Software Update: LibreOffice 5.4

The Document Foundation has released version 5.4 of LibreOffice. This open source office package originated as a fork of OpenOffice and comes with the word processor Writer, spreadsheet program Calc, presentation program Impress, drawing program Draw, database program Base and Formula, an application for making scientific notations.

Version 5.4 contains a large number of improvements, especially in Writer and Calc. For example, copying and pasting bulleted text is a lot better, the last settings used when importing CSV files are remembered and formulas can now contain a negative date. Furthermore, pdfium is integrated which provides better quality of images in pdf files and we also see some performance improvements. These are some of the main improvements made in Writer and Calc:

writer

• AutoText import from .dotx and .dotm files blog entry
• New “Edit Section” uno command which works if cursor is in a section, has been created and added in context menu. tdf#102132
• New “Footnotes and Endnotes” undo command which works if cursor is in a footnote or endnote, has been created and added in context menu. tdf#103258
• Huge improvement in the export of bullets & numbering via copy & paste ; [1]

calc

• Calculate with Precision as shown option now works also with
  • fraction format tdf#105657
  • several subformats tdf#106052
  • engineering notation tdf#106252
  • thousands of divisors tdf#106253
• CSV export settings are now remembered. tdf#55236
• Priority of conditional formatting rules can be changed with new up/down buttons. tdf#74074

New buttons for priority of rules conditional formatting

• New Show All Comments , Hide All Comments commands acting on the currently selected sheet(s) added. tdf#84837
• New Comments toggle option for showing/hiding all comments, added to View ? Comments acting on the currently selected sheet(s) added. tdf#107258
• New Delete All Comments commands available under menu Sheet ? Cell Comment, acting on the currently selected sheet(s) tdf#107143
• While building formulas, when selecting a cell or range on another sheet with the pointer, absolute sheet references are now created instead of relative. tdf#90799
• Support negative year date (BCE) in cell input and date display.
  • Accepted inputs include the ISO 8601 format -YYYY-MM-DD and locale dependent input like -Y/M/D or M/D/-Y or DM-Y
  • For BCE dates years are displayed negative unless a specified date format already includes an era code, eg G or GG
  • Last day BCE is -0001-12-31, the next day CE is 0001-01-01
  • Previous versions could already calculate such dates, but did not display negative years
• A new Cell Protection command and toggle button was added to formatting toolbar to change the protection status of the cell. tdf#95885
• Four new sheet protection options have been added to optionally allow insertions and deletions of rows and columns. the Insert rows and Insert columns options allow row and column insertions even when the sheet is protected, whereas the Delete rows and Delete columns options allow row and column deletions. Note that when row and column insertions are enabled, you can insert rows or columns even when the range to insert the new rows or columns into contains protected cells which will get shifted after the insertion. Row and column deletions, on the other hand, are only allowed on unprotected cells. tdf#43535

New spreadsheet functions

• New function ROUNDSIG to round a value at a number of significant digits. tdf#105931