Author: Italo Vignoli
Performance-focused LibreOffice 6.4 is available for download
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
ODF 1.3 approved as OASIS Committee Specification
OASIS is pleased to announce that Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.3 from the OpenDocument TC has been approved as an OASIS Committee Specification.
The OpenDocument Format is an open XML-based document file format for office applications, to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical elements. OpenDocument Format v1.3 is an update to the international standard Version 1.2, which was approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 26300 in 2015. OpenDocument Format v1.3 includes improvements for document security, clarifies underspecifications and makes other timely improvements.
The OpenDocument Format specifies the characteristics of an open XML-based application-independent and platform-independent digital document file format, as well as the characteristics of software applications which read, write and process such documents. It is applicable to document authoring, editing, viewing, exchange and archiving, including text documents, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, drawings, charts and similar documents commonly used by personal productivity software applications.
This Committee Specification is an OASIS deliverable, completed and approved by the TC and fully ready for testing and implementation.
The prose specifications and related files are available on the OASIS website.
Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.3
Part 1: Introduction
Editable source (Authoritative): https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part1-introduction/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part1-introduction.odt. HTML:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part1-introduction/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part1-introduction.html. PDF: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part1-introduction/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part1-introduction.pdf
Part 2: Packages
Editable source (Authoritative): https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part2-packages.odt. HTML: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part2-packages.html. PDF: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part2-packages.pdf
Part 3: OpenDocument Schema
Editable source (Authoritative): https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part3-schema.odt. HTML: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part3-schema.html. PDF: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part3-schema.pdf
Part 4: Recalculated Formula (OpenFormula) Format
Editable source (Authoritative): https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part4-formula/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part4-formula.odt. HTML: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part4-formula/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part4-formula.html. PDF: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part4-formula/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part4-formula.pdf
XML/RNG schemas and OWL ontologies: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/schemas/
For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose specification and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file at: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01.zip
Members of the OpenDocument TC approved this specification by Special Majority Vote. The specification had been released for public review as required by the TC Process. The vote to approve as a Committee Specification passed, and the document is now available online in the OASIS Library as referenced above.
Happy New Year 2020
2020 is going to be a milestone year for the LibreOffice community, as we are going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the LibreOffice project on September 28 – the date of the official announcement, with a press release distributed to FOSS media – and the 20th anniversary of the free office suite on July 19 – the date of the announcement issued by Sun for the release of StarOffice source code to the open source community.
It will be a year long celebration. To start it in the right way, four images which can be reused by LibreOffice community members to share their commitment to FOSS and to the best free office suite ever (background images are from Pixabay, and can be used without attribution). By right clicking on the images, it will be possible to download a larger version (2500 pixel wide).
Happy New Year 2020 to all LibreOffice community members and users worldwide.
10/20: LibreOffice 10th anniversary in 2020, a year long celebration
LibreOffice was announced on September 28, 2010, with a positive feedback from tech and business media all over the world (above, two significant titles from eWeek and Linux Gizmos). To celebrate the event, The Document Foundation has organized a year long anniversary project, starting at FOSDEM in Brussels on February 1/2 and ending at POSS in Paris in early December 2020.
LibreOffice community members will attend as many FOSS events as possible, carrying stickers and swag with the anniversary logo. The author is Rania Amina from Indonesia, a member of the LibreOffice community who has already contributed with logos and 2D animations to the success of LibreOffice Indonesia Conference in 2018.
Rania Amina will attend FOSDEM in Brussels, and will also talk about the LibreOffice Theme Changer at the Open Document Editors DevRoom.
So far, in addition to FOSDEM and POSS, events have been confirmed in Nigeria (Open Source Africa), Kosovo (FLOSSK), Croatia (DORS/CLUC), Albania (OSCAL), France (Libre Graphics Meeting and OW2con), Taiwan (COSCUP and LibreOffice Asia Conference), India (Open Source India), Germany (Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, FrOSCon and the LibreOffice Conference), US (All Things Open) and Serbia (PSSOH), but several other are being currently discussed and will be announced as soon as possible.
Stay tuned !!! 2020 will be an exciting time for the LibreOffice community !!!
According to TechRepublic, LibreOffice is one of the best open source innovations of the last decade
According to TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen, LibreOffice is one of the best open source innovations of the last decade, with Docker, Kubernetes, GNOME 3, the cloud, Chrome OS, Internet of Things (IoT) and Firefox Quantum: “We head back to the desktop with LibreOffice. Although OpenOffice (which was originally StarOffice) was one of the first full-blown open source office suites, it wound up falling far enough behind as to become irrelevant. That’s when on January 25, 2011 LibreOffice came into being to offer up an open source office suite that could hang with the best of them and innovate quickly and reliably. Although, even if LibreOffice went away, there would still be plenty of options remaining (such as KOffice), but there wouldn’t be one that held so true to the ethos of open source, while still being a viable option for the world of business. Without LibreOffice, Linux users would be relegated to Google Docs and Office 365 for business collaboration.”