Work with document files either imported from programs like MS Word, Excel and other office tools or created natively in formats like ODF or PDF compatible with modern and open standards. Editing, copying and incorporating data in databases is possible.
LibreOffice is an open-source free alternative to heavy commercial office suites like MS Office. While having generally the same functionality, LibreOffice is more open to modification and updates, making it a more attractive suite if you want a comfortable and adjustable tool for working with documentation.
LibreOffice consists of several tools capable of working with documents of any type, from standard Word files and Excel tables to presentations and Publisher files. There's a word processing and desktop publishing tool called Writer; spreadsheet program Calc; tool for creating effective multimedia presentations called Impress; a sketching tool named Draw; database manager Base; formula editor Math; advanced chart and diagram creator Charts. Every tool has all the features of an advanced editor for the kind of files you could work with. The tools work stable and fast, they are easy to use even if you're not an experienced user of office tools.
LibreOffice adds several unique features into its programming, such as the support for ODT documents and the ability to incorporate various plugins and extensions. You can always add new templates for various documents.
Open-source tools sometimes disappoint by being attempts to copy a licensed product. LibreOffice is different in that, it's a genuinely good product itself.
v6.2.8.2 [Dec 22, 2018]
Writer:
- Reimplementation of hiding tracked changes: Edit ▸ Track Changes ▸ Show no longer severely impacts performance in documents with many tracked changes. The document view is now capable of hiding the tracked changes, so they do not have to be rearranged in the document model to be hidden. The dialog advising users of the performance impact has been removed tdf#113479 (Michael Stahl - CIB).
- Native copy & paste of spreadsheet data in Writer tables. tdf#37223 (László Németh – NISZ) Previously, you could paste a copied table as image, object, plain text, and as RTF; the latter resulting in a new table in Writer. In 6.2 you can paste directly in an existing table.
- Before (insert Calc table as - for example - an embedded OLE object).
- After (cell by cell as a native Writer table).
- Remove CopyGraphic tdf#105262 (Xisco Faulí).
- Previous table-size actions were distribute column/row size equally and optimize (which acted like minimize), so a true minimize action was added and optimize was changed. Optimize row now acts similar to distribute where each row is given the same height based on the tallest row. Optimize, however, is based on the minimum height of the row with the most content. In addition, optimize ensures that the table size will not shrink (but it will grow if necessary). Optimize column now acts like minimize except that the width of the table will not change. Any leftover space is distributed proportionately, with thin columns growing slightly, and wide columns growing much wider. tdf#64242 (Justin Luth, SIL).
- Advanced menus to add/modify header/footer menus can be disabled now at Insert ▸ Header and Footer ▸ Use header/footer menu (enabled by default) tdf#118621 (Heiko Tietze).
- UTF-8 and UTF-16-encoded text may now be saved without BOM . tdf#44291 (Martin van Zijl). The option is available from GUI (using Text - Choose Encoding (.txt) export filter in Save As dialog with Edit filter settings checked), in the filter settings dialog: as well as from command line, as in soffice --convert-to \"txt:Text (encoded):UTF8,CR,,,false\" *.doc where "UTF8" is the text encoding; "CR" is line ending setting (also "LF" and "CRLF" are valid options); third and fourth empty parameters are unused for export; and "false" is to suppress output of BOM ("true" is the default to output the BOM).
- HTML export has an opt-in mode to write the ReqIF subset of XHTML blog post (Miklos Vajna - Collabora).
- Various small UNO API improvements blog post (Miklos Vajna - Collabora).
- LibreLogo, programming interface for graphic design and education has got unit testing, IDE and compiler fixes and improvements, see blog post (László Németh – FSF.hu Foundation).
- Autocorrect capitalization of the English i'm → I’m, i'll to I’ll etc.: now correction of the ASCII quotation mark to the typographical one (’) capitalizes the preceding single lowercase i, too, as in MSO, if the language of the text is English. tdf#108423 (László Németh – NISZ) ( Since LibreOffice 6.2.4 ).
Calc:
- Signature Lines are now available in Calc too (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB) tdf#117903.
- Data Validation now supports custom formulas (Marco Cecchetti - Collabora) tdf#96698.
- Now it is possible to do multivariate regression analysis using the regression tool (Data ▸ Statistics ▸ Regression). In addition, many more statistical measures are now available in the analysis output. For example, it shows confidence intervals for all the estimated parameters. (Dennis Francis - Collabora) tdf#109042 tdf#114092 blog entry.
New spreadsheet functions:
- REGEX to match text against a regular expression and optionally replace text. (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.)).
Changed spreadsheet functions:
- LARGE and SMALL now support an array as Rank argument, in which case they return an array of ranked numbers. This to comply with ODF 1.2 OpenFormula and interoperability with other spreadsheet applications. (Takeshi Abe) i#32345.
Impress & Draw:
Related to Animation Editing:
- Fix named object display of the animation entry. tdf#90243 (Mark Hung).
- Update display of the animation entry when object renames. tdf#45178 (Mark Hung).
- Display actual paragraph grouping level in Text Animation tab. tdf#47995 (Mark Hung).
- Prevent animation removed when setting as "As One Object" tdf#67611 (Mark Hung).
- Dispose old motion path so that new path works when changing the motion path type. tdf#33022 (Mark Hung).
- Allow changing the motion path by dragging its control points. tdf#53993 (Mark Hung).
UI:
- "Next" is disabled on the presenter console when the last slide is reached (arrow right goes ahead to the "end of presentation" slide) (Heiko Tietze) tdf#118443.
- Couple of text-related drawing styles were added (Heiko Tietze) tdf#94369.
- Table-size actions for Minimize and Optimize were added and Distribute Rows changed to set equal row height based on the tallest row, similar to Writer. tdf#117721 (Justin Luth, SIL).
