14 DAY TRIAL // The Document Foundation today announced the release and immediate availability of the LibreOffice 5.4 office suite, the last to be released for the LibreOffice 5 series.
Supported until June 11, 2018, with no less than six incremental updates, the LibreOffice 5.4 office suite is here to add an extra layer of improvements to the Writer, Calc, and Impress components. It also introduces a great number of incremental improvements to the Microsoft Office file compatibility and focuses on file simplicity, which is a very important concept for LibreOffice.
"Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, LibreOffice developers have focused on file simplicity as the ultimate document interoperability sophistication," said The Document Foundation. "This makes ODF and OOXML files written by the free office suite more robust and easier to exchange with other users than the same documents generated by other office suites."
The new file simplicity concept implemented in LibreOffice 5.4 translates to the XML description of a new a document outputted by LibreOffice being with 50% smaller for ODF/ODT files and around 90% smaller for OOXML/DOCX files, compared to the document formats generated by leading proprietary office suites like Microsoft Office.
Here's what's new for Writer, Calc, Impress, and LibreOffice Online
Highlights of LibreOffice 5.4 include a new standard color palette based on the RYB color model, better support for EMF vector images, better rendering of imported PDF documents, along with better support for embedded videos, support for OpenPGP keys for signing ODF documents on Linux, as well as the ability to ensure the authenticity of your signed ODF documents.
Writer now lets users import AutoText from Microsoft Word DOTM templates, preserves the file structure of exported or pasted bulleted and numbered lists as plain text, allow users to create custom watermarks for their documents, and introduces new context menu items to let users work easier with footnotes, endnotes, sections, and style.
Calc now includes support for pivot charts by using the data of pivot tables, lets users manage comments a lot easier than before via menu commands, allows you to easily change the priority of rules via up and down buttons when applying conditional formatting to cells, remembers the settings when exporting in the CSV format, and introduces extra protection for sheets.
Lastly, Impress now lets users specify fractional angles when duplicating objects, and automatically saves the settings for the next duplication operation. LibreOffice Online was improved as well to make its layout adapt to mobile devices and implement a read-only mode. LibreOffice 5.4 is available for download on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our website.
