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The Document Foundation announced today the release and general availability of LibreOffice 7.3 as the latest stable version of this powerful, free, open-source, cross-platform, and widely-used office suite software.
As with previous updates in the LibreOffice 7.x series, the LibreOffice 7.3 release is here to further improve document interoperability with proprietary formats from the MS Office suite in an attempt to ease the migration from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.
Highlights include handling of change tracking in tables and when text is moved, which have a positive impact on interoperability with Microsoft Office documents, faster opening of large DOCX and XLSX/XLSM files of over 200 pages, improved rendering speed of some complex documents, as well as improvements to import and export filters.
For DOC files there’s better import of lists/numbering, and for DOCX files there’s support for importing and exporting hyperlinks attached to shapes, the ability to track changes of paragraph styles, and improved permission for editing.
For XLSX files there’s decreased row height, better support of charts, the ability to prevent cell indent increases on each save, as well as improved permission for editing, and for PPTX files there’s improved support for interactions and hyperlinks on images, transparent shadow for tables, support for hyperlinks on images and shapes, and better import/export of slide footers.
In addition, LibreOffice 7.3 updates LibreOffice’s Help manual with a focus on those switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and extends the ScriptForge libraries, which are used for developing macros, with a new Chart service to define charts stored in Calc sheets, a new PopupMenu service to describe the menu to be displayed after a mouse event, an extensive option for Printer Management with a list of fonts and printers, as well as a new feature to export documents to PDF with full management of PDF options.
Other noteworthy features in the LibreOffice 7.3 release include the ability to generate one-dimensional barcodes, unified border line widths, rendering improvements in the Skia-based rendering backend, LTO (Link-Time Optimization) support for binary packages for an overall performance boost, as well as improvements to proofing tools and language support.
In addition, this release speeds up loading of large RTL (Right-to-Left) documents, improves speed of lookup functions in some cases, improves speed for filtering by Autofilter, improves use of threads for calculations, and makes chart insertion faster for sheets with more than 800,000 cells.
LibreOffice 7.3 is available for download right now from the official website for all supported platforms. For GNU/Linux systems, The Document Foundation provides ready-to-install binaries for Debian (DEB) and Red Hat (RPM)-based distributions, alongside the source tarball for those who want to compile LibreOffice themselves.
Image credits: The Document Foundation
Last updated 2 years ago
