Software Update: LibreOffice 7.3.0 RC 1

The Document Foundation is developing version 7.3 of LibreOffice and has now released the first release candidate. This open source office package originated as a fork of OpenOffice and comes with the word processor Writer, spreadsheet program Calc, presentation program Impress, drawing program Draw, database program Base and Formula, an application for making scientific notations.

Version 7.3, which should be released in the first week of February, will make it possible, among other things, to link hyperlinks to shapes and the changes that have been made will be better tracked. We can also expect performance improvements and the usual improvements related to the import and export of Microsoft Office files.

Detailed information about the changes we may find therein can be found at: this page below are the improvements made to Writer, Calc and Presentation so far.

writer

General improvements

• Hyperlinks can now be attached to shapes tdf#123626 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)
• Footnote and endnote anchors in the end of a paragraph are now treated exactly as they already were treated in the middle for the purposes of search/replace with regular expressions, ie they match [\p{Control}] or [:control:] regular expression. That means that they need to be taken into account when matching text against end-of-paragraph tdf#137737 (Mike Kaganski, Collabora)
• Start of list level support in Writer paragraph styles blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
• Start of linked character and paragraph styles blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)

Tracked text moving

During track changes, show moved text in green color and with double strikethrough or underlines to speed up reviewing. Add new tooltip captions and Manage Changes Action icons for tracked text moving. Re-ordered list elements or changed paragraph or sentence order is more visible this way. Tracked moving is detected at Move Up/Down, drag & drop, cut & paste and deletion + re-typing, also during ODT and DOCX import (including documents created with editors which lack of tracked text moving support, like Google Docs or web version or Microsoft Office). tdf#145233 tdf#145718 tdf#145719 tdf#145721 (László Nemeth, NISZ)

Tracked list item moved by Move Down, with new tooltip caption and Manage Changes Action icons

Other improvements in track changes

• Track change or paragraph style tdf#144272 (László Nemeth, NISZ)
• Track insertion of empty table rows tdf#143358 (László Nemeth, NISZ)
• Track deletion of empty table rows tdf#143359 (László Nemeth, NISZ)
• Track changes: hide deleted table rows and tables in Hide Changes mode. Previously it was possible to “hide” them only by accepting all the deletions, because Hide Changes mode hid only the cell content, but not the deleted rows and tables, leaving empty rows and tables in the document tdf#144057 (László Nemeth, NISZ)
• Fixed table formula calculation at track changes tdf#39828 (László Nemeth, NISZ)
• Track changes: fix table deletion at paragraph join tdf#144058 (László Nemeth, NISZ)
• Track changes: keep format of hints. When a text has multiple character formatting settings enabled and a new one is applied with tracked changes, only one of the former settings is restored upon rejecting the changes. tdf#144173 (László Nemeth, NISZ)
• Track format changes of the actual word. If there is no text selection, character formattings are applied on the word under the text cursor, now with storing the original direct character formatting in a redline “extra data” for rejection of the tracked formatting change. tdf#143939 (László Nemeth, NISZ)
• Show bullet and numbering changes at the moved list item, not at the next one. tdf#145068 (László Nemeth, NISZ)

A list item moved by Move Down: show changes only in two items, not in four items.

Performance

• Increased an opening speed for DOCX files with over 200 pages long table tdf#135683 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
• Increased a PDF export speed of some complex documents tdf#125892 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
• Speed ​​up loading large RTL documents tdf#64991 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
• Improved rendering speed with some complex documents core commit 71429b93†core commit d13b63a9 (Lubos Luňák, Collabora)

calc

General improvements

• The “Link to External Data” dialogue (Sheet ▸ Link to External Data…) now lists HTML tables in the order they appear in the source. tdf#142600 (Andreas Heinisch)
• Neumaier summation algorithm⁠ was implemented for using modern SIMD CPU instructions like AVX2 tdf#142307 (Dante Domenech)
• Whitespace line feed and character tabulation in cell formula expressions are now preserved and survive round-tripping between OOXML and ODF file formats. Tabs however can not be entered in the cell input UI and are converted to one space character. tdf#76310 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
• CSV import/export support a sep=; and “sep=;” field separator setting. When reading CSV the separator is taken from an initial sep=; or “sep=;” single field if that is the only row content. The quoted form is preserved as (unquoted) cell content, of the unquoted form the separator is discarded as contextually it is a real field separator. When writing CSV an existing single top left cell’s content sep=; if that is the only cell in the row is adapted to the current separator in the quoted form “sep=;” (if quotes / text delimiters aren’t set empty …) and always uses the ASCII ” double quote character. If the line containing the sep=; is not to be imported as data (and thus also is not preserved when re- saving) then the From row number in the dialog must be set to 2. tdf#117868 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
• A new Evaluate formulas option in the CSV Import and Paste Special and Text to Column dialog determines whether formula expressions starting with a † equal sign character are to be evaluated as formulas or imported as textual data. In the programmatic FilterOptions string this is the 13th parameter (token 12) with arguments either false or true. tdf#114878 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
• Bash like autocompletion for Calc autoinput was implemented. tdf#145198 (Dennis Francis, Collabora)
• Support Color Filter in “Standard Filter” dialog tdf#143103 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)
• Queries and filters using some text-based operations such as ‘contains’ now properly work even with numeric data core commit 71429b93 (Lubos Luňák, Collabora)
• Quick find will now search for values ​​instead of formulas (the search dialog offers both options). tdf#1012506 (Julian Nabet)

Changed spreadsheet functions

• Option “Search criteria = and <> must apply to whole cells” has been fixed to apply properly in lookup functions when turned off (tdf#139612† For better performance it is recommended to leave the option on unless partial cell matching is required. (Lubos Luňák, Collabora)
• The IF() function now unconditionally propagates the condition’s error value, if any. Previously a given ELSE-path was executed as the condition is never TRUE on error, which wasn’t significant unless the ELSE was an error evaluating function like IFERROR() or ISERROR() or other IS…() functions.
  This changes behavior of an undocumented side effect, so might break existing expressions that (unwillingly?) relied on it. tdf#146377 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)

Performance

• Improved speed of some XLSM files opening tdf#95549 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
• Speedup inserting large charts (for over 800000 cells) tdf#144052 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
• Improved speed of some XLSX files opening tdf#130795 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
• Improved speed of lookup functions in some cases tdf#139444†tdf#144249 (Lubos Luňák, Collabora)
• Improved speed for filtering by Autofilter tdf#133835† tdf#133867 (Noel Grandin, Lubos Luňák, Collabora)
• Improved use of threads for Calc calculations core commit a0e27322† core commit 871d5fe3 (Lubos Luňák, Collabora)

Impress & Draw

General improvements

• New bullet mode editing behavior has been added. More info in this blog post (Gokce Kuler)
• Added PowerPoint compatible screen size tdf#116374 (Jun Nogata). “Widescreen” is used in current PowerPoint, “On screen show” is used in previous PowerPoint and Google Slides. †see here) If you create a file with these sizes, the exported file will be treated as a preset size instead of a user size. It will also be treated as a preset size when you import it.
• Unshare shape properties for the same type before insertion blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
• tdf#140321 (Regina Henschel) The dialog “3D-Settings” opens if you toggle a shape to “Extrusion on”. The dialog has a drop-down list “Surface” with items “Wire Frame”, “Matt”, “Plastic” and “Metal”. In the old version the items “Matt”, “Plastic” and “Metal” did nothing, but the solid was always rendered as “Plastic”. Now you get different surfaces. “Matt” is really matte. “Metal” is similar to “Plastic” but has more contrast. Unfortunately the old versions have written wrong and invalid values ​​into the file. Such values ​​might result in unwanted rendering now. To repair such shapes, mark the shape, then first switch to item “Matt” and then to “Plastic” or “Metal” respectively.