The Document Foundation has announced the launch of LibreOffice 7.2 – a major new release of the office suite that comes with lots of interoperability improvements to better support Microsoft Office formats such as DOCX, DOC, PPTX and XLSX. The new update also adds native support for Apple Silicon, although, it’s recommended that you stick to the older binary types for stability reasons.
LibreOffice 7.2 also comes with several new performance improvements when it comes to opening larger files, opening DOCX and XLSX files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. If you’re using the Skia back-end, which was introduced in LibreOffice 7.1, you’ll also notice drawing speed improvements.
According to The Document Foundation, LibreOffice 7.2 Community’s new features came from 171 contributors with 70% of the code commits coming from just 51 developers employed by Collabora, Red Hat, and allotropia – all of which sit on the TDF’s Advisory Board, and other organisations. The other 30% come from 120 individual volunteers.
LibreOffice 7.2 Community is released in 119 different languages which TDF claims is more than any other free or proprietary software. It supports the native languages of 5.4 billion people worldwide and an additional 2.3 billion people speak one of those 119 languages as a second language.
You can download LibreOffice 7.2 from the LibreOffice website. It’s free of charge and, as mentioned in the article, is largely compatible with documents created in Microsoft Office.