[tdf-announce] The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3

Berlin, August 8, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice
6.3, a feature-rich major release of the LibreOffice 6 family with
better performance, a large number of new and improved features, and
enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats:

• Writer and Calc performance has been improved by an order of magnitude
based on documents provided by end users: text files with different
bookmarks, tables and embedded fonts, large ODS/XLSX spreadsheets, and
Calc files with VLOOKUP load and render more quickly. Saving Calc
spreadsheets as XLS files is also faster.

• The Tabbed Compact version of the NotebookBar user interface,
introduced in LibreOffice 6.2, is now available for Writer, Calc,
Impress and Draw. It leaves more space for user documents, spreadsheets
and presentations on laptops with wide screens. In addition, the new
Contextual Single UI is ready for Writer and Draw.

• In Calc, a new drop-down widget in the formula bar replaces the old
Sum tool, giving the user quick access to the most frequently used
functions. Also, a new FOURIER function has been added, to compute the
discrete Fourier transform of an input array.

• Export as PDF has been improved with the support for the standard
PDF/A-2 document format, which is required by several organizations for
long term file storage. In addition, the design of editable PDF forms
has been simplified with the addition of the Form menu to Writer, to
further improve one of LibreOffice strongest features.

• Documents can now be redacted to remove or hide sensitive information
such as personal data before exporting or sharing the file, to help
companies or organisations to comply with regulations.

• On Windows, a proper console mode was added, with better output and
error codes. This makes it easier to use LibreOffice to perform batch
operations such as printing or converting many documents.

• Interoperability with Microsoft Office proprietary file formats has
been improved in several areas with export support for DOTX document
templates and XLTX spreadsheet templates, import of charts from DOCX
drawingML group shapes, import/export of SmartArt from PPTX files, to
preserve editing capabilities in PowerPoint, and better XLSX Pivot table
interoperability.

LibreOffice 6.3's new features have been developed by a large community
of code contributors: 65% of commits are from developers employed by
companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB,
plus other organizations, and 35% are from individual volunteers.

In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking
care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software
localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help
system and documentation, plus free software and open document standards
advocacy.

A video summarizing the top new features of LibreOffice 6.3 is available
on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIBjmHSHs-w

*LibreOffice for individual users*

LibreOffice 6.3 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for
open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology
enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. The Document Foundation
does not provide any technical support to users, although they can get
help from other users on mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website.

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 maintains the LibreOffice 6.2
family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current
version is LibreOffice 6.2.5.

*LibreOffice in business*

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing
LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term
supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and bug
fixes, and other benefits. Also, the work done by ecosystem partners
flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

Also, support for migrations and trainings should be sourced from
certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend
the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT
managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set,
strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term
support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution
for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free
themselves from vendor lock-in.

*Availability of LibreOffice 6.3*

LibreOffice 6.3 is immediately available from the following link:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for
proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple
macOS 10.9. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are
available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service, and should be
installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate.
It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services
offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can
support The Document Foundation with a donation at
https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 6.3 is built with document conversion libraries from the
Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

*Press Kit*

The press kit, with background documents - Hybrid PDF, opened from
within LibreOffice can be edited as normal ODT files - and
high-resolution images, is here:
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/g4zsogp5qxE9bdH

*Blog Post*

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2019/08/08/tdf-announces-libreoffice-63/

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