LibreOffice in 2024 – TDF’s Annual Report
In 2024, LibreOffice celebrated its fourteenth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
LibreOffice 24.2
On January 31, LibreOffice 24.2 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at The Document Foundation, Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.
For instance, there were many improvements to the tabbed “NotebookBar” user interface, while styles support was added for comments. A new search field was added to the Functions sidebar deck in Calc, while in terms of accessibility, several significant improvements to the handling of mouse positions and the presentation of dialogue boxes via the Accessibility APIs were made, allowing screen readers to present them correctly. And regarding security, the “Sace with Password” dialogue box now has a password strength meter, which uses zxcvbn-c to determine the password strength.
TDF’s marketing and localisation community produced and translated a video (below) which demonstrated many of the new features in LibreOffice 24.2. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.
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LibreOffice 24.8
Later in the year, on August 22, TDF released LibreOffice 24.8. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.
In terms of features, this release added many improvements to the Navigator in Writer, including ding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, and indicating images with broken links. In Calc, the functions FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH were added, along with chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” which break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office/365).
Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the marketing ad localisation communities to make a video (also on PeerTube) to demonstrate some of the new features.
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Regular improvements
We also released 14 minor updates with bug and security fixes:
- LibreOffice 7.6.5 – February 22
- LibreOffice 24.2.1 – February 29
- LibreOffice 7.6.6 and 24.2.2 – March 28
- LibreOffice 24.2.3 – May 2
- LibreOffice 7.6.7 – May 10
- LibreOffice 24.2.4 – June 6
- LibreOffice 24.2.5 – July 11
- LibreOffice 24.2.6 – September 5
- LibreOffice 24.8.1 – September 12
- LibreOffice 24.8.2 – September 27
- LibreOffice 24.2.7 – October 31
- LibreOffice 24.8.3 – November 14
- LibreOffice 24.8.4 – December 19