LibreOffice 24.2 Beta Released For Testing This Free Software Office Suite

LibreOffice 24.2 Beta 1 is available today as the latest test candidate for this cross-platform open-source office suite that is packing many new features while also changing its approach to versioning.

LibreOffice 24.2 is going to be the successor to LibreOffice 7.6. The Document Foundation has changed the versioning approach to reflect the planned year/month release date. With the next LibreOffice release anticipated for February 2024, it's carrying the 24.2 version. LibreOffice 24.8 will succeed that come August of next year.

LibreOffice 24.2 is preparing many new features: improved multi-page floating tables, Small Caps for LibreOffice Impress, "save auto-recovery information" is now enabled by default, "always create backup copies" is also now enabled by default, there is now a password strength meter when saving documents with a password, and various other improvements. More details on the LibreOffice 24.2 changes can be found in this earlier article.

LibreOffice 24.2 Beta 1 can be downloaded from the TDP QA area.

With this beta milestone, LibreOffice 24.2 is now branched and is under a hard feature freeze. Coming up just before Christmas will be the UI freeze and English string freeze along with LibreOffice 24.2 RC1. Two more release candidates of LibreOffice 24.2 are expected in January before seeing the release of LibreOffice 24.2 at the start of February.