What’s New In LibreOffice 7.5 | All You Need To Know

The upcoming release of LibreOffice 7.5 version is currently under active development and will be available for download soon. However, in the meantime, if you’re curious about the new features that are being worked on by the developers of LibreOffice, read on to this post, as I’ve tried to summarize the major possible updates and features of the new version.

This latest version of LibreOffice 7.5 is loaded with new feature updates and improvements that can be found across all of its core modules, such as writer, calc, impress, draw, and base. Although it’s currently in the beta testing phase, early adopters have already started downloading and installing this new version on their computers.

This version is expected to be released between 30th January to 5th February in 2023, and you can download this beta version from this page.

General Updates On LibreOffice 7.5

The new version of LibreOffice 7.5 features a brand new set of icons for the application launchers and MIME types. These icons are now more colorful, vibrant, and modern in appearance.

1. This version has finally added support for touchpad gestures such as rotate and zoom. It has also fixed some bugs that caused spell checking and language-sensitive text layout to be disabled in the table of contents and hyperlink texts.

2. A new option has been added under Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Accessibility, which allows the user to disable the automatic detection of high-contrast mode.

3. This version has improved compatibility with Microsoft Office files, and it includes minor UI changes such as better support for dark themes.

New Updates On LibreOffice Writer

This version of LibreOffice 7.5 includes a number of updates and new features for the Writer module:

Two New Control Types, Support For PDF Exports:

1. Two new content control types have been added: one for inserting plain text as a content control and one for adding combo boxes.

2. Support for exporting content controls to PDF files for better compatibility with Microsoft Office suites has been added.

3. These features were initially developed for Collabora (the web-based LibreOffice version), but they are now fully supported and available on the desktop version as well.

Custom Color For Spell Checking:

4. If you’ve ever wanted to set a custom color to grammatical errors shown in a document, in this version of LibreOffice 7.5 you can change it under the Application Colors dialog in Tools > Options… > LibreOffice > Application Colors

5. Spellcheck now works on the text of hyperlinks.

6. Writer now keeps comments of corrected words when using the spellcheck with auto correct option, so you can see what changes have been made.

Other Accessibility Changes:

7. The page number shown in the status bar now accurately shows when the view spans several pages. Other than that, there are a few more accessibility checker rules have been added, such a re-scan button at the status bar to open the Accessibility Check dialog window.

Updates On Table And Bookmarks In Writer:

8. Writer now have a better column deletion feature when it intersects with merged cells. The new update allows better selection of nested table rows/columns with mouse.

9. A new setting dialog for bookmark insertion has been added. You can access the bookmark dialog window under the Navigator > Bookmarks > Right click > Edit…

New Updates On LibreOffice CalC

1. The option found under the View > Freeze Cells > Freeze First Column/Row now always works even when first row or column are not visible.

2. In LibreOffice 7.5, the Calc module has been improved to better handle numeric values.

If you enter numbers with a single prefix quote (‘), Calc will correctly determine whether to strip the prefix based on whether it is followed by a number. This should make it easier to use Calc without having to remember or guess how it will handle input values.

3. This version of LibreOffice 7.5, Calc now have the support for DBF encoding 0x69 and Mazovia (CP620) encoding.

4. The conditional formattings begins-with/ends-with/contains input are now case-insensitive.

5. The function wizard dialog has been improved to allow searching for functions by their name and description. Previously, the search feature only returned results based on matching function names.

Default “Spell Out” Number and Currency Formats:

6. This update is one of the my favorite features so far in this version. One notable update in LibreOffice 7.5 is the ability to format numbers and currencies in the spell-out formats, that so in 71 locales of 38 languages.

New Updates On LibreOffice Impress

The Impress module of LibreOffice Suite also has gained several new features in this update:

1. Support for cropped videos in slide edit mode and during slideshow for documents imported from PowerPoint.

2. The ability to customize the table style in slides with various themes and save the modified style as a template for future use. These updates should make it easier to work with videos and tables in Impress, and to customize and reuse table styles in your presentations.

Summary

LibreOffice 7.5 is a solid release with many new features and bug fixes. Although the majority of the development done from the Collabora (the online version of LibreOffice), all of updates successfully pushed to the desktop version as well.

This release is expected to be made public in early 2023. If you want more detailed information about the updates, you can visit the official release notes page