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.

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.