLutwM8XKvo and also on PeerTube: https://peertube.opencloud.lu/videos/watch/38ac180b-62b5-44b7-b649-74c7efe05758

LibreOffice, the best tool for interoperability

LibreOffice 7.1 Community adds several interoperability improvements with DOCX/XLSX/PPTX files: improvements to Writer tables (better import/export and management of table functions, and better support for change tracking in floating tables); a better management of cached field results in Writer; support of spacing below the header’s last paragraph in DOC/DOCX files; and additional SmartArt improvements when importing PPTX files.

LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite arena, starting from native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – with better security and interoperability features over proprietary formats – to optimized 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.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of a LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

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 7.1 Community

LibreOffice 7.1 Community 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 10.12.

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/

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 7.0 family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 7.0.4.

The Document Foundation does not provide technical support for users, although they can get it from volunteers on user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org

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

LibreOffice 7.1 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org

[1] Release Notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.1

Press Kit

Download link: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/FQXoczJb9RrExFA

Comments

  1. By regrettable

    LibreOffice “Inferior Edition”

    • By Italo Vignoli

      Any reason why this should be inferior, and to what? The announcement is not mentioning a change in features, and the reality is that LibreOffice Enterprise versions usually have less heature than LibreOffice Community, because they do not deploy the latest source code but the previous release (so, LibreOffice Community is based on 7.1 while LibreOffice Enterprise is based on 7.0). This will not change in the future.

    • By Aravind

      +1

  2. By Aravind

    Much discussion happened just months back and the presentation in the Board promised that there will not be any difference in features, but now it is clear that it is false. This so called Community version is going to kill the brand of LibreOffice among the community. A clear monopolistic decision without considering the community’s point of view.

    • By Mike Saunders

      There will be no difference in features in the version offered by TDF. The software isn’t changing at all. This is a label on the name, nothing else. Can you stop spreading falsehoods please?

    • By Leonardo

      i cannot understand, they added more features and you call that a feature-less version? How is that event possibile?

  3. By ajnabi

    Thank you, it’s a great Office suite and improving so actively. How to enable the new style-preview widget as mentioned here [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.1#Notebookbar]?

  4. By ConcernedBusinessUser

    It isn’t really very surprising that some businesses favour the “Community” edition over “Enterprise” editions, when those very same business supported versions have fewer features than the “Community” version. Why would any business support a product that doesn’t do what the “Community” version does relatively well in comparison ? I cite, as a classic example, the lack of Java, and full range of database connection support in the “Enterprise-ready” editions available, e.g. on macOS. Furthermore, which business wants to be forced to run two different versions of the same software (Community and some Enterprise supported version) just to get the functions that the Enterprise development actor has deemed unimportant from its business model perspective ? Seriously, if the project wants businesses to take up the Enterprise version, then that version is supposed to bring added-value over and above what can be found in the Community product, and not reduce the available feature set.

    • By Mike Saunders

      Hi Alex, I don’t know about these specific features, but the enterprise versions certainly offer added value:

      * Long-term support releases

      * Service Level Agreements (so guaranteeing a certain level of service/support)

      * Custom/accelerated bugfixes (which work back into the main LO code)

      * Help with migrations to LibreOffice, training and other consulation tasks

      • By ConcernedBusinessUser

        Hi Mike,
        Unfortunately, those SLAs target IMHO large corporate user deployments. No small business with 5 to 10 seats is going to fork out 15K/yr on the basis of a simple cost comparison with the competition :
        – use LibreOffice (TDF) – free (0 EUR), most things work >95% of average use case (bugs obviously, that sometimes take ages to fix, or never get fixed) ;
        – subscribe to MS Office365 – works pretty much > 95% of average use cases for 8-10 EUR/per/month – bug fixes/reporting, well OK, pretty much inexistent in most users eyes ;
        – subscribe to Google Business Workplace GSuite – works pretty much > 80% of average use cases for 8 EUR/per/month (annoying lack of certain basic functions only accessible via paying 3rd party add-ons).
        It isn’t hard to see why small businesses feel left out of commercial FOSS offerings, as they don’t appear to tailor their budgets to cater to their needs (and provide realistic expectations of results). After all, which software development business wants to pay a developer to fix the needs of a very small business.

        I still feel, regrettably, that the choice of one of the big software companies, with all of its inherent issues, in such a case, is a no-brainer for such small businesses. After all, I am one, faced with those same budget issues.

  5. By Jwo

    I have used LibreOffice on just about every linux install I have. This post made donate knowing the value I get from this project.

    • By Mike Saunders

      Thanks a lot, Jwo – really appreciated!

  6. By Joel Alleyne

    Are you also suggesting that SMEs and non-profit organizations should not be using the community edition?

    • By CocnernedBusinessUser

      See my post above as to why I feel that the commercial service offerings do not address the budget constraints and expectations of SMEs.

  8. By Popa Adrian Marius

    Discussion on HackerNews

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054160