14 DAY TRIAL // LibreOffice was, is, and will continue to be the main alternative to Microsoft Office, so every update it receives is quite big news for the millions of users out there.
And it’s all because The Document Foundation not only that is working on new features but also tries to improve the interoperability with Microsoft Office, thus making the transmission from Microsoft’s productivity suite to LibreOffice as easy as possible.
And the latest Community build is the living proof in this regard, as it includes plenty of changes specifically supposed to make LibreOffice play nice with Microsoft Office documents.
According to The Document Foundation, LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community includes approximately 80 bug fixes, and no less than 20 percent of them are specifically aimed at compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.
Only aimed at power users
However, worth knowing is that the Community build of LibreOffice shouldn’t be deployed within organizations, as it’s only aimed at users who want to try out new features in advance.
The Document Foundation requires companies and organizations to stick with the stable channel if they want the productivity suite to run smoother, though from my experience, the Community builds too are pretty refined, with very few bugs spotted while using it.
“LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community represents the bleeding edge in terms of features for open source office suites. For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation provides LibreOffice 7.0.6,” the organization says.
The best way to try out all the improvements without deploying the latest version on your system is to use a virtual machine, as this should help you test the new release in a secure environment without making any changes to your system. But needless to say, you still shouldn’t use this version with critical documents on your computer.