[tdf-announce] LibreOffice 24.8, for the privacy-conscious office suite user

The new major release provides a wealth of new features, plus a large 
number of interoperability improvements

Berlin, 22 August 2024 - LibreOffice 24.8, the new major release of the 
free, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), 
macOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux is available at 
https://www.libreoffice.org/download. This is the second major release 
to use the new calendar-based numbering scheme (YY.M), and the first to 
provide an official package for Windows PCs based on ARM processors.

LibreOffice is the only office suite, or if you prefer, the only 
software for creating documents that may contain personal or 
confidential information, that respects the privacy of the user – thus 
ensuring that the user is able to decide if and with whom to share the 
content they have created. As such, LibreOffice is the best option for 
the privacy-conscious office suite user, and provides a feature set 
comparable to the leading product on the market. It also offers a range 
of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to 
contemporary, and makes the most of different screen sizes by optimising 
the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features 
just a click or two away.

The biggest advantage over competing products is the LibreOffice 
Technology engine, the single software platform on which desktop, mobile 
and cloud versions of LibreOffice – including those provided by 
ecosystem companies – are based. This allows LibreOffice to offer a 
better user experience and to produce identical and perfectly 
interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the 
Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP), and the proprietary Microsoft 
OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). The latter hides a large amount of 
artificial complexity, which may create problems for users who are 
confident that they are using a true open standard.

End users looking for support will be helped by the immediate 
availability of the LibreOffice 24.8 Getting Started Guide, which is 
available for download from the following link: 
https://books.libreoffice.org/. In addition, they will be able to get 
first-level technical support from volunteers on user mailing lists and 
the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org.

New Features of LibreOffice 24.8

PRIVACY
    • If the option Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Security ▸ Options 
▸ Remove personal information on saving is enabled, then personal 
information will not be exported (author names and timestamps, editing 
duration, printer name and config, document template, author and date 
for comments and tracked changes)

WRITER
    • UI: handling of formatting characters, width of comments panel, 
selection of bullets, new dialog for hyperlinks, new Find deck in the 
sidebar
    • Navigator: adding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, 
deleting footnotes and endnotes, indicating images with broken links
    • Hyphenation: exclude words from hyphenation with new contextual 
menu and visualization, new hyphenation across columns, pages or 
spreads, hyphenation between constituents of a compound word

CALC
    • Addition of FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, 
UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH functions
    • Improvement of threaded calculation performance, optimization of 
redraw after a cell change by minimizing the area that needs to be refreshed
    • Cell focus rectangle moved apart from cell content
    • Comments can be edited and deleted from the Navigator's 
right-click menu

IMPRESS & DRAW
    • In Normal view, it is now possible to scroll between slides, and 
the Notes are available as a collapsible pane under the slide
    • By default, the running Slideshow is now immediately updated when 
applying changes in EditView or in PresenterConsole, even on different 
Screens

CHART
    • New chart types "Pie-of-Pie" and "Bar-of-Pie" break down a slice 
of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables 
import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office)
    • Text inside chart's titles, text boxes and shapes (and parts 
thereof) can now be formatted using the Character dialog

ACCESSIBILITY
    • Several improvements to the management of formatting options, 
which can be now announced properly by screen readers

SECURITY
    • New mode of password-based ODF encryption

INTEROPERABILITY
    • Support importing and exporting OOXML pivot table (cell) format 
definitions
    • PPTX files with heavy use of custom shapes now open faster

A video showcasing the most significant new features is available from 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx--aRv6af8 and PeerTube 
https://peertube.opencloud.lu/w/ibmZUeRgnx9bPXQeYUyXTV.

Contributors to LibreOffice 24.8

There are 171 contributors to the new features of LibreOffice 24.8: 57% 
of code commits come from the 49 developers employed by companies on TDF 
Advisory Board – Collabora, allotropia and Red Hat – and other 
organisations, 20% from seven developers at The Document Foundation, and 
the remaining 23% from 115 individual volunteer developers.

An additional 188 volunteers have committed localized strings in 160 
languages, representing hundreds of people actually providing 
translations. LibreOffice 24.8 is available in 120 languages, more than 
any other desktop software, making it available to over 5.5 billion 
people in their native language. In addition, over 2.4 billion people 
speak one of these 120 languages as a 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 wide range of dedicated 
value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs: 
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for 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 all major desktop operating 
systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android 
and iOS) and the cloud.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a migration protocol to help 
companies move from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, based on 
the deployment of an LTS (long-term support) enterprise-optimised 
version of LibreOffice plus migration consulting and training provided 
by certified professionals who offer value-added solutions consistent 
with proprietary offerings. Reference: 
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

In fact, LibreOffice's mature code base, rich feature set, strong 
support for open standards, excellent compatibility and LTS options from 
certified partners make it the ideal solution for organisations looking 
to regain control of their data and break free from vendor lock-in.
Availability of LibreOffice 24.8

LibreOffice 24.8 is available at https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. 
Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft 
Windows 7 SP1 and Apple MacOS 10.15. 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 latest features and prefer a version that 
has undergone more testing and bug fixing, The Document Foundation 
maintains the LibreOffice 24.2 family, which includes several months of 
back-ported fixes. The current release is LibreOffice 24.2.5.

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

Release Notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/24.8

Press Kit with Images: 
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/JEe8MkDZWMmAGmS

Permalink: 
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/08/22/libreoffice-248/
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