The Document Foundation has released the first release candidate (RC1) of the upcoming LibreOffice 7.2, which includes a lot of work to improve the compatibility of the open source office suite with Microsoft Office. Analyzing the release notes, The Register noted that the main changes in this release are the dozens of fixes and improvements to the open source office suite's ability to import and export documents in proprietary Microsoft Office formats. In addition to improving filters to handle proprietary document formats like DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, the popular alternative version of Microsoft Office also adds support for importing files in Windows image-only formats, namely WMF and EMF.
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Many of the features in the detailed release notes, The Register notes that most of the news is minor tweaks and bug fixes. Several, however, were the result of collaboration between various business entities that make up the LibreOffice ecosystem. For example, the functionality to create a multi-column layout in text boxes, which is debuting in this release, was co-developed by SUSE and Collabora, who also work together to provide sales support services across the office suite. Another great new feature in the release is for the LibreOffice development community and comes in the form of a developer tools panel for inspecting Universal Network Objects (UNO). UNO is the LibreOffice Component Model and would perform a similar function to the Component Object Model (COM) in Microsoft Office. The feature is the result of work by the Collabora developers in response to a call for tenders launched by LibreOffice last year. through registration