A new version of the popular open-source office suite LibreOffice has been released.
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!
LibreOffice 24.8: New features
Creating documents to share with others? LibreOffice 24.8 features a new privacy option you might want to check out.
If Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Security > Options > Remove personal information on saving is turned on, no personal information is saved to your document.
Personal details like author, timestamp, editing duration, printer name, document template title, comment metadata and timestamps – extraneous stuff.
LibreOffice 24.8 also adds password-based encryption mode for ODF files.
The suite’s devs say this is more performant, tamper-resistant, higher resistance to brute forcing, and hides metadata to reduce information leaks.
LibreOffice 24.8 Writer scores:
- Improved support for multi-page floating tables
- New Find deck in sidebar to quickly find text plus…
- New Alt + 9 shortcut to open Find deck
- Table alignment and left/right spacing can be adjusted from sidebar
- Comments panel width is now adjustable
- New (optional) formatting aid to enclose selected text with quotes, brackets, etc
- Custom document bullet points now appear in bullet dropdown for reuse
- Improved continuous endnotes for DOCX, DOC & RTF documents
- Assorted buffs to Navigator, including broken image link indicator
- New hyphenation options, including ‘no-break’ context menu action
LibreOffice 24.8 Impress gains:
- New Notes pane option to see notes underneath slides in Normal view
- Live-mode slideshow editing enabled by default
- Updated default templates from Indonesian community
- Dialog added to jump to specific slide or page in Impress and Draw
- Pressing enter in an empty list item now ends the list
- Faster opening of PPTX files with lots of custom shapes
LibreOffice 24.8 Calc adds:
- Sheet > Insert Cells lets you add more than one row or column at a time
- Hugely improved copy and paste between Calc and Google Sheets
- Improve threaded calculation performance
- FILTER, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE functions
- LET, XLOOKUP, and XMATCH functions
- AutoFill can be called via UNO commands for mouse-free action
- AutoFilter adds a lock checkbox
- Export sheet range option added
- Data validity can now be made case-sensitive
While LibreOffice 24.8 Draw pencils in a few changes:
- Support for tiling patterns in imported PDF files
- Hovering over a layer tab highlights the objects it contains
The official release notes for this release offer more information on these and other changes, including links to code commits, bug reports, and even some blog posts taking a deep dive on the technical challenges involved in adding them.
Other changes
A couple of welcome improvements to charts feature in LibreOffice 24.8 (and available to insert/edit in all of the suite’s components that support charts, including Writer).
First up, text inside chart titles, text boxes and shapes can now be formatted using the Character dialog (accessible in a variety of different ways, e.g., the toolbar). Being able to style text within charts has been a long-requested featured, so it’s great to see it added.
There’s also new “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” chart types. These let you break down a specific slice of a pie as either a pie or bar sub-chart. This is handy when you wish to zone in on a specific subset of data within a border data set.
Among the (many) improvements to interoperability with other file formats is an appreciable fix to ensure Writer docs retain the default page style’s background when saving to DOCX, and the suite can now import and export OOXML pivot table format definitions.
While LibreOffice 24.8 is the newest stable series it’s not the only version of LibreOffice that is actively supported. If you don’t need the latest features, and prefer a more tested base, stick with the LibreOffice 24.2 series (included in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS).
But if your needs are for the latest and greatest, then download LibreOffice 24.8 for Windows, macOS, and Linux from from the LibreOffice website — DEBs provided for Ubuntu (but read the README in the extracted archive for how to install easily).
Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and other *buntu-based distro user? You can install this update using the LibreOffice PPA if you like. LibreOffice is also officially available on the Canonical Snap Store and Flathub, if you’d prefer those.
Ubuntu won’t back-port this new series to its exist supported releases, but it will be available in Ubuntu 24.10 when released in October.