LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha 1 Tagged With More Open-Source Office Suite Improvements

LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha 1 was tagged on Friday in the first step towards this next open-source office suite update due out early next year.

Like usual, the next LibreOffice release should happen in February. LibreOffice 7.3 is working up many more changes as it continues to prove to be a very capable alternative to Microsoft Office. Some of the changes that have accumulated so far for LibreOffice 7.3 include:

- LibreOffice Writer now allows attaching hyperlinks to shapes.

- Various improvements to tracking changes within Writer.

- Faster performance around opening of Microsoft DOCX files as well as faster loading of large RTL documents. Meanwhile, PDF exporting is faster for some complex documents.

- Calc is also seeing some performance improvements around XLSM and XLSX files. Inserting large charts is also faster.

- Bash-like auto completion is implemented for the Calc spreadsheet program.

- A new bullet mode editing behavior is added for LibreOffice Impress.

- Various importing improvements around DOCX, XLSX, OOXML, and PPTX file formats.

- Initial Qt6 work.

See the tentative release notes for more information on the changes so far in the LibreOffice 7.3 development cycle.

Those wanting to help in testing can grab the latest nightly builds of the LibreOffice 7.3 alpha state via their daily build server with binaries available for a number of platforms.