LibreOffice 25.8: One last time for macOS 10.15

LibreOffice 25.8 has been released: The free office suite brings numerous improvements and new functions for Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw as well as other updates under the hood. The most important updates include the integration of further PDF 2.0 features, such as AES-256 encryption, support for PDF/A-4 and the export of documents as PDF 2.0.

Updates to the individual programs

In the word-processing program Writer, users can control the behavior of hyphenation at the end of pages more specifically. LibreOffice can either hyphenate words on the last line of a page or move the affected line completely to the following page instead. In addition, users can record, restore and track their changes individually – Until now, this could only be activated for individual documents, but not for users. Furthermore, rejecting a change no longer leads to the complete disappearance of the suggestion; they can now be found again in the document history.

Many new table functions have been integrated into Calc, such as COLUMN SELECTION, LINE SELECTION, EXTEND, DROP and many more. For the dialog 'Text import' there is now a checkbox 'Always show on import', which is set by default. Anyone who frequently imports CSV files into the spreadsheet with saved settings can therefore deactivate the dialog. The corresponding settings can be found under 'Edit filter settings' in the 'Open file' dialog.

The application-wide viewer mode is entirely new. It opens files in read-only mode and users do not have any editing tools at their disposal. As with every release, the developers have also improved the import and export filters to increase compatibility with Microsoft Office. The same applies to the speed of the programs; large documents should now load faster.

End of support

However, LibreOffice 25.8 also marks the end of support for older operating systems: the project has removed support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 and will also no longer continue to develop the 32-bit Windows builds. In addition, the release will be the last for macOS 10.15; the upcoming LibreOffice 26.2 will at least require macOS 11. All changes in the new version are listed in the detailed release notes. Here you will also find a preview of features that are still experimental, including a new 'Macro Manager' and a new mode for password-based ODF encryption.

(fo)