Neil Mohr discovers what’s new in this latest release of the office suite that is one of the crown jewels of the open source world.

Neil Mohr

These very words have been written with LibreOffice 7.0 and there’s nothing groundbreaking or earth-shattering about that, which is absolutely something to celebrate. LibreOffice is yet another first-class example of a successful - at least in terms of function - open source project. It’s feature-full, stable, supports open standards, backed by a vibrant community, underpinned by a ethical foundation and is successfully maintained and developed over time by a wide spread of developers.

Bayu Rizaldhan Rayes

Whatever your thoughts on LibreOffice itself, a full office suite is an essential component in any prime-time computing ecosystem and LibreOffice is just that. We hate to admit it, but Linux Format has been somewhat remiss of late for overlooking both the offline LibreOffice developments, but also the online cloud implementations that are based on it, such as Collabora’s CODE or NextCloud.

So with the milestone release of LibreOffice 7.0 we thought it was high time that we revisited this sprawling office suite and remind ourselves how important a project it is and its accomplishments. Of course, you’d be foolish to think anything is perfect, and LibreOffice has its shortcomings. Certainly, there are questions over its long-term sustainability of the ecosystem, with moves afoot to try and shore this up. However, a sign of a well-run project is that the 7.0 release timeline has been hitting its targets, so by the time you read this the final release of 7.0 will be out and ready to download in Deb, RPM and AppImage (just make the file executable) formats alongside Windows and MacOS builds.

So grab your build, donate some money and take the suite for a spin…

A key reason for the release of LibreOffice 7.0 at this point is its support for the newly released Open Document Format v1.3. This was ratified by its governing body OASIS (https:// bit.ly/lxf267odf) on 21 January 2020. Take a look at the box on the history of LibreOffice (below) and you’ll see that from the initial days of its predecessor OpenOffice, supporting open standards and specifically the XML-based Open Document Format (ODF) has been a key tenet of LibreOffice. So it makes perfect sense that in an effort to promote and expand adoption of the ODF v1.3 format, LibreOffice ensures it’s integrated into its next major release.