A new version of the open source office suite LibreOffice has been released earlier today. LibreOffice 7.3 is available for all supported platforms. Core improvements include better interoperability with Microsoft Office document formats, performance improvements, and new handling of change tracking in tables.
LibreOffice is one of the best-known open source office suites. It is a free Microsoft Office alternative, complete with a spreadsheet program, database tool, presentation maker, and word processor. The project was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle inherited the latter through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009.
Reading and writing to Microsoft Office file formats, like DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX remains a key ask of this open source office suite and something its millions of users rely on daily. Well, with the new 7.3 release, things get even better.
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Here are some of the major new features that LibreOffice 7.3 brings to you.
LibreOffice 7.3 Highlights
We start with the fact that a huge list of Microsoft Office compatibility updates arrives in this release. That means, your Microsoft Office documents are more similar in LibreOffice as they behave in Microsoft Office. In other words, LibreOffice 7.3 provides a large number of improvements targeted at users migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice or exchanging documents between the two office suites.
Another interesting change in LibreOffice 7.3 is the fact that the shapes in your Writer document now can have hyperlinks attached to them. Earlier, the hyperlink was not available or not working when importing a DOCX having a shape with hyperlink.
On top of that, footnote and endnote anchors in the end of a paragraph are now treated exactly as they already were treated in the middle for the purposes of search/replace with regular expressions
In addition, LibreOffice 7.3 Writer now better tracks and indicates changes to text. During track changes, it shows moved text in green color and with double strike-through or underlines to speed up reviewing.
The Calc Functions have been reviewed for accuracy and completeness and linked to Calc Function wiki pages, while Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library have been updated. In addition, a Bash like autocompletion for Calc autoinput was implemented. So, when the user types A, it will show the partial suggestion BCD.
But whatโs more important is that now LibreOffice 7.3 Calc supports Color Filter in “Standard Filter” dialog. This greatly expands the capabilities of the application.
The Impress & Draws apps have also received improvements in the new version in the form of added PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes.
Last but not least, LibreOffice 7.3 comes with performance improvements when opening large DOCX and XLSX files, improved rendering speed of some complex documents, and new rendering speed improvements when using the Skia back-end introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.
The list of what’s new is extensive, though most new features are small tweaks or bug fixes. For detailed information about all changes in LibreOffice 7.3, you can refer to the release notes.
LibreOffice 7.3 is already available for download on the official project website.
