The Document Foundation has revealed that the first Release Candidate for the LibreOffice 5.0.3 branch has been released and is now available for download.

The developers from The Document Foundation are not wasting any time, and they continue to greatly improve the 5.0.x branch of the famous open source office suite. Even if LibreOffice 5.0 has been named the best release in the series, it doesn't mean that it's perfect. If anything, the two point releases that have been launched already have improved the suite even more.

LibreOffice 5.0 has been downloaded millions of times, so its makers are under a lot of pressure to find and fix all the bugs that have been reported until now. It's a difficult task, and it will take a while to get everything sorted out, but this is how it happens. They push a new RC out the door, people test it, and the devs quickly move to other things.

LibreOffice 5.0.3 RC1 is ready for testing

As usual, the first RC in the series is quite extensive, and there is a lot of stuff going on. It's important to remember that only fixes are added and users won't find any new features. This time around, it looks like it's a mix of fixes for various components and the UI.

According to the changelog, a number of DOCX problems have been repaired, the bullets formatting is no longer destroyed when saving as .pptx, shortcuts are now properly displayed in the toolbar, saving big files no longer crashes the application, and some problems with AutoCalculate have been corrected.

Additionally, some GTK+ 3.x fixes have been implemented, the Breeze icons no longer appear in the Sifr theme, switching between Style and Formatting tabs no longer changes the document status to modified, and lots of other issues have been fixed.

You can download LibreOffice 5.0.3 RC1 right now from Softpedia. Please keep in mind that it's a development version, and it's not meant for production machines. Also, you shouldn't install and run this version alongside the stable one.