The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.1, a major release which shows the power of a large and diverse community of contributors

Berlin, August 8, 2018 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice
6.1, the second major release of the LibreOffice 6 family presented in
January 2018, with a significant number of new and improved features:

• Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows based on Microsoft's icon design
guidelines, which makes the office suite visually appealing for users
coming from the Microsoft environment;
• A reworked image handling feature, which is significantly faster and
smoother thanks to a new graphic manager and an improved image
lifecycle, with some advantages also when loading documents in Microsoft
proprietary formats;
• The reorganization of Draw menus with the addition of a new Page menu,
for better UX consistency across the different modules;
• A major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the
old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated, though still available,
and the new Firebird database engine is now the default option (users
are encouraged to migrate files using the migration assistant from
HSQLDB to Firebird, or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server);
• Significant improvements in all modules of LibreOffice Online, with
changes to the user interface to make it more appealing and consistent
with the desktop version;
• An improved EPUB export filter, in terms of link, table, image, font
embedding and footnote support, with more options for customizing metadata;
• Online Help pages have been enriched with text and example files to
guide the users through features, and are now easier to localize.

LibreOffice 6.1's new features have been developed by a large community
of code contributors: 72% of commits are from developers employed by
companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB
and by other contributors such as SIL and Pardus, and 28% are from
individual volunteers.

In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking
care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software
localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help
system text and documentation, plus free software and open document
standards advocacy at a local level.

A video summarizing the top new features of LibreOffice 6.1 is available
on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvoCpnwGNFU.

*Enterprise deployments*

LibreOffice 6.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for
open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology
enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.

For any enterprise class deployment, TDF maintains the more mature
LibreOffice 6.0, which should be sourced from a company providing a Long
Term Supported version of the suite (they are all members of TDF
Advisory Board, and are listed here:
http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/).

Also, value-added services for migrations and trainings, to support
enterprise class deployments in large organizations, should be sourced
from certified professionals (list available here:
http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

LibreOffice is deployed by large organizations in every continent. A
list of some large or significant migrations announced in the media is
available on the TDF wiki:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations.

*Availability of LibreOffice 6.1*

LibreOffice 6.1 is immediately available from the following link:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for
proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple
macOS 10.9. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are
available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service, and should be
installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate.
It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services
offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can
support The Document Foundation with a donation at
https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 6.1 is built with document conversion libraries from the
Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

*Press Kit*

The press kit, with background documents - Hybrid PDF, opened from
within LibreOffice can be edited as normal ODT files - and
high-resolution images, is here:
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/3B8ZecMNMcWcxHy.

*Blog Post*

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2018/08/08/libreoffice-6-1/