Open source office suite LibreOffice unveils a range of new improvements

LibreOffice, the world’s leading free office suite, is announcing a major release for its open source, volunteer-supported office suite. Ushering in a wide variety of improvements, LibreOffice 24.2 Community continues to deliver its open source personal productivity office suite that offers users complete control over their content while helping them break away from vendor lock-in.

Offering a clean interface and feature-rich tools, LibreOffice is a free and powerful office suite whose software is tested and used daily by its devoted user and developer community. The latest enhancements for version 24.2 are derived from LibreOffice’s attentiveness toward user requests and developer innovation.

LibreOffice is powered by the LibreOffice Technology engine, a centralized platform for all operating environments, including desktop, cloud, and mobile. This foundation allows LibreOffice to deliver both an enhanced user experience as well as produce identical and interoperable documents based on the Open Document Format (ODT, ODS, and ODP) and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX) ISO standards.

The new capabilities are engineered by LibreOffice’s wide range of volunteer contributors—including developers from Collabora, allotropia, and Red Hat. Some of the latest features available with LibreOffice 24.4 Community include:

• New calendar-based numbering scheme (YY.M), improving update comprehension
• Enhanced interoperability with Microsoft Office, including various optimizations for page style, template language, and more
• Save AutoRecovery information enabled by default, mitigating risk of losing content for new users
• UI improvements for NotebookBar
• New “legal” ordered list numbering
• Scientific formats now supported and saved in ODF
• Improvements to accessibility, such as enhanced mouse positioning, dialogue boxes, and more
• Password strength meter and password-based ODF encryption for better security for user content

LibreOffice also offers an enterprise version of its office suite, delivering services optimized for businesses, including SLAs and longer security support. Additionally, LibreOffice has crafted a migration protocol to better enable enterprises to move from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice accompanied by migration consulting and training.

According to Italo Vignoli, founder and media spokesperson for LibreOffice, readers “should be excited by the mere existence of LibreOffice, the only free and open source office suite to grant them total control over their content (in all other cases, control is tied to the commercial strategies of the company developing the office suite).”

“This means that their privacy is guaranteed, because we do not ask for any user information, as well as their digital sovereignty—the ability to govern their content according to their needs, without a company deciding how, when, and for how long this content is accessible without having to pay—and consequently their digital rights. LibreOffice means user freedom in a world where we are constantly being watched,” Vignoli concluded.

LibreOffice 24.2 Community is now available for Windows (Intel, AMD, and ARM), macOS (Apple and Intel), and Linux. For more information about LibreOffice, please visit https://www.libreoffice.org/.