The first release candidate of the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite is now available for testing. This half-year update as the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office has been working on performance improvements for various file types, dropping support for old versions of Windows, and various other enhancements.
LibreOffice 25.8 remains tracking on schedule for its release in late August. Out this morning is LibreOffice 25.8 RC1 to encourage further testing. Two more release candidates are planned in the coming weeks.
LibreOffice 25.8 has already been under a hard feature freeze since early June, so there isn’t much new work in RC1 in particular besides bug fixes. Some of the LibreOffice 25.8 highlights overall include:
– Various performance improvements for loading Writer documents and DOCX 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.
The in-progress 25.8 release notes provide more insight into the plethora of changes coming with LibreOffice 25.8.
Those wanting to test today’s RC1 release can find out more details via the LibreOffice blog.
