LibreOffice 26.8 Beta Released For Improving This Free Software Office Suite

Written by Michael Larabel in LibreOffice on 8 July 2026 at 12:27 PM EDT. 52 Comments
LIBREOFFICE
The Document Foundation today announced the first beta release of the LibreOffice 26.8 open-source office suite set for its stable debut in August.

Some of the highlights of new changes coming with LibreOffice 26.8 include:

- Infrastructure to support comparing documents side-by-side in LibreOffice Writer.

- Writer can now more quickly open large documents with images.

- Calc adds a shuffle command to randomize the order of cells in a range.

- LibreOffice Draw now supports swapping mouse wheel zoom and scroll.

- LibreOffice Chart has experimental support for import and re-export of new Chartex chart types that can be created in Microsoft Office and saved to OOXML files.

- LibreOffice 26.8 now has the Notebookbars' background color be colored individually per LibreOffice module.

LibreOffice 26.8 bars screenshot


More details on the many changes coming to LibreOffice 26.8 can be found via the work-in-progress release notes. Downloads and more details on the LibreOffice 26.8 Beta 1 release via the Document Foundation QA blog.
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