Tagged at the start of the week was LibreOffice 6.3 Alpha 1 as the first step towards the next major release of this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice 6.3 is expected to make its stable debut by mid-August and for that to be the feature freeze and branching is approaching at the end of the month followed by the first beta and then a few release candidates over the next two months. Alpha 1 striked on time so things are looking good at this stage for LibreOffice 6.3.

Among the work coming for LibreOffice 6.3 is faster open/save performance, FOURIER function support for spreadsheets, OOXML export improvements, tagged PDF exporting improvements along with other PDF handling enhancements, revisions to the GUI, dropped support for Java 5, and various other performance improvements/optimizations.

While not yet past the feature freeze for LibreOffice 6.3, the work-in-progress release notes are available from their Wiki.