LibreOffice 25.2 offers massive update of user interface and accessibility improvements

LibreOffice is releasing LibreOffice 25.2, a new major release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD, and ARM), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), and Linux.

LibreOffice offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen sizes, optimizing the space available to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.

It is also capable of creating documents (that may contain personal or confidential information) that respect the user's privacy, ensuring that the user can decide if and with whom to share the content they create, thanks to the standard and open format that is not used as a lock-in tool, forcing periodic software updates. All this with a feature set that is comparable to the leading software on the market and far superior to that of any competitor.

What makes LibreOffice unique is the LibreOffice Technology Platform, which can produce identical and fully interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

The latter hides a huge number of artificial (and unnecessary) lock-in complexities that create problems for users convinced they are using a standard format.

New features of LibreOffice 25.2 include:

PRIVACY

• LibreOffice can remove all personal information associated with any document (author names and timestamps, editing time, printer name and configuration, document template, author and date for comments, and tracked changes).

CORE/GENERAL

• LibreOffice 25.2 can read and write ODF version 1.4.
• Many interoperability improvements with proprietary OOXML documents.
• It is now possible to automatically sign documents after defining a default certificate.
• Windows 7 and 8/8.1 are deprecated platforms, and support will be removed in version 25.8.
• Extensions and features relying on Python will not work on Windows 7.

WRITER

• Improvements to Track Changes management, to manage large number of changes in long documents.
• Comments are now tracked in the Navigator when you move the focus into comments, while resizing the area containing comments now shows a visual guide.
• Added options to set a default zoom level for opening documents, overriding the level stored in documents.
• It is now possible to delete all content of a content type (excluding headings) via the Navigator.

CALC

• Addition of a "Handle Duplicate Records" dialog to select/remove duplicate records in Calc.
• Both the Function Wizard dialog and Functions Sidebar deck received improvements to searching and user experience.
• Solver models can be saved into spreadsheets and Solver is able to provide a sensitivity analysis report.
• Addition of new sheet protection options related to Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts and AutoFilters.

IMPRESS AND DRAW

• Many improvements to all Impress templates, which now have visible elements (font colour set to black) in Master Notes and Handout.
• Objects can be centered on the Impress slide (or Draw page) in one single step.
• Automatic repeating of slides can now be activated in windowed mode.
• Overflowing text in presenter notes is no longer cut off when printing.

USER INTERFACE

• The list of recently used files has now a checkbox "[x] Current Module Only" that allows to filter the list.
• Object boundaries are now toggled independently of Formatting Marks.
• The color of non-printing characters and the background color of comments can be customized.
• Default items for unordered lists (also known as bullets) have been updated.
• Significant improvements to application themes.

ACCESSIBILITY

• Improved warning and error levels in the Accessibility Sidebar, with option to ignore warnings.
• User interface elements report an accessible identifier which can be used by assistive technologies.
• Windows: accessibility gets enabled whenever a tool queries information on the accessibility level, and accessible relations are correctly reported.
• Linux: positions of UI elements (including on Wayland) are correctly reported on the accessibility level.

SCRIPTFORGE LIBRARIES

• An extensible and robust collection of macro scripting resources to be invoked from user Basic or Python scripts.
• The whole set of services (except when the native native built-in function is better) is made available for Python scripts with identical syntax and behavior as in Basic.
• The English documentation of ScriptForge libraries is now partially integrated in the LibreOffice help pages.

A total of 176 developers contributed to the new features in LibreOffice 25.2: 47% of the code commits came from 50 developers employed by ecosystem companies—Collabora and allotropia—and other organizations, 31% from seven developers at The Document Foundation, and the remaining 22% from 119 individual volunteer developers.

An additional 189 volunteers have committed 771,263 localized strings in 160 languages, representing hundreds of people working on translations.
LibreOffice 25.2 is available in 120 languages, more than any other desktop software, making it available to over 5.5 billion people in their native language. In addition, over 2.4 billion people speak one of these 120 languages as a second language.

LibreOffice 25.2 is available at https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple MacOS 10.15. LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/. 

For more information about this news, visit www.libreoffice.org.