LibreOffice 7.3 has been released, and is now available to download.
This release sees a score of improvements aimed at making it easier for users to migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, as well as those who regularly swap documents between the two office suites.
To this end, LibreOffice devs have spent time developing new features to handle change tracking in tables and text within documents. This, The Document Foundation say will have a “positive impact” on interoperability throughout all Microsoft Office formats.
Large files also get a performance boost thanks to upticks in rendering speed, and a glut of import and export filters have been added, honed, or improved to ensure .doc, .docx, .pptx and other office files appear as they should, where they should.
Writer changes include initial support for list levels in paragraph styles; hyperlinks can now be attached to shapes; tracked table row deletion/insertion; tracked text moving; and increased PDF export speed (among others).
Calc and Impress also pick up a variety of boosts, ranging from Bash-like auto-completion in Calc spreadsheets, through to PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes in Impress. There’s also new ‘chart service’, to define charts stored in Calc sheets.
LibreOffice’s macro scripting resources get a major revamp with 23 new services (each with plenty of options) available for use in Basic or Python scripts.
Also improved in LibreOffice 7.3:
- Help pages reviewed for accuracy and completeness
- Generate one-dimensional barcodes
- Border line widths have been unified throughout
- Navigation menus close when clicking outside them
- Underline for typo now ‘more discernible in high-resolution screens’
See the LibreOffice 7.3 release notes for more detail on these and many other changes, or watch the promo video embedded below:
You can download LibreOffice 7.3 for Windows, macOS and Linux from the LibreOffice website.
LibreOffice is also available from Flathub, and the Snapcraft store. Users of Ubuntu-based distros should be able to install LibreOffice 7.3 using the LibreOffice Fresh PPA though do note that builds for v7.3 are NOT present in the PPA at the time you read this.
Finally, for those willing to wait, Libreoffice 7.3 will ship by default in this April’s Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release.