LibreOffice 7.4: Update Brings WebP Support and New Features

Free alternative to Microsoft Office, LibreOffice is already widely known for bringing the main features of text editing, spreadsheets, slides and others in an open source software that is constantly being updated. Now, six months after the last version, LibreOffice 7.4 Community arrives, released last Thursday (18), highlighting a series of small innovations that even facilitate integration with Microsoft formats — which are closed and work with several details that make compatibility with other systems difficult.

In this case, in addition to general fixes with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats and improvements for Windows 10 and 11 users, the new version stands out for being compatible with WebP files, a format in which many images on the internet are being saved, eliminating a manual conversion of this file by the user. It also now includes support for EMF and WMF files, originally developed for Windows.

The program also brings a new help page about the support for ScriptForge libraries, which facilitate the development of macros, added in the directly previous version.

The text editor, also known as Writer, highlights changes to footnote settings, hyphen usage, and optional LanguageTool corrector compatibility.

On the side of Calc worksheets —the counterpart to Excel — there is a new limit on the size of files, now supporting up to 16,384 columns in a spreadsheet, in addition to bringing more functions in the AutoSum widget, to perform sums. On the presentation side, LibreOffice’s “PowerPoint” offers a new mechanic for setting themes and styles in master pages.

The new version can now be downloaded from the official website of the software, with versions for Windows (32 and 64 bits), macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux (64 bits).

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