[tdf-announce] Announcement of LibreOffice 7.0

LibreOffice 7.0: the new major release of the best FOSS office suite
ever is available on all OSes and platforms, and provides significant
new features

Berlin, August 5, 2020 – The LibreOffice Project announces the
availability of LibreOffice 7.0, a new major release providing
significant new features: support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3;
Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration for better
performance; and carefully improved compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and
PPTX files.

- Support for ODF 1.3. OpenDocument, LibreOffice's native open and
standardised format for office documents, has recently been updated to
version 1.3 as an OASIS Technical Committee Specification. The most
important new features are digital signatures for documents and
OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, with improvements in areas
such as change tracking, and additional details in the description of
elements in first pages, text, numbers and charts. The development of
ODF 1.3 features has been funded by donations to The Document Foundation.

- Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration. The Skia
graphics engine has been implemented thanks to sponsorship by AMD, and
is now the default on Windows, for faster performance. Skia is an open
source 2D graphics library which provides common APIs that work across a
variety of hardware and software platforms, and can be used for drawing
text, shapes and images. Vulkan is a new-generation graphics and compute
API with high-efficiency and cross-platform access to modern GPUs.

- Better compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. DOCX now saves in
native 2013/2016/2019 mode, instead of 2007 compatibility mode, to
improve interoperability with multiple versions of MS Office, based on
the same Microsoft approach. Export to XLSX files with sheet names
longer than 31 characters is now possible, along with exporting
checkboxes in XLSX. The "invalid content error" message was resolved
when opening exported XLSX files with shapes. Finally, there were
improvements to the PPTX import/export filter.

LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office
suite arena, starting from native support for the OpenDocument Format
(ODF) – with better security and interoperability features over
proprietary formats – to almost perfect support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX
files. In addition, LibreOffice includes filters for many legacy
document formats, and as such is the best interoperability tool in the
market.

Summary of Other New Features [1]

GENERAL

- New icon theme, the default on macOS: Sukapura
- New shapes galleries: arrows, diagrams, icons and more...
- Glow and soft edge effects for objects

WRITER

- Navigator is easier to use, with more context menus
- Semi-transparent text is now supported
- Bookmarks can now be displayed in-line in text
- Padded numbering in lists, for consistency
- Better handling of quotation marks and apostrophes

CALC

- New functions for non-volatile random number generation
- Keyboard shortcut added for autosum

IMPRESS & DRAW

- Semi-transparent text is supported here too
- Subscripts now return to the default of 8%
- PDFs larger than 500 cm can now be generated

LibreOffice Technology

LibreOffice 7.0’s new features have been developed by a large community
of code contributors: 74% of commits are from developers employed by
companies sitting in the Advisory Board, such as Collabora, Red Hat and
CIB, plus several other organizations, and 26% are from individual
volunteers.

In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking
care of other fundamental activities, such as quality assurance,
software localization, user interface design and user experience,
editing of help content and documentation, along with free software and
open document standards advocacy.

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.0 is available
on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XusjjbBm81s and also on
PeerTube: https://tdf.io/lo70peertube 

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for all major
desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), for the
cloud and for mobile platforms. They are released by The Document
Foundation, and by ecosystem companies contributing to software development.

LibreOffice for End Users

LibreOffice 7.0 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for
open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology
enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. The Document Foundation
does not provide any technical support for users, although they can get
help from other users on mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website:
https://ask.libreoffice.org 

For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore
prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the
new features, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 6.4
family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current
version is LibreOffice 6.4.5.

LibreOffice in Business

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends sourcing
LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners, to get long-term
supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other
benefits, including SLA (Service Level Agreements):
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/. The work
done by ecosystem partners is an integral part of LibreOffice Technology.

For migrations from proprietary office suites and training, professional
support should be sourced from certified professionals who provide
value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the
corporate world, and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with
proprietary offerings. Reference page:
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set,
strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term
support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution
for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free
themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.0

LibreOffice 7.0 is immediately available from the following link:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for
proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple
macOS 10.12. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are
available as Docker images from TDF:
https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/ 

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed
here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for
App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/ 

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can
support The Document Foundation with a donation at
https://www.libreoffice.org/donate 

LibreOffice 7.0 is built with document conversion libraries from the
Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org 

[1] A more comprehensive list of LibreOffice 7.0 new features is
available on the Release Notes wiki page:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.0 

Press Kit

The press kit with press release and high-resolution images and
screenshots, is available here: https://tdf.io/lo70presskit

Blog Post

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/08/05/announcement-of-libreoffice-7-0/

-- 
Italo Vignoli - Marketing & PR
The Document Foundation & LibreOffice
email italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
hangout/jabber italo.vignoli@gmail.com
mobile/signal +39.348.5653829

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