Some times you just don’t want to show the most recent posts, maybe because you have two widgets and the two most recent posts you want to display in the sidebar while another 8 are displayed at the footer.
To get this possible in 4.7 we have add an “start offset” parameter (not the greatest name, suggestions welcome) to indicate how recent (or whatever sort criteria is used) the post displayed should be, with a value of 1 indicates that the posts should stat with the most recent, 2 indicates they will starts if one item after the most recent and so forth (we preferred a 1 based system as it seems to be easier to understand than zero based one).
Technically the feature is implemented by requesting the DB to return items starting from position N and does not retrieve the first “ignored” items at all.
This feature will go into the 4.7 version of both the “free” and “pro” plugins due to be released right after WordPress version 4.7 will have its first RC release which is scheduled right now to november the 15th.
You can try the feature by downloading and installing the beta from https://github.com/tiptoppress/category-posts-widget/releases/tag/4.7.beta1, and report bugs or just get an impression of what is planned from our bug repository at https://github.com/tiptoppress/category-posts-widget/issues