LibreOffice 24.8 Open-Source Office Suite Officially Released, Here’s What’s New
Highlights of LibreOffice 24.8 include a new “Remove personal information on saving” privacy feature under Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Security > Options to prevent LibreOffice from exporting personal information like author names and timestamps, editing duration, printer name and config, document template, author and date for comments and tracked changes.
LibreOffice 24.8 also introduces a new mode of password-based ODF encryption that promises enhanced performance due to deriving a key only once per package, tamper-resistance with authenticated encryption, better hiding of metadata to reduce information leaks, and higher resistance to brute forcing using memory-hard Argon2id key derivation function.
Original Post:
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LibreOffice 24.8, for the privacy-conscious office suite user - The Document Foundation Blog
LibreOffice 24.8, the new major release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), macOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux is available from our download page. This is the second major release to use the new calendar-based numbering scheme (YY.M), and the first to provide an official package for Windows PCs based on ARM processors.
LibreOffice is the only office suite, or if you prefer, the only software for creating documents that may contain personal or confidential information, that respects the privacy of the user – thus ensuring that the user is able to decide if and with whom to share the content they have created. As such, LibreOffice is the best option for the privacy-conscious office suite user, and provides a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market. It also offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to contemporary, and makes the most of different screen sizes by optimising the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.
The biggest advantage over competing products is the LibreOffice Technology engine, the single software platform on which desktop, mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice – including those provided by ecosystem companies – are based. This allows LibreOffice to offer a better user experience and to produce identical and perfectly interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP), and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). The latter hides a large amount of artificial complexity, which may create problems for users who are confident that they are using a true open standard.
Linuxiac:
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LibreOffice 24.8 Released, Here's What's New
Central to LibreOffice 24.8 is the LibreOffice Technology engine, which supports the suite’s desktop, mobile, and cloud versions. This unified platform enables the production of consistent and interoperable documents according to ISO standards like ODT and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML formats.
Now, let’s look at the improvements made to the individual apps in the new version of this great office suite.
OMG Ubuntu:
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LibreOffice 24.8 Released, This is What's New - OMG! Ubuntu
LibreOffice 24.8 builds on the improvements shipped in the LibreOffice 24.2 release earlier this year. That release updated the versioning scheme to a data-based format, which this one follows. The ’24’ denotes ‘2024’, and ‘8’ the month, August.
Under the hood, LibreOffice 24.8 rolls up 6 months of development: 5591 commits from 171 developer, 115 of whom are volunteers. These range from bug fixes and security tweaks to UI changes, new features, and ever-important enhancements to interoperability.
Plus, LibreOffice 24.8 is the first version of the suite to be released for Windows on ARM (we Linux users have had native ARM builds for a long time, so we’re not missing out).
No doubt you’re wanting to hear and see more, so read on to swot up on what’s new in LibreOffice 24.8!
More here:
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It’s Time to Upgrade to LibreOffice’s Latest and Greatest ‘Cause 24.8 Is Here
The Document Foundation dropped the latest and greatest installment of LibreOffice this morning, version 24.8, which is only the second release under the new versioning format that’s based on the release date. It arrives with the usual bug and security fixes, as well as plenty of new features.
If you don’t know, LibreOffice is a free and open source office productivity suite that under one name or another has been around longer than Microsoft Office and almost as long as MS Word.
Most people know that under it’s current name, the project is the fork of the old, no longer being maintained OpenOffice, that was already being mismanaged by Sun Microsystems when Oracle acquired it when it acquired Sun in a going-out-of-business sale. Oracle’s mismanagement was even worse, so a lot of the devs forked the code and created LibreOffice, which thrives to this day.
Also here in LWN:
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LibreOffice 24.8 released
Version 24.8 of the LibreOffice office suite has been released. Changes include the ability to filter identifying information from exported files, easier creation of cross reference, better control over hyphenation, a number of new spreadsheet functions, accessibility improvements, and more.
Howtogeek:
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LibreOffice Just Got a Big Update
LibreOffice just got a major update that adds new privacy, security, productivity, and accessibility features across all its apps. It is a free and open-source productivity suite that includes a word, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing apps, supporting both open source and proprietary (mostly from Microsoft Office) file formats.
The register:
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LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft
We last looked at LibreOffice this time last year, and this release isn't vastly different – but then, neither are new versions of Microsoft Office these days. The suite began as a word processor for the Amstrad CPC in 1985, so it's had nearly four decades of development.
The new features page calls out three significant new features. This vulture's personal favorite is the new Notes view in Impress, the presentations component (read: PowerPoint replacement). Now, if you're in the slide sorter, you can toggle an optional pane underneath that shows your text notes for that slide. (We find it helpful to think of the notes as stuff written on the back of the slide, and this way, you can see both sides at once without flipping the slide over.)
Guides:
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Community announces the Getting Started Guide 24.8
The book is released on time for the new LibreOffice 24.8 release. The community members of the LibreOffice documentation team are happy to announce the immediate availability of the Getting Started Guide 24.8, at the same time of the release of LibreOffice Community 24.8, our latest major update.
Linux Magazine:
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LibreOffice 24.8 Offers New Features » Linux Magazine
LibreOffice 24.8 is officially available for installation and includes a new privacy feature that will appeal to many Linux users.
This new feature is centered around privacy and makes it easy for users to remove personal information from documents. Said information includes author names, timestamps, editing duration, printer name and configuration, document template details, author and date of comments, and tracked changes. Given how security and privacy have become a critical aspect of computing in the modern era, this is an especially important feature. LibreOffice is now the only office suite on the market that respects the privacy of the user, while also retaining a feature set that is comparable to the competition. To use this new feature, you only have to enable Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Security > Options > Remove personal information on saving. Once you've done that, no personal information will be exported.
Other new features/improvements include better handling of character formatting, cross-references for drag-and-drop items, better hyphenation, new functions for Calc (FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH), the ability to scroll between slides in Impress, new chart types (such as Pie-of-Pie and Bar-of-Bar), accessibility improvements, and a new mode for password-based ODF encryption.
You can read more about the latest release from the official LibreOffice notes and then download the installer from the LibreOffice download page.