The next major release of LibreOffice 7.0 under heavy development at the moment and close to release. I have obtained some information about the potential features and updates from official sites, changelogs. Have a look.
LibreOffice, the popular free and open-source office suite has come a long way from the initial OpenOffice days. It is now a default office suite for almost all Linux Distributions and being used heavily in Windows and Mac. With its popularity and user base increasing, developers are adding more features into LibreOffice so that users can experience a top tier free office suite.
The current LibreOffice version is 6.4.x and there is no particular reason for bumping up the version to 7.0. However, LibreOffice 7.0 looks promising at the moment.
LibreOffice version 7.0 is due in early August 2020. Here’s the release plan summary.
Table of Contents
LibreOffice 7.0 release plan
- Alpha1 – Out on May 13, 2020
- Beta1 – May 25 – May 31, 2020
- RC1 – June 29 – Jul 5, 2020
- RC2 – Jul 13 – Jul 19, 2020
- RC3 – Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2020
- Release 7.0 – Aug 3 – Aug 9, 2020
Next LibreOffice version 7.0: What’s in store
- New Branding Image: The old branding image is moving away in LibreOffice 7.0 and it is replaced by a more complex shape – see below. This image you would see in the about dialog and the default opening page.
- Performance improvements for heavy uses and all use cases across modules – Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, and Base. That means faster processing and opening of documents across modules, especially in Writer and Calc.
- The underlying Cairo graphics library was replaced with the Skia library.
Writer
- Padded numbering in Writer’s List.
- Navigator is overhauled in Writer.
Calc
- New Calc functions – Non-volatile random number generating functions that are not recalculated on every input: RAND.NV() and RANDBETWEEN.NV()
- Functions that use regular expressions as argument now can accept accurate case sensitive inputs.
Impress and Draw
- Automatic positioning fixed for superscripts and subscripts in Textboxes while editing
- Improvements of DOCX, PPTX, PPT filters with LibreOffice being more backward compatible with older Microsoft Office.
Toolbars and Icon Theme
- All toolbars are locked by default now on fresh user profiles.
- Added a new Sukapura icon theme. That icon theme will be a default theme for new LibreOffice installations in macOS.
- Sifr icon theme is polished
- Tango icon theme is removed from the core but will be available as an extension.
Other changes
- Macromedia Flash export filter was removed as Flash player will be end-of-life by the end of 2020
- Macro: Support for building against the obsolete CPython 2.7 has been removed, and scripts are now always executed on CPython 3
- Introduced basic HiDPI scaling for Qt5. So if you are using KDE based Linux distributions and uses the high-resolution display, LibreOffice would look nice.
Download LibreOffice 7.0 dev build
LibreOffice 7.0 is in active development and is not recommended for download and install for general users, production or enterprise installations. If you want to take a risk/experiment, grab your latest build copy from below for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
You may find bugs or issues, so if you want to contribute report the bugs via Bugzilla. If you are new to bug reporting, check out the bug reporting guide.
These are the list of changes expected at the moment and not a complete list. As we move towards the final release, more information about changes and updates would be available. I will keep this page updated.
So, what change you are expecting in LibreOffice 7.0? Let me know in the comment section below.
