LibreOffice kills 32-bit Windows builds, offers better MS Office compatibility with 25.8

LibreOffice, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, has gotten its version 25.8 update, bringing several changes and improvements, including "better interoperability" with Microsoft Office files.

Starting with the UI, there is a revamped Welcome/What's New dialog that gives you direct access to the UI picker and appearance options. Over in Writer (LibreOffice's Word), a dialog now lets you copy the content of a field even from a read-only document.

There's also now support for exporting PDF 2.0, a feature that's unavailable in Office, which still sticks to older standards. This update also introduces "modern" AES-256 encryption, which is a requirement for the PDF 2.0 standard, and improves how it handles PDF signatures to make them compatible with Adobe Reader.

Writer also saw several rules related to hyphenation get a complete overhaul, like better handling of how words are split across pages to match documents created in recent versions of Microsoft Office. It includes a new option to move the last line of a page to the next one to avoid awkward word splits.

In Calc, the following functions were added:

• CHOOSECOLS
• CHOOSEROWS
• DROP
• EXPAND
• HSTACK
• TAKE
• TEXTAFTER
• TEXTBEFORE
• TEXTSPLIT
• TOCOL
• TOROW
• VSTACK
• WRAPCOLS
• WRAPROWS

Apart from the new functions, The Document Foundation says that Calc opens complex XLSX files up to 30% faster and that a bunch of other operations got quicker, including things like row height calculation when you switch sheets, spellchecking in spreadsheets with multiple languages, and even chart rendering.

In Impress, the team improved how the application can handle PPTX files as support for embedded fonts has been added. In addition to that, the team says it developed a better algorithm to figure out if a font is actually used and needs to be embedded when you export to Microsoft's format.

Other changes include dropping support for older operating systems; LibreOffice 25.8 will not run on Windows 7 or 8. It is also the final version that will support macOS 10.15, and 32-bit Windows builds are now officially on the way out.

For its vector graphics tool, Draw, page margin boundaries are now visible by default. The entire suite has improved its display of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean DOCX documents for better accuracy and can now import encrypted hybrid PDFs. A new application-wide "Viewer mode" lets you open all files in a read-only state, while OLE objects like charts can finally be resized proportionally.

You can learn more in the full changelog.

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Posted Thursday 21 August 2025 at 2:44 am AEST (my time).

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