LibreOffice 26.8 Arrives with a New Paragraph Composer and Draft View
LibreOffice 26.8 Released with Many Nice Improvements
The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 26.8, bringing a host of improvements across Writer, Calc, Impress, and more. Writer gains a new Paragraph Composer that balances word spacing across lines, a distraction-free Draft View, and better handling of bidirectional text. Calc introduces a Shuffle command and improved RTL editing. Impress adds support for multiple page sizes in a single document and presentation sections. The update also includes rudimentary support for importing and re-exporting new chart types from Microsoft Office, and a style dialog that now shows interactive chips for properties that differ from the parent style.
The new Paragraph Composer balances word spacing in the consecutive lines, fixing fundamental incompleteness of the “greedy” single line composer of the word processors.
- edferda
This is such an important project that I think I will setup a recurring monthly donation.
I mostly use Calc and I’ve held back donating because honestly it is not that good (irrational, I know). Specially if you’re an excel power-ish user.
But lately it has been satisfying all my personal spreadsheet needs. Even though it has major pain points. I’ve tried every other spreadsheet app in Linux and honestly they all suck.
I guess our best bet is to rally behind this project and hope it gets as good as Linux so that it really competes with office.
Kudos to the team and really excited to try the pivot tables calculated formulas. Pivot table feature parity is what I am missing the most!
- Night_Thastus
I am very grateful for LibreOffice. Writer and Calc got me through college, and I use Calc on a nearly daily basis for keeping track of finances.
Years ago they felt unpolished and a bit pet-project-y, but now they feel like proper tools that stand up well.
I think for the business scene Excel will remain dominant for shear backwards compatibility, but for typical users there's no reason not to use it.
- treetalker
I got a good chuckle from the screenshot showing off Draft View “for distraction-free editing”.