LibreOffice 7.5.3 offers improved compatibility with MS Office, as well as numerous minor improvements throughout the suite.
The folks at LibreOffice, the cross-platform free and open-source office productivity suite which I consider to be the best office productivity suite on the market, on Thursday announced the release of LibreOffice 7.5.3. While downloads are available for Linux, Windows, and macOS, Linux users will probably want to wait for the new version to show up in their distribution’s repository, which should happen within a couple of days with most distros.
For most users, there’s no reason to hurry to upgrade for this one anyway, since this is primarily a bug-fix release. The exception here would be users who have to share documents with MS Office users. While LibreOffice has had the ability to open and save documents in Microsoft’s largely closed format going back 20 years or so when it was proprietary freeware called StarOffice, it’s been on a roll lately and has been rapidly improving its ability to deal with complex Office formatting. LibreOffice 7.5.3 is no exception.
“LibreOffice 7.5 provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with MS Office or migrating from MS Office,” the LibreOffice team said in a statement. “These users should check new releases of LibreOffice on a regular basis, as the progress is so fast that each new version improves dramatically over the previous one.”
In addition to bug fixes and improved MS Word compatibility, numerous minor improvements have been made in Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base, Math, and Help. A complete list of bug fixes and improvements can be found in the project’s latest release notes.
Downloads for LibreOffice 7.5.3 are available on the project’s downloads page.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
I ran into a bug that no website could help with ( LO Help, Youtube etc.). I somehow got a line at the bottom of every page of a book. There is an obvious fix, because it is meant to place such a line. Everyone said to use that and voila, no more line. Except it didn’t work. Now the line is gone and I have no more idea why it went away than I did why it came. This makes me wonder if it is possible to hover on a feature and have the program tell the user what it is and why it is there? Would this be too impossibly complicated?