LibreOffice 25.8 uses a new version-numbering scheme reflecting software maturity and focuses on small, incremental improvements. Performance enhancements include faster startup, smoother scrolling, and quicker opening of Writer and Calc files. Compatibility with Microsoft Office formats (.DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX) has improved, with better hyphenation and PowerPoint-compatible font handling. Calc gains over a dozen new functions to improve Excel import fidelity. The suite supports PDF 2.0 export and can digitally encrypt and sign PDFs. A ribbon-style 'fluent' UI option is available, and small, off-by-default LLM integrations and DeepL translation hooks remain present.
Many of the improvements in version 25.8 are along the same lines as we've reported on in recent versions. First, it's faster than it was. Notably, this release should start faster, scroll through documents faster, and open Writer and Calc files faster. If you open Microsoft Office documents, .DOCX, .XLSX, and .PPTX files should all import more faithfully. This version is better at handling hyphenation, its font handling is more compatible with PowerPoint,
LibreOffice 25.8 also can now export files in version 2.0 of the PDF format. This took us by surprise, we confess, because we had missed the news that there was a new version of PDF, but there is: it came out in 2017. Now LibreOffice 25.8 can digitally encrypt and sign PDFs. As we have described before, there are other Linux office suites with more modern-looking UIs - but if you actually like the Office "fluent" interface, LibreOffice has its own version of a ribbon-driven UI too. We read that 25.8 should offer you this option on its first run, but we never saw this - presumably because we already had it installed, and have for years.
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