New bidirectional-text tools, better OOXML round-tripping, and no built-in AI show why LibreOffice is accountable to users rather than product-market calculations.
LibreOffice’s latest release offers a good example of the benefits of supporting community-focused open source projects rather than profit-centered projects whether open source or not. Remove the profit motive, and suddenly serving all of your users becomes a bigger mandate than serving users with pocketbooks.
As expected, LibreOffice 26.8, which hit the streets on Wednesday, delivers new features in spades. Interestingly, few of them are of the meaningless bells and whistles variety that proprietary vendors such as Microsoft like to add to maximize cash sales. Here, the additions focused on things like interoperability and languages that are underserved by mainstream software.
“The largest single body of work in this release addresses bidirectional and complex text,” said The Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice, in the release announcement. This includes addressing the needs of Arabic and Hebrew, both of which might also include left-to-right snippets from other languages, and Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean which are sometimes presented vertically.
In 26.8, Writer automatically detects the paragraph direction when documents or plain text are opened or pasted. In addition, line wrapping places end-of-line spaces according to the direction of the paragraph rather than focusing on adjacent characters. Object resize handles now behave correctly in right-to-left as well as in vertical CJK documents, and bidirectional control characters are now visible alongside other formatting marks.
This built-in right-to-left capability also extends to LibreOffice components outside of Writer. Typing right-to-left into an empty cell in Calc automatically sets the direction of that cell. In another language consideration, Math now has named functions and operators for the N’Ko and Adlam scripts, used for the Manding languages of West Africa and for Fulani, along with left-pointing vectors and harpoons for right-to-left formulas.
I can’t say for sure, since I’m a native English speaker whose only experience with right-to-left languages is a wholly unuseful smidgen of Hebrew, but it looks to me like someone who has to work using a right-to-left language will find this new LibreOffice quite capable.
“None of this work has a commercial market,” the Document Foundation pointed out. “It was done anyway, because a foundation does not have to ask whether a language pays for itself before deciding to support it.”
How LibreOffice 26.8 Plays Nice with Microsoft
These aren’t the only changes, of course.
For starters, the folks at the Document Foundation have continued to work to make sure that Open Document Format works and plays well with Microsoft’s OOXML. For example, the newer OOXML chart types Box and Whisker, Funnel, Pareto, Sunburst, Treemap, and Waterfall, can’t yet be rendered or edited, so LibreOffice displays a message identifying them as unsupported and preserves the underlying definition, meaning that a file opened and saved in LibreOffice returns to its originating application intact.
Also, when working with Microsoft Excel XLSX documents, Calc improves the handling of line breaks in referenced cells, and XLSX form control elements now appear in the Navigator, which is Calc’s dockable panel for quickly moving around a spreadsheet and viewing its structure.
For a more complete look at what’s new in LibreOffice 26.8, take a look at ReleaseNotes/26.8 on The Document Foundation Wiki.
A Notable Absence
Another interesting point about this new release is the absence of AI.
Unless you’ve been on a SpaceX jaunt to Mars, you probably know that one of the hallmarks of 2026 is that all new software automatically comes with some sort of AI built into the works, with no thought as to whether it actually helps or merely gets in the way. These days, every project must have an AI assistant, which can be a generative chatbot that offers advice or an agentic integration that performs tasks for you.
Not so with LibreOffice — and not because they just didn’t get around to it, forgot, or just couldn’t figure out how. The lack of AI here is a purposeful part of the grand plan.
“LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative AI features,” The Document Foundation said in a release statement. “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 organization 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.”
LibreOffice 26.8 can be downloaded for Windows, macOS and Linux, in 120 languages.
For organizations deploying the software at scale, enterprise versions of LibreOffice optimized for managed environments are available from various companies. These are backed by Service Level Agreements, professional support, the option of custom development, and security updates maintained for three to five years.
LibreOffice is fully open source, released under the Mozilla Public License v2.
“LibreOffice carries no advertising, no telemetry, no subscription, no account requirement, and no feature withheld behind payment,” said the organization.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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