Summary
- LibreOffice 26.8 tweaks the Notebookbar ribbon with app-colored bars and scrollable tab labels.
- New Paragraph Composer controls paragraph-wide word spacing for cleaner, consistent line breaks.
- Deliberately contains zero generative AI; there are no document uploads and all features work offline for data sovereignty.
If you’re on the hunt for an open-source alternative to Microsoft 365, you may want to give LibreOffice a try. The Document Foundation has been spending some time unpacking why Microsoft’s strategies are harmful to digital sovereignty, while also teaching people how it does things differently. Now, The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 26.8, which contains a new UI for the Notebookbar, a new tool for setting your word spacing, and a huge serving of absolutely zero AI tools.
LibreOffice 26.8 is available to download right now
It features some very cool tools
Credit: LibreOffice
Over on The Document Foundation blog, the group breaks down what we can expect from LibreOffice 26.8. One of the cooler features is a new “Paragraph Composer” that lets you define how much word spacing you want when your paragraph goes onto a new line. Instead of looking at each line individually, Paragraph Composer takes into account the whole paragraph to ensure it looks good. You can see examples of different word spacing settings in the image above; note how the red underlined text spreads out more the higher the max word spacing setting is.
The update also tweaks how LibreOffice’s Ribbon-like UI, the Notebookbar, looks across the entire suite. Now the bar will change color depending on which app you’re using. The update adds more consistency to the list of styles, and each tab in the Notebookbar has labels you can scroll using your mouse wheel or trackpad.
While the above are excellent features, what’s likely the most impactful patch note for some people relates to what The Document Foundation didn’t add in this update:
No artificial intelligence
LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative AI features. Documents are not transmitted to remote services for processing, and no component of the suite requires network access to function. This is a deliberate position. Any organisation handling confidential, legally privileged or personal data needs to know where that data goes, and the only assurance that survives an audit is that it does not leave the machine.
If you want to give it a go, head over to the LibreOffice download page and grab version 26.8 right now.
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