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OFFICE SOFTWARE

LibreOffice 7.5 released

Turbo-charge your productivity with this upgraded office suite.

T he Document Foundation has just released LibreOffice 7.5, a major upgrade of its popular open source office suite. This latest version includes a huge number of improved features.

Lovers of dark modes will be pleased to hear that more than 40 bugs have been ironed out to make it much easier to activate and navigate. If you prefer a little colour in your life, you can also enjoy the more rounded application and file icons, based on the Sifr icon set.

These aren’t the only features to be more vibrant: Writer bookmarks now come in all hues of the rainbow, making them much easier to see, while Impress and Draw now have a much wider and more colourful range of tables to insert.

The new LibreOffice is also easier to navigate, with an improved single-toolbar user interface. (You can activate this by going to View > User Interface > Single Toolbar.)

When you first launch, the Start Centre also now enables you to search for files by both name and type. When inserting functions into Calc sheets, you can also now search for a function if you’re not sure of the exact term.

The Document Foundation also claims that it has done a lot to increase interoperability with sharing files in Microsoft format, as well as converting them. The release notes (https:// wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/ 7.5) don’t mention it specifically, but this has been a long-standing feature of LibreOffice. The Foundation has also started its own Migration Program to help businesses make the switch. LibreOffice has long been praised for its regional language support. Version 7.5 includes updated Ukrainian, Slovenian and Persian dictionaries, as well as support for Mozambican Portuguese. Since Croatia has now joined the eurozone, the default currency for Croatian users in LibreOffice Calc is now euros, too.

Here both the single toolbar and dark mode have been enabled to help users focus better on the text.

The suite also has better content management features, which makes exporting to PDF much easier on the eye, including support for embedding colour emoji fonts.