Now available for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows

Jan 31, 2018 11:15 GMT  ·  By

The Document Foundation project announced today the release and general availability of the LibreOffice 6.0 open-source office suite for all supported platforms, including Linux, Android, Mac, and Windows.

Numerous months in the making, LibreOffice 6.0 comes two and a half years after the LibreOffice 5.x series, and it's the biggest release of the open-source and cross-platform office suite so far. It introduces a revamped design with new table styles, improved Notebookbars, new gradients, new Elementary icons, menu and toolbar improvements, and updated motif/splash screen.

LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project.

Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice.

These include a new "Save As" feature, a new "Find and Replace" dialog, the ability for Calc to managed half a million rows, and spell checking support for Writer, Calc, and Impress. In addition, LibreOffice 6.0 revamps the Special Characters dialog with the addition of lists for Recent and Favorite characters and a Search field. The Customize dialog was redesigned as well.

"The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.0, a major release and a dramatically improved free office suite, which celebrates the 7th anniversary of the availability of the very first version of LibreOffice. Today LibreOffice is more powerful, simple and secure, and offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents," reads today's press announcement.

New features and functionality for Writer, Calc, Impress & Draw

Writer in LibreOffice 6.0 features a new Form menu to make it easier to design forms and create standards-compliant PDF forms, improved input field behavior, the ability to rotate images to any angle, improved Mail Merge function with support for writing a document or an XLSX file as data source, new default column spacing of 0.5cm, and a new set of default numbering list styles.

Calc in LibreOffice 6.0 received ODF 1.2-compliant functions like FINDB, REPLACEB, and SEARCHB to improve support for the ISO standard format, the ability to export a selection of cells or a selected group of shapes (images) in JPG or PNG formats, enhanced "Links" dialog, pasting of unformatted text, and a new command to select unprotected cells on protected or unprotected sheets.

Impress & Draw in LibreOffice 6.0 get new default slide size of 16:9 ratio to support most modern form factors of screens and projectors, along with 10 new Impress templates and updated older ones, removal of the confirmation dialog when setting an image as slide or page background, more possibilities for placement and enlargement in the Duplicate dialog, and a better UI for handling layer attributes in Draw.

Last but not least, LibreOffice 6.0 lets users use OpenPGP keys to sign ODF documents on all supported platforms, along with experimental support for OpenPGP-based encryption. It also enhances the Find toolbar with a drop-down list of search types to speed up navigation, and improves document classification to allow multiple policies. New Noto fonts and LibreOffice Helper were added as well.

LibreOffice 6.0 binary and source packages can be downloaded for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now through our web portal of from the official website. It should be noted that this release drops support for Windows XP and Vista as only Windows 7 SP1 and later are supported. Also, LibreOffice 6.0 requires Apple's macOS 10.9 or later operating systems for Macs.

The new LibreOffice Viewer for Android release is coming this spring with support for creating new documents, a tab-based toolbar with formatting options, support for adding images from the device's camera, cloud or local storage, a presentation mode for Impress, and an improved Calc user interface with column headers. Check out the video and screenshot gallery below for more details.

LibreOffice 6.0 Writer
LibreOffice 6.0 Writer
LibreOffice 6.0 Calc
LibreOffice 6.0 Calc
LibreOffice 6.0 Impress
LibreOffice 6.0 Impress

LibreOffice 6.0 (8 Images)

LibreOffice 6.0 Writer
LibreOffice 6.0 WriterLibreOffice 6.0 Calc
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