[tdf-announce] LibreOffice 7.4 Community, a benchmark for interoperability

Development is now focused on interoperability with Microsoft’s 
proprietary file formats, and many new features are targeted at users 
migrating from MS Office

Berlin, August 18, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.4 Community, the new major 
release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop 
productivity, is immediately available from 
https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon 
and Intel processors), and Linux.

Most Significant New Features

GENERAL
    • Support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files
    • Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library
    • Search field for the Extension Manager
    • Performance and compatibility improvements

WRITER
    • Better change tracking in the footnote area
    • Edited lists show original numbers in change tracking
    • New typographic settings for hyphenation

CALC
    • Support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets
    • Extra functions in drop-down AutoSum widget
    • New menu item to search for sheet names

IMPRESS
    • New support for document themes

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.4 Community is 
available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC8M4UzqpqE and 
PeerTube: https://peertube.opencloud.lu/w/myZUTCytN28kuxDa5VXNgh. A 
description of all new features is available in the Release Notes [1]

Interoperability

Based on the distinctive features of the LibreOffice Technology platform 
for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, LibreOffice 7.4 
provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at 
users sharing documents with MS Office or migrating from MS Office. 
These users should check new releases of LibreOffice on a regular basis, 
as the progress is so fast, that each new version improves dramatically 
over the previous one.

LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office 
suite market segment, with native support for the OpenDocument Format 
(ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to 
superior support for MS Office files, to filters for a large number of 
legacy document formats, to return ownership and control to users.

Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by 
ISO in 2008, and not on the ISO approved standard, so they hide a large 
amount of artificial complexity. This causes handling issues with 
LibreOffice, which defaults to a true open standard format (the 
OpenDocument Format).

Contributors to LibreOffice 7.4 Community

LibreOffice 7.4 Community's new features have been developed by 147 
contributors: 72% of code commits are from the 52 developers employed by 
three companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and 
allotropia – or other organizations (including The Document Foundation), 
and 28% are from 95 individual volunteers.

In addition, 528 volunteers have provided localizations in 158 
languages. LibreOffice 7.4 Community is released in 120 different 
language versions, more than any other free or proprietary software, and 
as such can be used in the native language (L1) by over 5.4 billion 
people worldwide. In addition, over 2.3 billion people speak one of 
those 120 languages as their second language (L2).

LibreOffice for Enterprises

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the 
LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – 
for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated 
value-added features and other benefits such as SLA (Service Level 
Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises are 
using the version supported by volunteers, instead of the version 
optimized for their needs and supported by the different ecosystem 
companies. Over time, this represents a problem for the sustainability 
of the LibreOffice project, because it slows down its evolution. In 
fact, every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for their 
enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code 
repository, and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform.

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. Slowing down the 
development of the platform is hurting users, and the LibreOffice 
project may fall short of its expectations and possibilities.

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 an LTS version from the LibreOffice 
Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from 
certified professionals who offer 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 LTS 
options from certified partners – is the ideal solution for businesses 
that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from 
vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.4 Community

LibreOffice 7.4 Community is available from: 
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/.

For users who don’t need the very latest features, and prefer a release 
that has undergone more testing and bug fixing, The Document Foundation 
maintains the LibreOffice 7.3 family, which includes some months of 
back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 7.3.5.

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

[1] Release Notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.4

Press Kit

Download link: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/6i79yxpLYjsaGZB

Permalink: 
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2022/08/18/libreoffice-7-4-community/

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

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