A new version of ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, a free, open-source office suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux, is now available to download.

ONLYOFFICE 8.3 brings a bunch of new features and nimble enhancements spread throughout the full suite, which is composed of word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and PDF editing apps.

Such as?

Well, the headline feature is the ability to open and work with Apple iWork documents (.pages, .numbers, .key) and Hancom Office files (.hwp, .hwpx) .

Opening these documents will convert them to OOXML to support editing. It’s not possible to edit the native files themselves, nor export/save edits back to the original file formats – but that’s to be expected.

iWork support is a big feature addition. Despite the fact Apple iWork is not as ubiquitous as Microsoft Office, Apple’s Numbers, Pages, and Keynote apps come preinstalled in macOS, iOS, and iPadOS.

Open iWork docs in ONLYOFFICE 8.2

However, don’t expect miracles.

The formats iWork use are proprietary so third-party support for its files is hit and miss. Most .pages documents I tried when taking screenshots for this post rendered …Poorly, at best. With any non-open file format, the simpler the document, the fewer the issues.

Of course, the best way to collaborate with users on different office suites is to try and stick to open standards formats in the first place.

Shape merging is now supported throughout ONLYOFFICE

Anyone who regularly works with shapes in documents will appreciate the ability to merge shapes in ONLYOFFICE 8.3. Unite, combine, fragment, intersect, or subtract options show in the context menu when right-clicking multiple shape selections.

The past few updates to ONLYOFFICE have fleshed out right-to-left language support, and this release continues to do so by adding advanced settings to change default sheet direction, paragraph direction, and display non-printable characters in previews.

Other improvements in ONLYOFFICE 8.3 which benefit all apps:

  • Image opacity settings
  • Image cropping reset button
  • Toggle field codes
  • Context menus added to tabs and windows
  • Albanian (sq-AL) translations

Changes made to the Document Editor:

  • customXml and dataBinding support
  • Editing protected documents now enables correct set of tools
  • Ability to change the main direction of a paragraph
  • Combine and compare text documents on character or word level

The Spreadsheet Editor adds:

  • Open and save calculated items in Pivot Tables
  • Function wizard now shows argument descriptions
  • Weekdays/month/years options when autofilling cells
  • AutoDetect of delimiters
  • Set the default sheet direction in Advanced Settings
  • Show/hide horizontal/vertical scroll bars
  • Option to automatically update external links
  • Automatically detect a separator when opening CSV files
  • Co-editing undo support

Presentation Editor gains:

  • Themes, Colours and Slide size tools move to a new Design tab
  • Rename Master/Layout options added to slide context menu
  • Hand and Select buttons available in presentation viewer
  • ‘Start slideshow from the beginning’ button added to Quick Access toolbar
  • Draw on slides in the Slideshow/Presenter View modes

The Form editor sees minor tweaks:

  • Default size of the fixed text field has been increased
  • Improved calculation of top indent for multi-line text fields with small height

Finally, the ONLYOFFICE PDF Editor now offers:

  • Support for stamp annotations
  • Text recognition improvements
  • Opacity options for highlight, strikeout and underline annotations
  • Edit annotations from a new Quick Panel
  • Support for gradients
  • Co-editing undo support
  • Multiple page selections in thumbnail panel:
    • ctrl to add/remove
    • shift to select a range

All of that plus lots of smaller, low-level bug fixes, performance adjustments, and other tweaks.

Downloading ONLYOFFICE 8.3

New ‘Design’ tab in Presentation; series fill in Spreadsheet

If you’re using Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or another Ubuntu-based Linux distributions you can download ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors from the official website as a DEB package.

Alternatively, you can opt for the official ONLYOFFICE Snap, the official Flatpak build available on Flathub, or the official AppImage — but at the time of writing all of those have yet to be updated to v8.3 (they will be soon though).

If visiting the website directly make sure you download the Desktop Editors and not the ONLYOFFICE Docs version (unless you want that). Same tech but different approach as the Docs version is self-hosted and runs as a server, effectively.

Worth trying? Absolutely

LibreOffice is the best known open-source office suite, and anyone after a reliable, interoperable, free alternative to Microsoft Office should definitely try it out.

If you try the latest LibreOffice 25.2 release and find it lacks the look, feel, or features you need, it could well be worth trying ONLYOFFICE 8.3: it’s also open-source, offers a UI more familiar to Microsoft Office users, and gets updated regularly.