LibreOffice 5.3 released

LibreOffice 5.3 released

Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 5.3 for Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as for the private cloud for the first time.

LibreOffice 5.3 represents a significant step forward in the evolution of this free and open source office suite: it introduces new features such as online collaborative editing and at the same time provides incremental improvements to make the program more reliable, interoperable and user-friendly.

New features

LibreOffice 5.3 offers a number of interesting new features in every area including:

  • a new cross-platform text layout engine that uses HarfBuzz for consistent text layout on all platforms, with significant advantages across languages and alphabets;
  • a revised Help menu, with new quick links to user guides and community support forums; and
  • better import/export filters for new and legacy MS Office documents.

New features in Writer include:

  • Table Styles, for applying formatting to a table which is preserved when edited; and
  • new Go to Page Box (activated by keystrokes Ctrl+G) makes it possible to jump to another page in the document with fewer keystrokes.
LibreOffice 5.3 Writer in action
LibreOffice 5.3 Writer in action

Turning to spreadsheets, Calc provides a new set of default cell styles, with greater variety and better names than in previous releases, whilst in fresh installations, “Enable wildcards in formulas” is now the default option, rather than regular expressions, to improve compatibility with other spreadsheet software.

Impress, LibreOffice’s presentation package, now opens with a template selector to get the user off to a quick start. In addition, a new Slide Properties Deck is now available in the sidebar while in slide master mode.

A list of the most significant new features is available in a separate document, in addition to which a series of short presentation videos has been produced.

Experimental UI features

As of this release, the LibreOffice UI has been extended with the addition of an experimental Notebookbar, which offers another UI option in addition to the Default UI (with two toolbars), the Single Toolbar UI and the Sidebar with a Single Toolbar. Each UI layout has been thought to serve a different cluster of LibreOffice users.

LibreOffice Online

LibreOffice 5.3 features the first source release of LibreOffice Online, a cloud office suite enabling basic collaborative editing of documents in a browser by re-using the LibreOffice “core engine”.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service and should be installed and configured by adding a cloud storage and a SSL certificate, which are not included in the package.

Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images.

Availability

LibreOffice 5.3 is available for immediate download (your correspondent has already moved onto an as yet unreleased development version. Ed.).

However, for large scale and commercial deployments, The Document Foundation recommends the more mature 5.2.5 version (posts passim), preferably with professional support.

Author: Steve Woods

Generic carbon-based humanoid life form.