Best Free Software
www.libreoffice.org What you need: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10, macos or Linux
Libreoffice 7.2
Libreoffice has just been updated with a long list of improvements, making our favourite free office suite even more useful. Many of the tweaks affect background processes, boosting the suite’s speed and stability, while others make it work better when you import Microsoft Office files such as DOCX (Word) and XLSX (Excel). It’s still not perfect, though, and if you open and save complex documents between Office and Libreoffice, you may occasionally encounter formatting errors.
Version 7.2 adds a new dark theme, a pop-up list of menu commands and a new List View for browsing templates. The word processor, Writer, now lets you add links in tables of contents and indices, which is useful when creating long documents. You can also apply background fills that cover the full page, extending beyond the margins – although this doesn’t affect margins imposed by your printer. If you use Writer’s mail merge tool, you’ll now see a warning if you fail to link to a data source containing names and addresses.
A new Autofilter option in Calc, the spreadsheet tool, lets you filter a spreadsheet’s contents by text colour or background colour, and is available in the Data menu. There’s also a new ‘fat cross’ cursor that’s easier to see – you can turn this on in Options.
Both Impress (Libreoffice’s equivalent of Microsoft Powerpoint), and Draw (its drawing program), gain new templates - Candy, Freshes, Grey Elegant, Growing Liberty and Yellow Idea (see below). Text boxes now allow for multiple columns in each box, which is a major improvement, because it means you don’t have to create a separate box for each column of text.
There’s also a special version of Libreoffice for new Mac computers equipped with Apple Silicon (M1 chips). You can download it from www.snipca.com/39268, although its developers warn that it’s an early build and shouldn’t be used for “critical work”.