The first alpha release of LibreOffice 25.8 is now available for testing of this cross-platform, free software office suite.

LibreOffice 25.8 is working its way toward a stable release in August with more refinements for this leading open-source office suite alternative to Microsoft Office. LibreOffice 25.8 is shaping up to be another nice half-year feature release.

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Following today's alpha release, LibreOffice 25.8 is set to go into its feature freeze and code branching in early June followed by a beta release. After release candidates in June and July, LibreOffice 25.8 should be out as stable by mid to late August.

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Some of the changes to look forward to with LibreOffice 25.8 include:

- Various performance improvements for loading Writer documents and DOX files.

- LibreOffice Calc has performance improvements for opening of Microsoft Excel (XLSX) ifles and various other performance optimizations to this spreadsheet program.

- A variety of new functions were added to the Calc spreadsheet program like WRAPCOLS, TOCOL, TOROW, EXPAND, DROP, CHOOSECOLS, VSTACK, and others.

- LibreOffice Writer adds a command to insert a paragraph break before tables.

- The Ctrl + Shift + F2 command shortcut was added for converting fields into plain text.

- LibreOffice 25.8 brings a new application-wide viewer model for opening documents in read-only mode.

- Support for importing encrypted hybrid PDFs.

- Various spell check dictionary and thesaurus improvements.

- Removing support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1.

Downloads and more details on today's LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha release via [3]DocumentFoundation.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=libreoffice_258alpha_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=libreoffice_258alpha_2_lrg

[3] https://qa.blog.documentfoundation.org/2025/05/20/libreoffice-25-8-alpha1-is-available-for-testing/