LibreOffice 7: Now more Microsoft-compatible — and still free

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Given a choice between Office 2019 and the just-released LibreOffice 7.0, your pick should be open-source’s top office suite LibreOffice. After all, as Jared Spataro, then Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Office and Windows group, said, Office 2019’s applications are “frozen in time. They don’t ever get updated with new features.” Of course, what Spataro wants is for you to move to the cloud-based Microsoft 365 where the “apps keep getting better over time.”

LibreOffice 7: Now more Microsoft-compatible — and still free

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Carl D, Microfix, Norio

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..and doesn’t suffer from outages, dodgy patches or login issues with the added benefit that the Libre office suite is windows 7 compatible.
‘Seven on Seven’ sounds good but, I’ll wait for the first point release before going there

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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Microfix wrote:

I’ll wait for the first point release before going there

Well yes, and https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/ says 7.0 is for early adopters and such.

7.0.1 is expected to be published around week 36. (LibreOffice is on a fairly well-defined release plan.)

Though going through the release notes and some of the bug trackers, might wait until 7.0.2 if you’re a heavy spreadsheet user… there was fairly major work done on the internals. (FINALLY getting the column limit raised but…)

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“After all, as Jared Spataro, then Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Office and Windows group, said, Office 2019’s applications are “frozen in time. They don’t ever get updated with new features.”

He says that like it’s a bad thing.

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OscarCP, RamRod, byteme

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Good news.

But, like quite a few others I’m a bit wary of the “early adopter” releases. Last time I tried installing one of those (which, admittedly was a couple of years ago) the installer ‘crashed’ halfway through the install – over and over.

I’ll stick with the ‘older’ versions for now. In fact, I’ve just updated to 6.4.5 about an hour ago.

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I use the portable version of LibreOffice, so I’ll just wait (never used Microsoft Office since working with computers 50+ years ago).

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LibreOffice 7.0 Released, This is What’s New

The headline change in LibreOffice 7.0 is support for ODF 1.3. This is the ‘Open Document Format’ that LibreOffice natively uses to save documents. The latest version of the spec includes support for digital signatures, OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, and better handling of elements within pages.

Another ‘big ticket’ addition comes courtesy of AMD. This sponsorship helped implement a new Skia graphics engine used for drawing text, shapes, and images in 2D. This is enabled by default on Windows with Vulkan GPU-based acceleration. This major change helps puts the suite on a good footing for future developments…..

Portable version :

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/portable-versions/

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DriftyDonN, Fred

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Using the v.7 installed version here on Windows and Linux20; very satisfied.
saving is very well possible and standard in “microsoft-standard” docx xlsx pptx
Saves me a lot of Microsoft patches.

* _ ... _ *

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I’ve been using OpenOffice for years but I understand it isn’t supported any longer so I spose its time to try libre.

 

Thnx!

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DriftyDonN wrote:
I’ve been using OpenOffice for years but I understand it isn’t supported any longer

To be fair to the OpenOffice devs and community, OpenOffice is (still) an active project under active development at the Apache Software Foundation. For links to support resources, maybe start here.

But, yeah, much of the open source office suite attention/mindshare – and most of the distros – have moved to LibreOffice.

Hope this helps.

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[mn--]

Note that Apache OpenOffice isn’t “not supported”, just less people working on it so everything happens much slower.

Poking around their public bugtracking logs, I find things like “Since this is an AOO 4.2.0 bug, and 4.1.x presumably works, a more productive approach might be a regression test between them” dated… well, earlier this month…

… with note that 4.1.7 is the last released version. So clearly they are working on future releases.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by mn--. Reason: typo

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LibreOffice 7.1.4 available

Berlin, June 10, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.4 includes around 80 bug fixes, with 20% focused on Microsoft Office file compatibility (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX, and legacy DOCs).

more info on LibreOffice 7.1.4 over at the Document Foundation site.

Note: this download is bleeding edge, (read beta) what isn’t these days..

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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LibreOffice 7.1.5 Released:

More info on the documentfoundation blogsite with changelogs and feature updates.

Berlin, July 22, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.5 Community, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.5 includes around 55 bug fixes, with 20% focused on Microsoft Office file compatibility (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX, and legacy DOCs).

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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