LibreOffice 24.8 unveils new features and improvements across entire suite

The Document Foundation has released its second major build of LibreOffice for the year with the release of LibreOffice 24.8, the second to sport the new YYYY.MM versioning method.

Highlights include a new Quick Find deck in LibreOffice Writer’s Sidebar, numerous new spreadsheet functions in Calc and the ability to view and edit a slide deck’s notes beneath the slide in Normal view in LibreOffice Impress.

The new build won’t be offered by default to existing users, who will remain on the LibreOffice 24.2.x branch (currently 24.2.5) for now. This branch will be supported until November 2024. Instead, they will need to download LibreOffice 24.8 manually and then install it over the top of their existing installation.

The new Quick Find deck -- which can be toggled on and off by pressing Alt + 9 -- makes it possible for users to quickly view the results of a search along with their context.

In addition, Writer users can now disable hyphenation on individual words by right-clicking the breaking word and choosing 'No Break'. Specific words can also be permanently excluded from being hyphenated via the Format > Character > Position > Exclude from Hyphenation menu.

Calc users gain numerous new functions, including FILTER, SEQUENCE, SORT, XLOOKUP and XMATCH. In addition, users gain two new chart types: pie-of-pie and bar-of-pie, and are promised improved imports of OOXML pivot tables.

The big improvement for LibreOffice Impress users is the addition of Notes as a collapsible pane under the slide in Normal view -- simply choose View > Notes Pane to toggle the view.

LibreOffice Draw now allows users to reveal which objects belong to which layer in a drawing simply by hovering the mouse over a specific layer’s tab – any objects within that layer will be highlighted in black on the drawing.

Other notable improvements include the use of better (localized) placeholder text in Impress templates, a newly added function for searching for objects directly from the Gallery Sidebar deck, and a new colour scheme dialog in Basic IDE.

As always, these improvements and new features barely scratch the surface: the LibreOffice wiki contains a detailed and comprehensive list of all changes.

LibreOffice 24.8.0.3 is available now as a free, open-source download for Windows 64-bit and 32-bit, macOS and Linux.