LibreOffice 7.1 Beta Released With Faster Spell Checking, Speedier Find And Replace

LibreOffice 7.1 was branched this weekend that also marked the hard feature freeze for this next half-year update to this open-source office suite. LibreOffice 7.1 Beta has now shipped ahead of next month's release candidate and the additional test releases in January before going gold in early February.

LibreOffice 7.1 brings presentation improvements, an outline folding mode as an experimental feature, faster find/replace performance, faster spell checking performance within the Calc spreadsheets, new physics-based animations within Impress, LibreOffice Math now has full support for HTML colors, native support for Windows ARM64, and a wealth of low-level improvements.

The faster find/replace performance stems from this bug report that had been around for two years over LibreOffice find/replace performance slowing down from around 5 seconds in older releases to as much as 20 seconds or more with newer releases on large documents. With LibreOffice 7.1, the find/replace is made faster by making only one "UNDO" object versus one for each item found and replaced. LibreOffice 7.1 also no longer repeatedly re-validates the paragraph signature. These optimizations now lead find and replace to take roughly half the amount of time as previously needed.

Meanwhile leading to faster spell checking performance is doing it synchronously to avoid an idle handler, avoiding continuous invalidations with per-cell spell checking in Calc, and caching spell checking information.

The full list of LibreOffice 7.1 changes are accumulating at the The Document Foundation Wiki.

The LibreOffice 7.1 Beta can be downloaded from LibreOffice.org. Next up are a series of release candidates while the stable LibreOffice 7.1.0 should be out the first week of February.