LibreOffice, the popular open source office suite, has just released version 25.8 with many important changes in performance, security and compatibility with Microsoft Office.
LibreOffice, the popular open source office suite, has just released version 25.8 with many important changes in performance, security and compatibility with Microsoft Office.
The most notable point in this update is the official discontinuation of support for 32-bit Windows . That means LibreOffice 25.8 will no longer run on Windows 7, Windows 8 or other 32-bit operating systems. This is also the last version to support macOS 10.15.
In terms of features, Writer – the word processing application – has been significantly improved in the way it handles line breaks and hyphenation, making documents more consistent with Microsoft's Word format. Meanwhile, Calc – the spreadsheet application – has been added with a series of new functions such as TEXTSPLIT, CHOOSEROWS or WRAPCOLS, and has also accelerated the opening of complex XLSX files by up to 30%. With Impress – the presentation software – LibreOffice has added the ability to embed fonts in PPTX files and optimized the algorithm to determine the actual font used, thereby improving the quality when exporting to Microsoft formats.
Another important upgrade is in PDF handling . LibreOffice 25.8 now supports the PDF 2.0 standard with modern AES-256 encryption, and improves compatibility with Adobe Reader when using digital signatures. This is an advantage over Microsoft Office, which is still stuck with the old PDF standard.
In addition, the new version also brings a redesigned welcome interface, adds a 'Viewer mode' to open files as read-only, supports more accurate display of DOCX documents in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and improves the Draw drawing tool with default page margin display and the ability to import encrypted PDF files.
With the above changes, LibreOffice 25.8 not only affirms its position as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, but also shows its pioneering role in some features that even Office does not have yet.