A new major release of the free and open-source office suite LibreOffice has just arrived, with new features, and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office document formats.
LibreOffice is an office productivity software forked from OpenOffice.org, and owned by The Document Foundation (TDF), a non-profit organization that promotes open-source document handling software, and it aims to create a free (as in freedom) and open-source alternative for Microsoft Office proprietary software compatible.
It’s consisting of 6 programs for word processing (LibreOffice Writer), creating and editing spreadsheets (LibreOffice Calc), slideshows (LibreOffice Impress), diagrams and drawings (LibreOffice Draw), working with databases (LibreOffice Base), and composing mathematical formulae (LibreOffice Math).
A new version of LibreOffice is released approximately every 6 months, and this week the Document Foundation announced version 7.3 of this office suite.
In LibreOffice Writer 7.3, hyperlinks can now be attached to shapes, table and table row insertions now appear in cyan and deletions in pink in Show Changes mode. The text that you moved as well is now shown in green and with double strikethrough or underlines to speed up reviewing during track changes.
Calc has a bash-like autocomplete in rows, the cell cursor now uses the system's highlight color instead of the default font color for better visibility, the "Link to External Data" dialog (Sheet → Link to External Data...) now lists tables HTML in the order they appear in the source, and a color filter support has also been added to the Standard Filter dialog (Data list → More filters → Standard filter).
In Impress, PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes have been added in "Slide → Slide Properties ... → Slide → Paper Format", and new bullet mode editing behavior is also included in this version.
LibreOffice can now generate one-dimensional barcodes in addition to QR codes, and borderline widths have been unified throughout LibreOffice. The wavy lines that indicate spelling or grammar problems have been improved to be more discernible in high-resolution screens, and they will match the document’s zoom level instead of staying thin unconditionally. Tweaks are made as well to Colibre icons related to graphics, saving, formatting, and undo/redo.
LibreOffice 7.3 comes with a lot of improvements to Microsoft Office documents format (DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX), and it works on various platforms such as Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. You can download LibreOffice from its official website, or if you use Linux, you can wait for this new version to be available in your distribution repositories or download it as Snap, Flatpak, or AppImage.