LibreOffice 7.5 is now available to download.
This update arrives on schedule, six months after the LibreOffice 7.4 release, which was notable release for doubling-down on the suite’s compatibility with Microsoft Office files. In LibreOffice 7.5 devs further that work, deliver a sizeable set of fixes, and furnish the app with powerful new features.
LibreOffice 7.5 is the result of 144 contributors chipping in to do their bit.
For a little more detail on what’s new in LibreOffice 7.5, scroll on!
LibreOffice 7.5: New Features
The most striking first change you’re bound to notice: LibreOffice has new app icons. These are bold, colourful replacements that, to my eyes at least, are a much better fit for modern trends. Icons don’t affect usability of course, but they do help make a better first impression. LibreOffice looks fresher.
GNOME fans may also notice a more rounded Sifr icon set (not enabled by default, AIUI), which got updated to more closely match the style of Adwaita icons.
Devs have reworked dark mode and high contrast theme support throughout the app; build-in the ability to touchpad rotate and zoom gestures; and add an “improved” version of the Single Toolbar UI for those prefer to use suite with it (it’s not enabled by default, and in Writer tools are context-aware in this mode).
On Linux, LibreOffice’s scrollbars now support “smooth scrolling”. You can long-press on a scrollbar (or press shift and click) for ‘more precise’ scrolling.
PDF export picks up a wide range of fixes, plus options to embed colour emoji and fonts using colour layers or colour bitmaps; embedding variable fonts with font variations applied to glyph shapes; and you can choose to export comments in the page margin.
Elsewhere, Writer makes bookmarks more visible; supports marking page objects as decorative; adds a new accessibility checker; buffs its spell checker; and offers machine translation of text using DeepL translate APIs (this is disabled by default and requires an API key).
Calc supports data tables in charts; makes conditional formatting case insensitive; and adds “spell out” number formats.
Impress and Draw pick up new default table styles (plus support for creating custom styles); lets you drag and drop objects in the navigator, and makes it possible run the ‘presenter console’ as a normal window rather than fullscreen – nice.
For more details on these and other changes see the official LibreOffice 7.5 release notes.
Download LibreOffice 7.5
LibreOffice 7.5 is free, open source software available to download for Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can grab the latest release from the LibreOffice website.
LibreOffice is pre-installed and available from the Ubuntu repos but unless you run daily builds you won’t have this version — but you can get it now from the LibreOffice website, or from Flathub or the LibreOffice PPA in the coming days.