LibreOffice 7.0, News and Download of the Alternative to Microsoft Office

Although Microsoft Office is the most used office suite in the world, it has an important rival to which it is taking less and less advantage: LibreOffice. This suite, developed and maintained by The Document Foundation , is the evolution of OpenOffice, which started its business separately after its acquisition by Oracle (and its transfer to Apache). LibreOffice has a very frequent development divided into two parts: the first one, the minor versions, focused on correcting errors, and the second one, the major updates, which come packed with features for everyone. And this is how the new LibreOffice 7.0 has arrived.

Last May we were lucky enough to test the first Alpha version of LibreOffice 7.0, the promising new version of this office suite. This version has been in development for several months with a very clear objective: to improve compatibility with all types of Office documents (especially Word) so that no user can miss Microsoft’s programs.

LibreOffice 7.0, News and Download

But it is not the only thing that has come to us in this new version, and that is that LibreOffice is one of the best free office suites that we can find today, as well as the one with the best maintenance.

All new features in LibreOffice 7.0

Without a doubt, one of the most striking aspects of this new LibreOffice 7.0 is the improvement of compatibility with Word documents . From now on, Writer, the word processor of this program, will save by default in native format of Office 2013, 2016 and 2019 instead of using the compatibility mode of Office 2007. This will allow users to take advantage of performance improvements and error correction functions offered by Word in DOCX. Although, in return, those users who continue to use Office 2007 and 2010 will not be able to open these documents. This change also applies to XLSX (Excel) and PPTX (PowerPoint).

LibreOffice 7.0

Another important innovation that we will find in the new LibreOffice 7.0 is that, from now on, we will have support for the ODF 1.3 file format , the latest version of this open document format. And performance has also been dramatically improved thanks to Vulkan GPU acceleration .

Other news

Other important changes that we will also find in the program are:

  • General changes :
    • New theme and icon.
    • New gallery of shapes to use.
    • New glitter effects and smooth edges for objects.
  • Writer:
    • Navigator is now easier to use, and has more context menus.
    • Support for semi-transparent text.
    • Bookmarks can now be displayed inline with text
    • Improvements in the numbering of elements.
    • Improvements in the use of quotation marks and apostrophes.
  • Calc:
    • New functions to enter random numbers.
    • New keyboard shortcut for Autosum.
  • Impress and Draw:
    • Support for semi-transparent text (same as in Writer).
    • The subscripts again have the default value of 8%.
    • Possibility of creating PDF files of more than 500 cm.

Of course, it has also been used to correct various bugs and stability and performance problems, as well as security. As with all software, it is important to always stay up to date.

Download LibreOffice

The new version of this alternative suite to Office is now available for all users. And, of course, completely free of charge. Users interested in downloading this new version can do so directly from their main website .

Users who already have the program installed on their computer will receive a notice as soon as this new version is released through OTA . However, it may take a few days for this notice to still arrive. The manual installation of the new version will replace the one we have with the new 7.0, and will keep our preferences.

LibreOffice Writer 7.0

We remember that this office suite is available for Windows, Linux and macOS, being one of the best alternatives that we can find to the Microsoft suite, especially if we do not want to pay for the Office license.