Original note from: MuyLinux
To read Eduardo Medina’s original in Spanish, click here
The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 7.1 Community, the latest version of the popular Open Source office suite aimed at end users.
LibreOffice 7.1 Community should be the edition that reaches GNU / Linux users and home users running Windows or macOS. Compared to the initial release of version 7, we find at the assembly level with a new dialog to select the interface type, an improved search for the size of the paper placed in the printer to match the document to be printed, the sample of all supported files when an extension is added from the corresponding manager, in addition to the asynchronous update of the print preview to avoid blocking the user interface when adjusting the settings in the print dialog box.
After commenting on the most outstanding news shared by all the applications and tools in the suite, we will continue with Writer, the word processor and possibly the most used application. Writer version 7.1 includes a new Style inspector to display the attributes of paragraph styles, character and manually formatted properties; the ability to set the default anchor for images embedded in a document; the ability to detect Unicode even if the imported file does not support Byte Order Mark (BOM); and better search and replace performance.
Calc, the spreadsheet application, has been introduced to new options to manage paste operations with the Enter key and to select elements in the AutoFilter window by clicking on the row of all elements, in addition to being improved in a way the performance of the Autrofilter and search and replace operations significantly.
Also added are the ability to add visible signatures to existing PDF files in Draw, the ability to change animations for multiple objects at once in Impress, and pause, resume, and exit buttons on the Impress presenter screen.
Moving away from the spectrum of the common user we find macros, which have achieved with the ScriptForge libraries “an extensible and robust collection of macro scripting resources so that LibreOffice is invoked from user scripts written in Basic or Python.”
Although LibreOffice is the great champion of the ODF document format, the true dominator of the industry is the well-known Microsoft Office and its OOXML format. This makes interoperability with the Redmond giant’s suite very important for The Document Foundation, so LibreOffice 7.1 Community is in charge of moving forward in that sense, improving in Writer the support for handling tables, managing the results of cached fields and adding spacing support below the last paragraph of the header in DOC / DOCX files.
Beyond LibreOffice 7.1 Community
The Document Foundation has been working in recent times to be something more than the developer of an Open Source office suite by creating a Migration Protocol “to help companies that move from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice”, based on this in the implementation of an LTS version of the LibreOffice Enterprise family together with the work of a migration consultancy and training provided by certified professionals.
Did we say LibreOffice Enterprise? The Document Foundation announced last summer of 2020 that it was looking for a more balanced business model, hence a ‘Personal Edition’ of the office suite emerged that set off the alarms because many perceived it as an attempt to offer a limited product that I would force checkout to get advanced features.
Faced with the uproar, The Document Foundation had to step out to calm things down and backtrack when it came to publishing a Personal Edition of LibreOffice. However, this rectification did not mean that the foundation abandoned its intentions to seek a more balanced business model.
The Document Foundation has recommended that companies use the edition directed at them instead of the community edition because the use of the community edition within companies has generated the following negative consequences for the project: “a bad use of the time of the volunteers, since they have to dedicate their time to solve business problems that do not contribute anything to the community, and this represents a net loss for the companies in the ecosystem. "
“This has been a problem for the sustainability of the LibreOffice project, because it has slowed down the evolution of the software. In fact, every line of code developed by the business ecosystem for its clients is shared with the global community, and this improves the product and fosters the growth of the LibreOffice technology platform. In order to offer better support to companies and organizations, LibreOffice Enterprise has been created, which shares with the Community edition the use of the LibreOffice technological platform.
We will see how The Document Foundation fares in its journey to offer a more adjusted support to companies. We only hope that this does not lead to the offering of a second-rate product for those who have been loyal users of the Open Source office suite until now, starting with Linux and domestic users who have adopted it from Windows and macOS.
Those who want to obtain LibreOffice 7.1 Community can download it from the corresponding section on the official website, wait for it to arrive via update in rolling release distributions such as Arch Linux (where by the way it already is) or resort to the Flatpak version hosted on Flathub, which is maintained by The Document Foundation itself.