Serving as a handy reminder that Microsoft Office is certainly not the only office suite out there, LibreOffice 7.2 has landed. There are a large number of changes in this latest version of the free, open-source office software including support for Apple M1 chips.
While there are lots of under-the-hood changes that are concerned with optimization, stability and improving compatibility with Microsoft Office, there are also plenty of things which are rather more obvious. This includes a new LibreOffice Dark theme, and a new batch of templates.
You might expect a minor version number increase to mean that there is not much to expect from a software update, but this is certainly not the case with LibreOffice 7.2 (or LibreOffice 7.2 Community to give the software its full title.
In Writer, the suite's word processor, it is now possible to include clickable links in tables of contents and indices, and there have been improvements to the important and exporting of PDFs. When mail-merging, a helpful error is display if there is a link to a non-existent data source, and there have been speed improvements to font rendering.
In the Calc spreadsheet tool, there is a redesigned Special Paste dialog, and numerous improvements to the autofill function. Some of the built in functions (CELL(), RAWSUBTRACT() and ROUND ()) have been tweak, and there have been various speed optimizations implemented.
For both Impress and Draw, there are new templates to choose from, but there are also some that have been removed. It is now possible to have multi-column text boxes in presentations, and the rendering of large images has been sped up.
But this is just scratching the surface. There are so many changes in LibreOffice 7.2 that is an increasingly viable Microsoft Office alternative for anyone on a budget.
The office suite is available for not only Windows, but also macOS and Linux, making it ideal for individuals and businesses working across different platforms.
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