The LibreOffice Quality Assurance team announced the general availability of the beta version of the volunteer-driven community project, LibreOffice 7.4. This is the second pre-release since the development of LibreOffice 7.4 started in the November of 2021. The first beta version can be downloaded from its official website for Linux, macOS, and Windows and it can be installed alongside the standard version.
Final release in August
LibreOffice 7.4 is expected to be released as final in August 2022. Since the first pre-release, Alpha 1, 920 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 220 issues got fixed. Users who experience any issues in the beta version can report them via Bugzilla. The latest release comes with new optional hyphenation settings to adjust paragraph-level text flow:
- Hyphenation zone (it’s for limiting hyphenation, used especially with not justified paragraph alignment).
- Minimum word length for hyphenation
- Do not hyphenate the last word of the paragraph
These features are part of CSS4 Text Module Level 4, DTP software, and in the case of hyphenation zone. Along with these enhancements, the release also introduces new features and performance improvements, especially when many columns contain data, functions such as COUNTIF, SUMIFS, and VLOOKUP, especially with unsorted data, a faster recalculation in some documents with many formulas, faster CSV file opening speed, faster Excel export filter, and better performance when loading spreadsheets that require recalculation.