The LibreOffice project has announced the availability of LibreOffice 7.0 release for production use. It comes with several significant new features, support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3, Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration for better performance, and improved compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.
LibreOffice is a multi-language, cross-platform, and free and open-source office suite software. It is a project of The Document Foundation and was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, in turn, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. It consists of a word processor, spreadsheets editor, slideshows program, diagrams and drawings package, databases tool, and composing mathematical formulae program.
The highlights of this new LibreOffice 7.0 release are the implementation of the Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration thanks to sponsorship by AMD, and is now the default on Windows, for faster performance. Skia is an open-source 2D graphics library that 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.
There is now better compatibility with DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files with files now saving in native 2013/2016/2019 mode, instead of 2007 compatibility mode. This improves interoperability with multiple versions of MS Office, based on the same Microsoft approach.
It is now possible to export to XLSX files with sheet names longer than 31 characters along with exporting checkboxes in XLSX. There are also improvements to the PPTX import/export filter.
OpenDocument, LibreOffice’s native open and standardized format for office documents, has recently been updated to version 1.3.
For these and more details about the new LibreOffice 7.0 release please visit the official release notes found here. You can also check out the announcement post which breaks down the details in this release. if you just want to get yourself a copy of the software suite you can head on over to the official download page found here.
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