LibreOffice 25.8: Faster, leaner, and finally speaks PDF 2.0

Update boosts Microsoft file imports, adds new spreadsheet functions, and drops older Windows

LibreOffice 25.8 arrives with a tagline of "smarter, faster and more reliable." That all sounds good. So what's new?

As we mentioned a year ago looking at LibreOffice 24.8, the Document Foundation has adopted a new version-numbering scheme. This reflects that LibreOffice is a very mature piece of software now, with roots in a German word processor for the Amstrad CPC a full 40 years ago. Expect small, incremental improvements instead of big, sweeping changes.

Many of the improvements in version 25.8 are along the same lines as we've reported on in recent versions. First, it's faster than it was. Notably, this release should start faster, scroll through documents faster, and open Writer and Calc files faster.

If you open Microsoft Office documents, .DOCX, .XLSX, and .PPTX files should all import more faithfully. This version is better at handling hyphenation, its font handling is more compatible with PowerPoint, and the Calc spreadsheet supports over a dozen new functions that should mean Excel spreadsheets import better than before.

LibreOffice 25.8 also can now export files in version 2.0 of the PDF format. This took us by surprise, we confess, because we had missed the news that there was a new version of PDF, but there is: it came out in 2017. Now LibreOffice 25.8 can digitally encrypt and sign PDFs.

As we have described before, there are other Linux office suites with more modern-looking UIs – but if you actually like the Office "fluent" interface, LibreOffice has its own version of a ribbon-driven UI too. We read that 25.8 should offer you this option on its first run, but we never saw this – presumably because we already had it installed, and have for years.

There are, admittedly, some subtle traces of the nowadays-unavoidable integration with LLM tools, but they're small, off by default, and they seem to be easily avoided. LibreOffice has included hooks to call out to DeepL for automatic translation since version 7.5. It can also use LanguageTool spellchecking, which we mentioned about Collabora CODE a few years ago.

As before, LibreOffice runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, and we expect OpenBSD will update its port soon. For this version, though, the system requirements have increased slightly. You will need Windows 10 or above: it drops support for Windows 7, 8.0, and 8.1.

Both Arm64 and x86-64 Windows editions are on offer, but there's no 32-bit flavor anymore. This release still runs on macOS 10.15 Catalina, but it's the last one that will. The full release notes detail the new functions and changes. ®