At Collabora Productivity, we’re passionate about open source and delighted to see the steady progress of LibreOffice, the world’s most powerful free office suite. LibreOffice is also a foundation of our enterprise, supported, collaborative browser-based product – Collabora Online.
Why We Love LibreOffice
LibreOffice is not just software – it’s a project bringing together professional companies and a passionate community of developers, working together collaboratively as peers with a shared purpose. It offers professional-grade tools to millions of users worldwide, free of charge. And we think that’s pretty special!
Our Contributions
While we’re only one part of a broader community, our developers have been able to contribute a big share of the improvements in recent releases. Having combined forces with another major LibreOffice contributor, allotropia, earlier this year, we contributed nearly half of the new features listed in LibreOffice 25.8 released last month. Nearly half of the commits to the previous release (LibreOffice 25.2) were also from Collabora Productivity and allotropia.
What Does This Mean?
These aren’t just abstract numbers. Just some of the wins from Collabora Productivity in LibreOffice 25.8 mean:
Impress: Presentations That Travel Well
- Embedded PPTX fonts – LibreOffice now supports font embedding, so slides keep their intended look even on systems without those fonts installed.
- Smarter export filter – only the fonts actually in use are embedded, keeping file sizes smaller.
Interoperability & Standards
- PDF 2.0 export – support for the latest standard, including modern encryption.
- DOCX multilevel numbering – fixing a numbering format issue in DOCX files causing formatted strings to be corrupted – showing % symbols where they shouldn’t appear.
- Editable sections in read-only documents – new support for editable sections within otherwise read-only files, with a new extension making controlled collaboration easier.
Writer: Track Changes & Performance
- Reinstate changes – you can now reject changes while preserving history, making document review more flexible.
- Interdependent tracked changes – overlapping edits are handled more clearly with colours and within change management.
- Language data & layout speed-ups – inspired by a particularly heavy DOC file, the loading of language data and graphical layout was streamlined.
Optimised undo for large tables – deleting or undoing big tables is no longer a slow ordeal. - Smarter bookmark-table loading – tables with lots of bookmarks now open quickly, without the previous exponential slowdown.
- Large right-to-left documents – long Arabic, Hebrew, or other large right-to-left documents open much faster (thanks also to Jonathan Clark’s of TDF).
- Tracked-move performance – Writer handles documents containing change-tracking moves more smoothly.
Calc: Faster Spreadsheets at Scale
- Conditional formatting – rendering and opening of XLSX files with extensive conditional formatting is significantly faster.
- Graphical objects – spreadsheets packed with shapes or drawings load more efficiently.
- Multi-language spell-check – smoother performance when working across multiple languages.
- Large charts – load, edit, and switch sheets with heavy charts without lag.
- Comment-heavy sheets – navigating and editing documents full of comments is far more responsive.
Naturally there are many other exciting features new to LibreOffice 25.8 you can check out here. We want to celebrate the special, open collaboration that makes all this possible to improve the future of documents. We love to work in the open to liberate people’s documents, for the benefit of everyone.
Looking ahead, we’ll keep keep investing in the future of open source document editing, because the world needs great, open tools.
If your organisation wants to enjoy all the benefits of LibreOffice with enterprise support try Collabora Office – or get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!
