Download LibreOffice 6.1.0

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 6.1.0. This open source office package originated as a fork of OpenOffice and comes with the word processor Writer, spreadsheet program Calc, presentation program Impress, drawing program Draw, database program Base and Formula, an application for making scientific notations. The announcement of this release on the mailing list looks like this:

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.1, a major release which shows the power of a large and diverse community of contributors

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.1, the second major release of the LibreOffice 6 family presented in January 2018, with a significant number of new and improved features:

• Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows based on Microsoft’s icon design guidelines, which makes the office suite visually appealing for users coming from the Microsoft environment;
• A reworked image handling feature, which is significantly faster and smoother thanks to a new graphic manager and an improved image lifecycle, with some advantages also when loading documents in Microsoft proprietary formats;
• The reorganization of Draw menus with the addition of a new Page menu, for better UX consistency across the different modules;
• A major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated, though still available, and the new Firebird database engine is now the default option (users are encouraged to migrate files using the migration assistant from HSQLDB to Firebird, or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server);
• Significant improvements in all modules of LibreOffice Online, with changes to the user interface to make it more appealing and consistent with the desktop version;
• An improved EPUB export filter, in terms of link, table, image, font embedding and footnote support, with more options for customizing metadata;
• Online Help pages have been enriched with text and example files to guide the users through features, and are now easier to localize.

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.

In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system text and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy at a local level.

A video summarizing the top new features of LibreOffice 6.1 is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvoCpnwGNFU†