14 DAY TRIAL // LibreOffice has just received another update today that brings improved compatibility with the DOCX format, which is being used by Microsoft for its own Office productivity suite.
At this point, LibreOffice is considered to be the number one Microsoft Office alternative, and with so many companies and state departments across the world adopting it, it’s critical for both The Document Foundation and users to have full compatibility with DOCX documents.
LibreOffice 5.3.2 is specifically focused on this feature, bringing over 50 patches, many of them related to RTF and DOCX formats, as The Document Foundation itself explains today.
The list of changes is huge and includes information that’s mostly aimed at tech-savvy users, but as far as DOCX improvements are concerned, there are two important references that need to be mentioned.
DOCX improvements
First and foremost, LibreOffice 5.3.2 comes with fix for a bug that caused the DOCX export feature to crash, and it goes without saying that this is a critical option in most organizations out there replacing Office with LibreOffice. Exporting LibreOffice documents to DOCX is vital in some environments, so if you encountered this bug on your system, now’s the right time to update.
Second of all, DOCX importing has also been improved with fixes for issues causing lost section breaks, so this means that both the importing and the exporting of DOCX documents should now work more smoothly in LibreOffice.
As far as Windows users are concerned, LibreOffice is released in both 32- and 64-bit versions, but the latter is only available on Windows Vista and newer. The 32-bit flavor of LibreOffice runs even on Windows XP, the 15-year-old operating system that no longer receives updates since April 2014.
As is the case with every new version of the productivity suite, you can download LibreOffice 5.3.2 for GNU/Linux, macOS or Microsoft Windows from Softpedia right now to benefit from all these improvements on your systems as well.