Over 60% of the code commits for the brand new version of the best free and open-source office suite focus on interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.
LibreOffice 7.2 Community, the latest major release of the free office suite supported by volunteers for office productivity, is available for download at https://www.libreoffice.org/download. Built on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile, and cloud, it offers numerous improvements in interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats. Additionally, LibreOffice 7.2 Community features various performance enhancements in handling large files, opening certain DOCX and XLSX files, font caching management, and opening presentations and drawings containing large images. Improvements in drawing speed have also been made when using the Skia back-end, which was introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.
LibreOffice 7.2 is now natively available for Apple Silicon, a series of processors designed by Apple based on the ARM architecture. Due to the initial phase of development on this specific platform, binaries are provided but should not be used for critical purposes at this stage. The software will be available from the following page: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.2.0/mac/aarch64/
LibreOffice and Interoperability
The LibreOffice community version 7.2 brings a significant number of improvements to interoperability with legacy DOC files and DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX documents. Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in April 2008, rather than on the ISO-approved standard, which integrates a large amount of hidden artificial complexity. This causes management issues with LibreOffice, which by default uses a true open standard format (the OpenDocument format).
The LibreOffice community is proud to have many talented developers addressing these challenges.
Thanks to the targeted development efforts of volunteer and sponsored developers, LibreOffice 7.2 makes a significant step forward in terms of seamless interoperability while retaining many benefits in terms of resilience, robustness, and conformity to standards – for the benefit of businesses and individual users.
LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, starting with native support for the OpenDocument format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats in terms of security and robustness – up to superior support for DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files. Furthermore, LibreOffice provides filters for a large number of legacy document formats to empower users with ownership and control.
New Features in LibreOffice Community 7.2 [1]
The new features of LibreOffice Community 7.2 have been developed by 171 contributors: 70% of the code commits come from 51 developers employed by three companies sitting on TDF’s advisory board – Collabora, Red Hat, and allotropia – or other organizations (including The Document Foundation), and 30% come from 120 individual volunteers.
In addition, 232 volunteers provided localizations in 151 languages. LibreOffice 7.2 Community is available in 119 different language versions, more than any other free or proprietary software, enabling it to be used in the native language (L1) by over 5.4 billion people worldwide. Moreover, over 2.3 billion people speak one of these 119 languages as a second language (L2).
GENERAL
• Context menu for searching menu commands
• Scrolling style selector in the NotebookBar
• Fontwork panel in the sidebar
• New list view for the templates dialog box
• Integrated UNO object inspector of type “Xray”
WRITER
• Background fills can cover entire pages, beyond the margins
• Page styles can now have a gutter margin
• Mail merge displays a warning regarding nonexistent data sources
• RDF metadata in the style inspector
• Custom color field metadata shading
CALC
• Calc can now filter by color in AutoFilter
• HTML tables listed in the external data dialog box now display captions
• “Thick cross” cursor available in 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 areas
• Direct access to the scale factor via the status bar
A video summarizing the main new features of LibreOffice Community 7.2 is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWmURg_rM2o and PeerTube: https://peertube.opencloud.lu/videos/watch/d9413c81-a568-4a0e-b570-6200fc1d062c.
LibreOffice for Businesses
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise application family from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile, and cloud – featuring a wealth of dedicated value-added functionalities. These include long-term support options, professional assistance, custom developments, and other benefits such as SLAs (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of businesses are using the community-supported version instead of the version optimized for their needs and supported by various companies in the ecosystem.
Over time, this represents a challenge for the sustainability of the LibreOffice project, as it slows down the project's evolution. In fact, every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for their client businesses is shared with the community on the main code repository, enhancing the LibreOffice Technology platform.
Products based on LibreOffice technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and for the cloud. Slowing down the development of the platform harms users at all levels and may ultimately lead to stagnation of the LibreOffice project.
Migrations to LibreOffice
The Document Foundation has developed a migration protocol to assist businesses in transitioning from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which relies on deploying an LTS version of the LibreOffice Enterprise family, along with migration consulting and training from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.
In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature code base, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility, and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for organizations looking to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.
Availability of LibreOffice Community 7.2
LibreOffice 7.2 Community is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. The minimum required configuration for proprietary operating systems is Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.12.
Change logs: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.0/RC1 (RC1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.0/RC2 (RC2), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.0/RC3 (RC3).
Products based on LibreOffice technology for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while those for the App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/.
For users whose main focus is personal productivity, and therefore prefer a version that has undergone more testing and bug fixes compared to new features, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 7.1 family, which includes several months of backported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 7.1.5.
The Document Foundation does not provide technical support to users, although they can obtain it from volunteers on user mailing lists and on the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates, and community members can support The Document Foundation by making a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.
LibreOffice 7.2 is built with the Document Liberation Project's document conversion libraries: https://www.documentliberation.org.
[1] Release notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.2.
