LibreOffice 6.0 Polishes Open-Source Office Productivity Suite

The open-source LibreOffice office application suite has been the standard office productivity suite in Linux distributions since 2010, when it was forked from the Oracle OpenOffice Suite. The latest update—LibreOffice 6.0, which was released on Jan. 31—provides incremental improvements to a number of components bundled as part of the suite, including the Writer document, Calc spreadsheet and Impress presentation applications. Among the improvements is the integrated ability to directly export Writer documents to the ePub format used by ebook readers, while Impress gains new templates. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the new LibreOffice release.

In LibreOffice 6.0, the Writer word processing application gains integrated capabilities that enable users to directly export documents to the ePub digital book format.

Writer also benefits from a new menu toolbar item that provides easy access for users to embed special characters in documents.

Users can now make use of OpenPGP-based encryption to sign documents created with LibreOffice.

There is a new menu in Writer that makes it easier for users to build interactive forms inside of a document.

In the Calc spreadsheet application, users can now export a range of cells as a .png image or directly to a PDF.

The Impress presentation application in LibreOffice 6.0 boasts new templates that are set to a default widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9.

While LibreOffice has become the default office suite on many Linux distributions, it also has both Windows and Mac versions.