The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 6.0, latest major release of worlds leading open source productivity suite. This release brings various improvements to provide better privileges, security and reliability to the users. It also ensures better interoperability with MicroSoft office documents.
It has been 7 years since the first release of LibreOffice. The Document Foundation was established with the goal of providing a powerful, stable, cross platform supported and free office productivity suite. Initially, LibreOffice project was started as a fork of OpenOffice. Within a short span, LibreOffice has evolved a lot and has proven itself as professional productivity suite. With the release of LibreOffice 6.0, it continues its journey as leading open source productivity suite.
Following are some of the notable features of LibreOffice 6.0 productivity suite:
It has been 7 years since the first release of LibreOffice. The Document Foundation was established with the goal of providing a powerful, stable, cross platform supported and free office productivity suite. Initially, LibreOffice project was started as a fork of OpenOffice. Within a short span, LibreOffice has evolved a lot and has proven itself as professional productivity suite. With the release of LibreOffice 6.0, it continues its journey as leading open source productivity suite.
 |
| LibreOffice Development over the years |
Following are some of the notable features of LibreOffice 6.0 productivity suite:
GENERALFor more information, see LibreOffice 6.0 release announcement published in Document Foundation website.
WRITER
- An EPUB export filter has been added, to save documents as e-books.
- It's now possible to import QuarkXPress v3 and v4 files, while support forOOXML has been improved as well, especially for SmartArt, cross references and ActiveX controls.
- The Special Characters dialog has been improved, with a new search facility along with recent and favourite characters. Also, a new drop-down icon in the toolbar lets you quickly add special characters.
- In addition, the user interface customisation dialog has been redesigned to be more intuitive and user friendly.
- A new icon set for the toolbars - called Elementary - has been added.
- If you want to save an image that's embedded into a document, and the image has been modified, you can now either save the original version or the modified version.
- On all desktop platforms, you can now use OpenPGP keys to sign and encryptODF documents.
- TSCP-based classification now allows multiple policies, and in Writer, you can mark and sign individual paragraphs.
- A selection from the popular open source Noto font family is now included by default, due to its large Unicode coverage, while fonts for Hebrew and Arabic have been added as well.
- Finally, the Help system has been improved to be more user-friendly and work better with mobile devices.
CALC
- New table styles have been added to the word processor, to make your documents and data look even better.
- A drop-down list has been added to the find toolbar, which helps to make navigation simpler.When you're performing a mail merge, it's now possible to use data from tables inside Writer itself.
- A new Form menu has been added, making it easier to add interactive forms to your documents.
- It's now possible to have split sections inside tables.Custom dictionaries are more flexible, using innovative human language technology, helping professional journalists, editors and writers.When you've inserted an image into a document, you can now rotate it to any angle, rather than in steps of just 90 degrees.
IMPRESS
- In the spreadsheet, new commands have been added to select unprotected cells on protected or unprotected sheets.
- If a sheet is protected, a lock symbol appears at the beginning of the sheet's tab.Using the File > Export dialog, you can now export a cell range selection - or a selected group of shapes - in PNG or JPG format.
- The Links dialog has been simplified, while three new ODF 1.2 compliant spreadsheet functions have been implemented, for finding and replacing textusing byte positions.
ONLINE
- 10 great new templates have been added, for home and business use, to make your presentations really stand out.
- In addition, the default aspect ratio is now 16:9, so your new presentations work with widescreen displays straight away.
- In LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based version of the suite, many improvements have been made to the interface.
- User avatars are now supported, which are displayed in comments.
- In addition, links in comments are now detected automatically.
- Dialogs have been added and updated, such as Insert Special Characters, and Find And Replace.
- Spell checking is now available across Writer, Calc and Impress, while the status bar now shows the current language of text being edited.
- Writer now has an interactive horizontal ruler, like in the desktop version of the suite.
- In Calc, an active cell reference box has been added, and basic editing of charts has been implemented