Another blow for MS Office? LibreOffice brings feature MS Office has had for almost 10 years

When Microsoft launched Office 2016, one big improvement the update brought was the support for Bitcoin, the world's most popular cryptocurrency. Now, LibreOffice, arguably one of Microsoft Office's biggest competitors, has finally added the same feature. It has been a long time coming for users of the free office suite who handle digital assets.

The change stemmed from a feature request by @social.chemicals267, a few days ago, on the project's bug tracker. The user pointed out that Bitcoin is a common unit of account and having native support would "help users manage Bitcoin transactions directly in spreadsheets without needing custom format workarounds." They even provided the exact technical specifications: the ₿ symbol is U+20BF, it should have 8 decimal places to account for a Satoshi, and it must appear before the number, just like a dollar sign.

This small patch has been merged into the main LibreOffice code. But do not expect to see it right away, as the change missed the feature freeze for the upcoming 25.8 release. But according to Phoronix, we should expect to see it next year, likely with the LibreOffice 26.2 update.

When you think about it, LibreOffice has been playing a lot of catch-up lately. The project has also been on the offensive, doing things like directly courting Windows users and encouraging them to switch to Linux and ditch Office for LibreOffice. It even launched a series of free guides to help people who make the switch.

Apart from this Bitcoin support, the most recent beta, 25.8, brought proper embedded font support, which should improve interoperability with PowerPoint. And if you look back, version 25.2 gave us support for inline headings in Writer, another one of those features that people migrating from Word just expect to work.

When this feature finally lands, managing your Bitcoin in LibreOffice Calc will become much simpler. You will just select your cells, head over to the Numbers tab in the Format Cells dialog, and pick Bitcoin from the currency list.

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