The Document Foundation, the organization behind the popular open source office suite LibreOffice, has announced the release of LibreOffice 25.8. It brings several new functions for those working in spreadsheets, and it’s the first major release not to support Windows 7 and a few other outdated operating systems.
Calc, LibreOffice’s equivalent to the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application, has no fewer than 14 new functions with version 25.8. Since it’s the part of LibreOffice I use the most, these functions are probably the part of the update I find most interesting. Here’s the full list:
- CHOOSECOLS – Return columns from an array
- CHOOSEROWS – Return rows from an array
- DROP – Drop a row or column from an array start or end
- EXPAND – Expand an array by a certain number of rows and columns
- HSTACK – Horizontally stack an array
- TAKE – Return rows or columns from an array start or end
- TEXTAFTER – Return text after a specified delimiting characters
- TEXTBEFORE – Return text before a specified delimiting characters
- TEXTSPLIT – Split text with a delimiter into rows or columns
- TOCOL – Return an array as one column
- TOROW – Return an array as one row
- VSTACK – Vertically stack an array
- WRAPCOLS – Wrap a specified column array into a 2D array
- WRAPROWS – Wrap a specified row array into a 2D array
These mirror most of the functions that debuted with Excel 2024, making LibreOffice even more interoperable with modern Microsoft 365. Other LibreOffice applications received interoperability improvements too, like overhauled word hyphenation and spacing and new font management in Impress. You can also now export to PDF 2.0, a standard that was introduced in 2023.
There are a few things that disappeared with this release, though they weren’t a surprise. The previous major release, LibreOffice 25.2, was the last one to be installable on Windows 7 and 8/8.1, both of which have been deprecated as operating systems for years. Support has also gone away for macOS 10.5 Catalina, whose maintenance by Apple ended almost three years ago. While Windows 10 reaches end of life this October, there’s no word on when LibreOffice will stop supporting it. Still, I wouldn’t recommend waiting around on Windows 10 with no security updates just to find out.
For everyone who is able to install LibreOffice, they’ll be greeted by a revamped welcome dialog in 25.8. It’ll now give you a chance to quickly customize LibreOffice’s look and layout before you dive into your documents and spreadsheets. It’s a small a change, but maybe one that’ll give people new to open source office work more of a sense of ownership.
The Document Foundation is also claiming significant performance boosts with LibreOffice 25.8. We haven’t had a chance to confirm this claim, but according to their LibreOffice’s benchmarks, “Writer and Calc open files up to 30% faster.” The team has also made improvements to memory management they claim will increase results in “smoother operation on virtual desktops and thin clients.”
If you want to learn more, check out the official release notes for LibreOffice 25.8. You can get started working in the free and open source office suite by visiting the LibreOffice download page.
Source: LibreOffice
