LibreOffice is my preferred word processor/spreadsheet/presentation program and otherwise is my preferred program to be used in place of Microsoft Office. I use LibreOffice multiple times per day, including once today to write this article. Not bad for a FREE program! Don’t waste your money on the (overpriced) Microsoft Office!

LibreOffice just got a major update that adds new privacy, security, productivity, and accessibility features across all its apps. It is a free and open-source productivity suite that includes a word, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing apps, supporting both open source and proprietary (mostly from Microsoft Office) file formats

LibreOffice claims that it’s “the only software for creating documents that may contain personal or confidential information that respects the privacy of the user.” To that end, LibreOffice 24.8 introduces a new privacy feature that lets you remove personal and trackable information from any file before exporting it. Metadata like timestamps, version history, printer identifiers, author information are usually embedded in most documents. Exporting via this privacy feature makes them harder to track. Plus, LibreOffice gives you one more mode to encrypt ODF files with passwords (an open source document format).

LibreOffice

The new LibreOffice Writer interface is getting new formatting, linking, and search features. New bullet styles and a Find deck have been added to the navigator. It also offers finer control over hyphenation and drag-and-drop navigation. 

Calc, the spreadsheet editor, has nine new functions (many of them for better sorting and filtering). Calc also supports two new chart types (Pie-of-Pie and Bar-of-Pie) and makes them compatible with proprietary chart formats from Microsoft Office. The text inside these charts is now easily formatable via the dedicated character window. And it has been optimized for better overall performance. 

Impress (the presentation app) also gets some minor updates. You can scroll between slides, and edits made to a presentation are immediately reflected in a running slideshow. The new LibreOffice 24.8 is now available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This new version is also the first to offer native support for Windows PCs built on the ARM architecture.

You can read more about the new release of LibreOffice at: https://www.howtogeek.com/libreoffice-24-8-release/.