This tutorial will explain the steps to upgrade preinstalled LibreOffice 6.4 to latest version 7 or later at Ubuntu Focal Fossa LTS 20.04. This will give you many benefits come from newest version, including, new Candy and Yellow Idea templates in Impress and better Tabbed / Ribbon user interface in all. Check this out!

 (Growing Liberty, a new template only available on Impress 7 or later)

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Option 1

This will add a third party repository to Ubuntu, commonly called PPA, then pull newer LibreOffice version from it instead of the official repository. Once finished, you can run LibreOffice from start menu.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa  # adding the repository
$ sudo apt-get update                          # making system up to date
$ apt-cache policy libreoffice                 # checking available versions
$ sudo apt-get install libreoffice             # installing the newest version

(Writer 7.3 or later at Ubuntu Focal Fossa)

Option 2

Choose this method if you prefer official backports packages (click here for explanation) instead of third-party PPA. This is suitable for advanced and experienced Ubuntu users, not beginners. Once finished, you can run LibreOffice version 7 or newer. Once this finished, you don't need Option 1 anymore.

Step 1. Enable focal-backports if have not yet.

Step 2. Do an APT reload:

$ sudo apt-get update

Step 3. Show all package versions available including from focal-backports:

$ apt-cache policy libreoffice  

Step 3. Upgrade package libreoffice specifically from focal-backports:

$ sudo apt-get install -t focal-backports libreoffice

Step 5. LibreOffice upgrade finished.

Results

At the time we write this tutorial, on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa we got results as the following:

• LibreOffice 7.3 or later if we upgrade from PPA.
• LibreOffice 7.2 or later if we upgrade from Backports.