The first alpha release of LibreOffice 25.8 is now available for testing of this cross-platform, free software office suite.
LibreOffice 25.8 is working its way toward a stable release in August with more refinements for this leading open-source office suite alternative to Microsoft Office. LibreOffice 25.8 is shaping up to be another nice half-year feature release.
Following today’s alpha release, LibreOffice 25.8 is set to go into its feature freeze and code branching in early June followed by a beta release. After release candidates in June and July, LibreOffice 25.8 should be out as stable by mid to late August.
Some of the changes to look forward to with LibreOffice 25.8 include:
– Various performance improvements for loading Writer documents and DOX files.
– LibreOffice Calc has performance improvements for opening of Microsoft Excel (XLSX) ifles and various other performance optimizations to this spreadsheet program.
– A variety of new functions were added to the Calc spreadsheet program like WRAPCOLS, TOCOL, TOROW, EXPAND, DROP, CHOOSECOLS, VSTACK, and others.
– LibreOffice Writer adds a command to insert a paragraph break before tables.
– The Ctrl + Shift + F2 command shortcut was added for converting fields into plain text.
– LibreOffice 25.8 brings a new application-wide viewer model for opening documents in read-only mode.
– Support for importing encrypted hybrid PDFs.
– Various spell check dictionary and thesaurus improvements.
– Removing support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1.
Downloads and more details on today’s LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha release via DocumentFoundation.org.
