LibreOffice 7.4 Community is the new version of the open source productivity and collaboration suite, and it comes with improvements in various parts, bug fixes, the introduction of small productivity-focused features in all its applications, new visual modes for Windows 10 and 11, and of course better interoperability with Microsoft Office .

LibreOffice is the best local installation alternative to Microsoft Office. Created to keep the OpenOffice project alive once it was taken over by Oracle after Sun Microsystems was purchased, It is open source development and completely free. It is available in 120 languages, has versions for Linux, Windows and macOS, and is compatible with a wide range of hardware architectures.

Technical compatible with Microsoft Office file format, the process has been improving since the release of major version 7.0. It has built-in tools for creating complex documents, books and websites, and hundreds of available templates and extensions to extend its functionality. In addition to Writer, Calc and Impress applications for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, LibreOffice includes other office applications such as Draw (diagrams), Base (database) and Math (advanced formulas).

LibreOffice 7.4, what’s new

Those responsible for the set say that its development focused on interoperability with proprietary Microsoft file formatsY “many of the new features are aimed at users moving from MS Office”they explain in the release notice.

Elaborating on the above, it should be noted that LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the market segment of office packages with native support for the OpenDocument format (ODF), which surpasses proprietary formats in terms of security and robustness, with excellent support for MS Office files, with “filters for a large number of legacy document formats and returns ownership and control to users”.

LibreOffice 7.4’s new community features were developed by 147 contributors. 72% of the code submissions came from 52 developers employed by the three companies that are part of the TDF Advisory Council – Colabora, Red Hat and allotropia – or from other organizations (including The Document Foundation), and 28% from 95 individual volunteers. All were joined by 528 volunteers who provided localizations in 158 languages.

A summary of what’s new is:

General:

• Support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files.
• Help pages for the ScriptForge script library.
• Search box for Extension Manager.
• Performance and compatibility improvements

Writer word processor:

• Better tracking of changes in the footnotes area.
• Modified lists show the original numbers in the change tracker.
• New typographic settings for hyphenation

Table Calc

• Support for 16,384 columns in tables.
• More features in the AutoSum dropdown widget.
• New menu item for finding sheet names

Presentation with impression:

• New support for document themes

LibreOffice 7.4 is free and free and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.