14 DAY TRIAL // The Document Foundation released today the LibreOffice 6.3 open-source and cross-platform office suite for Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms.
The third major, feature-full update to the latest LibreOffice 6 office suite series, LibreOffice 6.3, comes exactly six months after the LibreOffice 6.2 release to add better performance, enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats, as well as a set of new features and other improvements.
The LibreOffice 6.3 office suite will be supported for the next ten months with smaller maintenance updates until May 29, 2020. The Document Foundation has planned a total of six point releases for LibreOffice 6.3, but currently recommends users the LibreOffice 6.2 series for extra stability in production environments.
LibreOffice 6.3 comes with an important change for Linux users, namely that it doesn't ship with 32-bit binaries for Debian or Red Hat-based operating systems. The Document Foundation is comitted to support 32-bit systems for a few more months, therefore they recommend the LibreOffice 6.2.x branch for 32-bit installations.
What's new in LibreOffice 6.3
New features of the LibreOffice 6.3 office suite release include a Tabbed Compact version of the NotebookBar user interface for Writer, Calc, Draw, and Impress, which will benefit users with wide-screen laptops, along with a new Contextual Single user interface for the Writer and Draw components.
Microsoft Office interoperability has been improved in LibreOffice 6.3 to support exporting of DOTX document templates and XLSX spreadsheet templates, importing of charts from DOCX drawingML group shapes, importing and exporting of SmartArt from PPTX files, and editing in PowerPoint.
There's also better interoperability with XLSX Pivot tables, improved support for exporting documents as PDF files by supporting the PDF/A-2 document format standard, the Form menu has been added to Writer for a new design of editable PDF forms, and LibreOffice now lets you remove or hide sensitive information before exporting or sharing documents.
LibreOffice 6.3 also adds performance improvements to Writer and Calc to offers users faster saving of Calc spreadsheets as XLS files, support for different bookmarks in text files, faster loading and rendering of Calc files with VLOOKUP, support for large ODS/XLSX spreadsheets, and support for tables and embedded fonts.
Last but not least, LibreOffice 6.3 introduces a new drop-down widget in the formula bar of Calc to let users more quickly access the most frequently used functions, along with a new FOURIER function for computing the discrete Fourier transform of an input array. A proper console mode is also available for Windows users to improve batch conversion and printing operations.
You can download LibreOffice 6.3 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems right now through our free software portal. LibreOffice 6.3 represents a bleeding-edge version of the popular office suite and it is only recommended to technology enthusiasts and power users who want the latest features.
