LibreOffice 7.5: Interoperability with Microsoft Office, new features and icons

The free office suite LibreOffice 7.5 has been released for Windows, macOS and Linux and focuses on interoperability with the industry leader Microsoft Office and its three individual components Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint . In addition, new features and icons are introduced.

Better interoperability with Microsoft Office

According to the official release notes, the new LibreOffice 7.5, described by the developers of the non-profit organization The Document Foundation as a “milestone of interoperability”, offers even better compatibility with Microsoft Office applications.

LibreOffice 7.5 is also visually breaking new ground and now provides new icons for both the applications and the documents created with them.

The new icons of LibreOffice 7.5

News for all Office applications

The Writer app, the counterpart to Microsoft Word, has received a number of improvements, the most notable of which are:

• Content controls for titles and tags.
• A new one Added simple text type.
• New combo box type and ability to export content controls to PDF.
• Improved spell checking for different languages ​​such as Danish, Dutch, Estonian, German, Hungarian, Norwegian and Swedish.
• For tables Improved detection of columns overlapping merged cells.
• Bookmark editing and accessibility has been improved.
• Images, embedded objects, and text frames can be decoratively tagged to allow utilities to appropriately ignore them in exported PDFs.

The Calc app, which can be seen as an open-source alternative to Microsoft Excel, receives the following innovations:

• Support for Kamenický and Mazovia encodings has been added, as well as Conditional formatting improvements.
• When searching for a term in the function wizard, both the function descriptions and the names of the functions are now considered.
• Cell input with a leading apostrophe in cells that are not formatted as text now has the first apostrophe permanently removed to avoid confusion.

Impress, the Microsoft PowerPoint equivalent, now supports the addition of cropped video in various media forms and fixes an issue with Windows Enhanced Metafile (EMF) format graphics that could previously appear blurry and display incorrectly.

Added support for changing table styles and creating new styles for the Draw drawing program. Modified styles are now saved in the document and can be made into templates for easier sharing.

In addition, LibreOffice 7.5 has an improved and consistent Dark Mode, which extends to all applications in the free Office suite.

LibreOffice also runs in the browser

The open source developers have been planning for a long time to add a browser version to the free office suite.

An experimental version of this online offshoot has already been published in cooperation with the software developers of Allotropia Software GmbH based in Hamburg.

The final version of LibreOffice in the browser should have the following key data:

• Based on WebAssembly (WASM)
• Implemented with Emscript -Toolchain from LLVM
• C and C++ translated into JavaScript and WebAssembly
• LibreOffice 7.4 including GUI directly in the browser
• WebAssembly System Interface (WASI)
• Backend based on Qt

The still very experimental test version*, which is already available to everyone and runs in Mozilla Firefox, the various Chromium browsers and browsers based on Apple Webkit, is still based on the source code of LibreOffice 7.4.

*) The WebAssembly port loads around 300MB of application code when first started and therefore takes a while to get up and running.

Download on ComputerBase

As usual, LibreOffice 7.5 (“Community”) can be downloaded from the ComputerBase download area directly below this message.

The developers present all the improvements in the latest version in a three-minute video in detail and provide corresponding impressions.

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