LibreOffice is a popular free and open-source office suite with free alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. LibreOffice 7.4, just released, includes some great new features.
LibreOffice 7.4 is a major update with 147 developers and is supported on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The Document Foundation, the organization that manages the development of LibreOffice, also took note of the expanded language support. “LibreOffice 7.4 Community is available in 120 different language versions, more than any other free or proprietary software,” the group said.
As with almost all LibreOffice updates, version 7.4 improves interoperability with Microsoft Office documents. LibreOffice Writer has improved border support and break removal for Word documents, and LibreOffice Impress has fixes for embedded media and shapes in PowerPoint files. There are several other ways to open (and even edit) Microsoft Office files without paying Microsoft, but the new update ensures that LibreOffice is one of the best tools for the job.
There are other improvements as well. The entire package now supports WebP images and new options are available for the ScriptForge scripting library (equivalent to Office macros in LibreOffice). Writer has improved tracking changes and new hyphenation options, and Impress now supports document themes. Calc, a spreadsheet application, can now use worksheets with 16,384 columns.
The update also includes initial support for dark mode in Windows 10 and 11. This setting can be found under Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Advanced > Enable Experimental Features (may be unstable). This changes the application’s interface to a dark theme, but leaves the document area intact. If you want your document to look dark too, you need to go to Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Application Colors > LibreOffice Dark. Hopefully all of this will be automatic (or at least easier) in a future release.
LibreOffice 7.4 is available for Linux, Windows 7 SP1 and later, and macOS 10.12 and later. You can download it from the official website . If you like it, please donate to the Document Foundation so we can continue to release updates to LibreOffice.
