Writer and Calc components are getting new features

Feb 20, 2018 18:54 GMT  ·  By

LibreOffice 6.1 is being prepared by The Document Foundation for an August 2018 release, promising to add more enhancements and some new features to the popular open-source office suite.

Last week, we talked with The Document Foundation's marketing assistant Mike Saunders about the 1 million downloads milestone reached by the major LibreOffice 6.0 release in only two weeks after its launch, who told us that the team is already working on the next version, LibreOffice 6.1, due for release in August.

LibreOffice 6.1 will be the first major update to the 6.x series of the office suite and will add yet another layer of new features and improvements to the open-source and cross-platform office suite used by millions of computer users worldwide, and we'd like you to be the first to know about them.

Here's what's coming in LibreOffice 6.1

Among the new features and improvements that'll be implemented in LibreOffice 6.1, we can mention optional inline tooltips on tracked changes for Writer, the ability to sort images in Calc, along with a new option implemented in the Image Insert dialog to let you anchor the image to the cell or page.

Writer is also getting a basic list of styles, which will be accessible from the Styles submenu in the context menu, the ability to insert page numbers to documents, support for vertical ruby text format used by the Traditional Chinese language, and the ability to remove the entire ideographic variance sequence with the Backspace key.

Calc's user interface is also getting some new context menu options, such as the "Manage Name," "Data Validation" and "Conditional Formatting" UNO commands designed to work if the mouse cursor is in a named range, in a field with validation attribute, and in a field that has a condition, respectively.

Furthermore, Impress and Draw are getting a new Page menu, Writer can export ruby text to DOCX format, the Microsoft Excel 2003 XML import filter was overhauled, the backgrounds of the Gallery and Area Fill dialog were completely revamped, and Calc's "Link to External Data" feature now supports Text/CSV files.

LibreOffice Online is getting better with each new release

On the other hand, it looks like LibreOffice 6.1 promises to further improve the LibreOffice Online component, which lets users use LibreOffice's basic functionality through a web browser, by adding new features like column and row grouping to Calc, as well as new Position & Size, Area and Line dialogs to Impress.

In addition, LibreOffice Online's Writer component will receive several new dialogs, including Find & Replace, Spelling & Grammar, Word Count, Bullets & Numbering, Edit Style, Hyperlink Dialog, New Special Character, Index Entry, Paragraph, Character, and Table Properties.

The Calc component, on the other hand, will let users add autofilter and will support filtering of items via the autofilter pop-up, as well as a Format Cell dialog. Lastly, LibreOffice 6.1 will add new languages and locales, improve language support and the proofing tools, as well as to incorporate other languages.

LibreOffice 6.1 will be first available for public testing in spring, at the end of April, and will enter beta stages of development in the last week of May. The final release is expected to arrive in the second week of August 2018, which will be supported with up to six maintenance updates until its end of life on May 29, 2019.

Sorting images in Calc
LibreOffice Online with Calc
LibreOffice Online with Calc

LibreOffice 6.1 (4 Images)

Sorting images in Calc
Set anchor type for images in CalcLibreOffice Online with Calc
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