[tdf-announce] LibreOffice 7.1 Community released by The Document Foundation

A brand new version of the best free open source office suite, based on 
the LibreOffice Technology platform for desktop, mobile and cloud 
productivity

Berlin, February 3, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1 Community, the 
volunteer-supported version of the best open source office suite for 
desktop productivity, is available from 
https://www.libreoffice.org/download. The Community label underlines the 
fact that the software is not targeted at enterprises, and not optimized 
for their support needs.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF has strongly recommended the 
LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – 
for desktop, mobile and cloud – with long-term support options, 
professional assistance, custom features and other benefits, including 
SLA (Service Level Agreements): 
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises have 
chosen the version supported by volunteers over the version optimized 
for their needs. This has had a twofold negative consequence for the 
project: a poor use of volunteers' time, as they have to spend their 
time to solve problems for business that provide nothing in return to 
the community, and a net loss for ecosystem companies.

This has been a problem for the sustainability of the LibreOffice 
project, because it has slowed down the evolution of the software. In 
fact, every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for their 
customers is shared with the global community, and this improves the 
product and fosters the growth of the LibreOffice Technology platform.

Both LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of 
products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, which is the 
result of years of sustained development efforts (see the white paper) 
with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only 
for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud, following the 
evolution of the marketplace since 2010.

Today, products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major 
desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), for 
mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and for the cloud. They may have a 
different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share 
the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

By using the Community label we underline the importance of enterprise 
customers contributing to our mission, according to their ability, and 
how much we appreciate their support.

LibreOffice 7.1 Community New Features [1]

LibreOffice 7.1 Community’s new features have been developed by a large 
number of code contributors: 73% of commits are from developers employed 
by companies sitting in the Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and 
CIB/allotropia – to serve their enterprise customers, plus other 
organizations (including TDF), and 27% are from individual volunteers.

GENERAL
• New dialog to select the User Interface flavor, aiming to pick the 
right UI based on each user's own preferences at first start
• Improved search for a matching printer paper size for the printed document
• Show all supported files when adding a new extension in Extension Manager
• Print Preview is now updated asynchronously, to not block UI when 
adjusting settings in Print Dialog
• Additions Dialog: to search, get and install extensions with one-click

WRITER
• New Style Inspector to display the attributes of Paragraph and 
Character Styles, and manually formatted (Direct Formatting) properties
• Default anchor for newly added images can be set using Tools ▸ Options 
▸ LibreOffice Writer
• Ability to detect Unicode, even if the imported text file does not 
have the BOM (Byte Order Mark)
• Significant speed improvement of find/replace operations

CALC
• Added an option to manage pasting with Enter key, which can be 
switched on/off in the Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice Calc ▸ General dialog
• Added option to select items in Autofilter window clicking on all 
item's row, in addition to the checkbox
• Significant speed improvement of Autofilter and find/replace operations

IMPRESS & DRAW
• Possibility to add visible signatures to existing PDF files in Draw
• Possibility to change animations for several objects at once in Impress
• Addition of "Pause/Resume" and "Exit"buttons to Presenter's Screen
• Addition of realistic soft blurred shadows to objects
• Addition of new physics based animation capabilities and new animation 
effect presets that use them

MACRO
• ScriptForge libraries: an extensible and robust collection of macro 
scripting resources for LibreOffice to be invoked from user Basic or 
Python scripts

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.1 Community is 
available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLutwM8XKvo and 
also on PeerTube: 
https://peertube.opencloud.lu/videos/watch/38ac180b-62b5-44b7-b649-74c7efe05758 


LibreOffice, the best tool for interoperability

LibreOffice 7.1 Community adds several interoperability improvements 
with DOCX/XLSX/PPTX files: improvements to Writer tables (better 
import/export and management of table functions, and better support for 
change tracking in floating tables); a better management of cached field 
results in Writer; support of spacing below the header's last paragraph 
in DOC/DOCX files; and additional SmartArt improvements when importing 
PPTX files.

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 optimized 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.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support 
enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which 
is based on the deployment of a LTS version from the LibreOffice 
Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from 
certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added 
solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: 
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 7.1 Community

LibreOffice 7.1 Community 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.

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/ 


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 7.0 
family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current 
version is LibreOffice 7.0.4.

The Document Foundation does not provide technical support for users, 
although they can get it from volunteers on user mailing lists and the 
Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org

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

LibreOffice 7.1 is built with document conversion libraries from the 
Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org

[1] Release Notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.1

Press Kit

Download link: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/FQXoczJb9RrExFA

Blog Post: 
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/02/03/libreoffice-7-1-community/

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


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