The Document Foundation begins to warm up engines. Although the sixth version of your office suite will still receive more updates, they are already preparing everything for the launch of LibreOffice 7.0, a new important installment that will come with new functions in all its applications and performance improvements, one of them also related to security by eliminating the obsolete technology of the Flash Player. And, after resisting slightly, even Adobe will completely abandon its support at the end of 2020.
As we read in the informative note published a few hours ago, The Document Foundation will allow us to test LibreOffice 7.0 Starting May 11, the day in which they will also hold their first Bug Hunting Session, a question and answer session related to the tests carried out in the next version of LibreOffice. The first Alpha version will be uploaded to the pre-release server, which we can access from this link, a few days before, but they have not advanced what day exactly.
LibreOffice 7.0 will arrive with these new features
Although The Document Foundation assures that they will still include more changes in his WikiLibreOffice 7.0 already has these new features confirmed:
- Implemented padded numbering in Writter lists.
- New and changed functions in Calc spreadsheets. Performance when opening XLSX files has also been improved.
- In Impress and Draw, the subscripts have returned to the default 8%, automatic positioning for super / subscripts in text boxes has been fixed, and positioning for text boxes with auto-adjusting text has been corrected. Performance improvements will also be included that will translate into higher speed.
- Macro signatures are now evaluated in the document upload kernel.
- For numeric types, the current locale is taken into account for the decimal and thousands separator, for example, 1.234,321 in de_DE becomes 1234, while 1,234.321 in the en_UK locale provides the same result.
- The underlying Cairo chart library has been replaced by Skia.
- Many improvements in Writer's Navigator:
- Navigator categories are grayed out if they don't have any items (same for Calc Navigator).
- All objects in Navigator (headers, tables, frames, images, etc.) have their own context menu items like Go to, Edit, Delete, Rename.
- Headings in Navigator have context menu items from the Promote / Downgrade chapter.
- Table context menu in Navigator now has Insert Title Item.
- Outline tracking has been added for headings in the browser. It can be in three states: Default, Focus, Off. You have to click the mouse in several places in a large text document with many headings. We will see that the headings in Navigator will be automatically selected according to the position of the text cursor.
- The navigation toolbox has been replaced with the item navigation control.
- Added tooltip character and word count from Navigator section.
- New help pages for properties and resume LibreOffice Basic declarations as well as the Err VBA object. Basic syntax diagrams begin to be included in the help pages.
- Improvements in import / export of DOCX, PPTX and PPT filters.
- Animation rendering improvements.
- Document encryption.
- Improvements in the user's interface:
- All bars are blocked by default on fresh user profiles.
- The new Sukapura icon theme has been added, which will be used by default on macOS.
- Unnecessary scrolling for recent documents and templates in the Start Center has been fixed.
- Improved language support, including new translations.
- Support for compiling against the deprecated CPython 2.7 has been removed, and scripts now always run on the CPython 3 kernel.
- Support for JFW_PLUGIN_DO_NOT_CHECK_ACCESSIBILITY y JFW_PLUGIN_FORCE_ACCESSIBILITY.
- Removed the Macromedia Flash export filter.
Available from August
As we can read in your roadmap, LibreOffice 7.0 will be released the week of August 3-9. Until then, the most impatient will be able to try the new version from the pre-release server that we have provided at the beginning of this article.
It would lack a good face lift ...