The LibreOffice 7.4 release, which arrives six and a half months after LibreOffice 7.3, brings a host of new features for fans of the well-liked open source office suite, including support for WebP images, support for EMZ/WMZ files, a new Search field for the Extension Manager to make it easier to find extensions, help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library, an asynchronous dialogue for naming a new colour, redesigned font dialogue, and the ability to remember.
LibreOffice 7.4 for Writer, the document processor, adds new typographic options for hyphenation, a new remote grammar checker, improved change tracking in the footnote area, various border improvements around tables and paragraphs, new numbering in Show Changes mode, and the capacity to clear breaks from Word documents. The Show Changes mode in Word now features a new numbering scheme, support for viewing tracked footnote insertion and deletion in the footnote area, native support for rich text, checkbox, dropdown, picture, and date content controls, as well as support for edited lists to display original numbers in change tracking.
LibreOffice 7.4 adds support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets for Calc, the spreadsheet editor, a new menu item to search for sheet names, new functions in the AutoSum drop-down widget on the Formula bar, the capacity to store the height of the Formula bar inside the Document, an improved Move/Copy sheet dialogue, and automatic cell matrix expansion for Formula expressions that return an array or matrix.
Additionally, Calc now performs much faster when loading spreadsheets that need to be recalculated, loading spreadsheets with multiple columns of data, using functions like COUNTIF, SUMIFS, and VLOOKUP, recalculating documents with numerous formulas, opening CSV files, exporting Excel files, and using various functions like COUNTIF, SUMIFS, and VLOOKUP.
LibreOffice 7.4 introduces early support for document themes, shape fill support for document themes, and support for using slide backdrop as shape fill for PPTX interoperability for the Impress & Draw components.
As per usual, the main goal of development was to make LibreOffice more compatible with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats, such as DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX, in an effort to encourage customers to switch from MS Office to LibreOffice. Additionally, LibreOffice 7.4 enhances the importing and exporting of RTF files, improves the exporting of PDF documents, enhances the importing of TIFF files and adds support for the OfficeArtBlip TIFF format, enhances HTML exporting by making UTF-8 encoding the default setting, enhances the importing of EMF/WMF files with support for Miter Limit and individual line endings for the EMF+ format, enhances the importing of EMF/WMF files with support.
For DEB and RPM-based distributions like Fedora Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, etc., ready-to-install 64-bit binaries of LibreOffice 7.4 are currently accessible for download from the official website. Of course, there are also the source tarballs and binaries for the Windows and macOS operating systems. Technology enthusiasts, early adopters, and power users are the intended audience for the LibreOffice 7.4 series, which will receive six maintenance updates up until June 12th, 2023. The Document Foundation recommends the LibreOffice 7.3 series, which is supported through November 30, 2022, for users who don’t require the newest features.
