The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 7.2. The organization also stated that more than 60% of the code commits to offer better interoperability with Microsoft Office’s proprietary file formats. LibreOffice 7.2 Community is a new major release and is currently ready to download.
Available natively for Apple Silicon
The Document Foundation also stated that the latest version is now available natively for Apple Silicon, ARM architecture-based series of processors designed by Apple. LibreOffice 7.2 Community mainly focuses on performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain DOCX and XLSX files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. The drawing speed is also improved with the Skia back-end.
Interoperability
In the latest version, interoperability with legacy DOC files, and DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX documents are improved drastically. The company stated that Microsoft Office files are based on the proprietary format deprecated by the ISO in April 2008, and not on the ISO-approved standard, so a large amount of hidden artificial complexity was embedded. It makes it harder for LibreOffice and causes handling issues. However, LibreOffice 7.2 takes a significant step forward in terms of transparent interoperability, while maintaining many advantages in terms of resiliency, robustness, and compliance with standards. Some of the new features are:
GENERAL
• Popup list to search for menu commands
• Scrollable style picker in the NotebookBar
• Fontwork panel in the Sidebar
• New list view for the templates dialog
• Built-in “Xray”-like UNO object inspector
WRITER
• Background fills can cover whole pages, beyond margins
• Page styles can now have a gutter margin
• Mail merge shows a warning about nonexistent data sources
• RDF metadata in Style Inspector
• Custom color metadata field shadings
CALC
• Calc now can filter by color in AutoFilter
• HTML tables listed in the External Data dialogue now show captions
• “Fat cross” cursor available in the options
• Type can be selected in “Moving Average” trend lines
IMPRESS & DRAW
• New templates: Candy, Freshes, Grey Elegant, Growing Liberty, Yellow Idea
• Multiple columns now available in text boxes
• Direct access to the scaling factor via the status bar