LibreOffice 24.8 released with focus on data protection

LibreOffice – the open source competitor to Microsoft Office – has just released version 24.8, positioning it as the best option “for the privacy-conscious user of the Office suite.”

LibreOffice is one of the best alternatives to Microsoft Office, offering users powerful word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and database capabilities in a familiar interface. Like most open source software, LibreOffice already has privacy-protecting features, but this latest version offers even more.

LibreOffice is the only office suite, or if you like, the only software for creating documents that may contain personal or confidential information, that respects the user's privacy – thus ensuring that the user can decide whether and with whom to share the content they create. Therefore, LibreOffice is the best option for privacy-conscious office suite users, offering a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market. It also offers a range of interface options for different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen sizes by optimizing the space available on the desktop to make the maximum number of features accessible with just one or two clicks.

One of the biggest improvements concerns the way the suite handles personal data.

If the Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Security ▸ Options ▸ Remove personal information when saving option is enabled, personal information will not be exported (author names and timestamps, editing time, printer name and configuration, document template, author and date for comments and tracked changes).

The new version also improves interoperability.

• Supports importing and exporting OOXML pivot table format definitions (cells)
• PPTX files with heavy use of custom shapes now open faster.

As OpenOffice points out, interoperability is a particular challenge, especially when it comes to working with Microsoft formats.

The biggest advantage over competing products is the LibreOffice Technology Engine, the unified software platform on which desktop, mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice – including those provided by ecosystem companies – are based. This allows LibreOffice to provide a better user experience and create identical and perfectly interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). The latter hides a large amount of artificial complexity that can cause problems for users who are sure that they are using a true open standard.

LibreOffice is gaining traction as organizations and governments increasingly wary of being tied to platforms controlled by large technology corporations. For example, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein recently decided to convert 30,000 computers to Linux and LibreOffice.

The new version should significantly improve the user experience for users switching from Microsoft Office.