14 DAY TRIAL // The Document Foundation announced today the official release and general availability for download of the LibreOffice 6.1 open-source office suite, the second major update of the LibreOffice 6 series introduced in early 2018, for all supported platforms.
LibreOffice 6.1 has been in development for the past six months and it's now ready to conquer your Linux, Mac, or Windows office workstations with new features like revamped image handling functionality that's significantly faster and smoother, especially when opening documents created in Microsoft Office.
LibreOffice 6.1 also adds a new Page menu and re-organizes the menus of the Draw component for better consistency across the different modules, improves the EPUB export filter with additional options for customizing metadata and better support for links, images, tables, footnotes, and embedded fonts.
The Base component also received a major improvement, namely that the Firebird database engine is now enabled by default, replacing the old HSQLDB database engine. Users are recommended to migrate their files from HSQLDB to Firebird using the migration assistant or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server.
"LibreOffice 6.1's new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 72% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as SIL and Pardus, and 28% are from individual volunteers," said The Document Foundation.
For Linux users, LibreOffice 6.1 brings better integration with the KDE Plasma desktop environment, enables the use of Elementary icons by default on GNOME-based desktop environments, uses native GTK+ 3 interfaces on dialog windows. The import filter for Microsoft Excel 2003 XML files was improved as well in this major release of the open-source office suite.
Introducing Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows users
With the LibreOffice 6.1 releases, The Document Foundation introduces Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows users that follows the design guidelines of Microsoft's default icon theme for the Windows operating system. With this, they hope Windows users will feel at home when migrating to a different OS like Linux or Mac.
LibreOffice Online, the server-side service for deploying LibreOffice in private and public cloud environments, also received significant improvements in LibreOffice 6.1, for all of its modules. Highlights include a revamped user interface that's more appealing and consistent with the desktop version of LibreOffice.
Last but not least, LibreOffice 6.1 enriches the Online Help pages with text and example files to guide users through the office suite's features and help them easily localize LibreOffice. LibreOffice 6.1 is now available to download for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems for new and existing installations.
The Document Foundation considers LibreOffice 6.1 a bleeding-edge release that should be used only by power users, technology enthusiasts, and early adopters. For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation still recommends the LibreOffice 6.0 series, which will be supported with maintenance updates until November 26, 2018. LibreOffice 6.1 will be supported until May 29, 2019.
