The Document Foundation has announced the stable release of Libre Office 7.3, the latest version of the well-known office suite published as free software and the main rival of Microsoft Office within the segment. On this occasion, among other things, the improvement of interoperability with formats from the Redmond giant stands out, a priority that is forced by the market situation.
Now that we’ve said interoperability, let’s mention the specific aspects of that front that have been improved in LibreOffice 7.3. Here stand out the performance improvements when opening DOCX, XLSX and XLSM documents, a faster rendering process of complex documents in those formats and better performance of the back end from Skia, which was introduced in version 7.1 of the suite.
There are also new features like new handling of tracking changes to tables and when text is moved, which also positively impact interoperability with Microsoft Office. For the old DOC (Word) format, the import of numbering and bullets has been improved, while for DOCX (Word) the import of numbering and bullets and hyperlinks has been improved, in addition to correcting permissions to edit.
For XLSX (Excel) the height of the rows has been adjusted, the cell indentation does not increase every time it is saved and the permissions when editing have also been fixed. For its part, PPTX (PowerPoint) support has received fixes covering links, images, transparencies, import and export.
the libraries of ScriptForge, which facilitate the development of macros, have been extended with some new features including the definition of graphics in Calc (spreadsheets), the new PopupMenu service, a wide range of options for managing printers and “a function to export documents to PDF with full management of PDF options”.
LibreOffice 7.3 Community
From the foundation they denounce that the documents generated with Microsoft Office are still based on the obsolete standard of 2008 and not approved by the ISO. As a consequence, according to The Document Foundation, there is a lot of hidden complexity that ends up causing problems in LibreOffice. That the giant from Redmond is not interested in complying with its own standard is logical, especially considering that this would open the door to competition.
LibreOffice 7.3 has been made possible thanks to the work of 147 contributors. 69% of code commits have come mainly from 49 developers employed by three companies belonging to the Advisory Council of The Document Foundation: Collabora, Red Hat and allotropia. The remaining 31% comes from 98 individual contributors.
All the details of LibreOffice 7.3, more specifically of the Community edition, which is what concerns us, are available in the official announcement and the release notes. The office suite can be obtained from the download section of the project’s official website for Linux, Windows and macOS, however, the Linux packages available there have to be updated manually, so as an alternative you can use the Fesh PPA for Ubuntu , to Flatpak, Snap or some distribution rolling release Y bleeding edge like Arch Linux, which should be reached by standard update. We leave you with a video where the main new features of this release are exposed.
