The Document Foundation releases new major LibreOffice version

The Document Foundation (TDF) has released a new major version of LibreOffice, version 24.8. For those who are a bit confused as to why a point-8 release is considered major and not minor, it's because the project switched to a new version numbering system. 24.8 signifies that this version was released in the eighth month - August - in 2024.

One of the main new features in this update pertains to privacy. You can now go to Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Security > Options and enable Remove personal information on saving. This prevents personal information from being exported, such as author names and timestamps, editing duration, printer name and config, document template, author and date for comments, and tracked changes.

The full changelog is as follows:

PRIVACY

• If the option Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Security ▸ Options ▸ Remove personal information on saving is enabled, then personal information will not be exported (author names and timestamps, editing duration, printer name and config, document template, author and date for comments and tracked changes)

WRITER

• UI: handling of formatting characters, width of comments panel, selection of bullets, new dialog for hyperlinks, new Find deck in the sidebar
• Navigator: adding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, indicating images with broken links
• Hyphenation: exclude words from hyphenation with new contextual menu and visualization, new hyphenation across columns, pages or spreads, hyphenation between constituents of a compound word

CALC

• Addition of FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH functions
• Improvement of threaded calculation performance, optimization of redraw after a cell change by minimizing the area that needs to be refreshed
• Cell focus rectangle moved apart from cell content
• Comments can be edited and deleted from the Navigator’s right-click menu

IMPRESS & DRAW

• In Normal view, it is now possible to scroll between slides, and the Notes are available as a collapsible pane under the slide
• By default, the running Slideshow is now immediately updated when applying changes in EditView or in PresenterConsole, even on different Screens

CHART

• New chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” 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)
• Text inside chart’s titles, text boxes and shapes (and parts thereof) can now be formatted using the Character dialog

ACCESSIBILITY

• Several improvements to the management of formatting options, which can be now announced properly by screen readers

SECURITY

• New mode of password-based ODF encryption

INTEROPERABILITY

• Support importing and exporting OOXML pivot table (cell) format definitions
• PPTX files with heavy use of custom shapes now open faster

You can download LibreOffice 24.8 now from the LibreOffice download page. The minimum requirements are Windows 7 SP1 and macOS 10.15. Linux users should stick to whichever version of LibreOffice is in their repositories for the best experience, although they can upgrade. If you are on LibreOffice 24.2, you can stay on that version, too, as fixes are being backported to it.