Berlin, July 28, 2017 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.4, the last major release of the LibreOffice 5.x family, immediately available for Windows, macOS and Linux, and for the cloud. LibreOffice 5.4 adds significant new features in every module, including the usual large number of incremental improvements to Microsoft Office file compatibility.
Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", LibreOffice developers have focused on file simplicity as the ultimate document interoperability sophistication. This makes ODF and OOXML files written by the free office suite more robust and easier to exchange with other users than the same documents generated by other office suites.
Thanks to the efforts of developers, the XML description of a new document written by LibreOffice is 50% smaller in the case of ODF (ODT), and around 90% smaller in the case of OOXML (DOCX), in comparison with the same document generated by the leading proprietary office suite. Additional details in the file simplicity backgrounder: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/5Oe8guDN0XSS7h8.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Saturday July 29 2017, @10:21AM (2 children)
On the one hand it's good that LibreOffice produces smaller files, but then given the totally insane XML that MS Office generates (try looking at the raw XML for a DOCX some time), crowing about this is a bit like making fun of the village idiot.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @03:05PM (1 child)
Just remember that the village idiot has 75% approval rating on desktop... thanks to people's ignorance and inertia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @06:30AM
It's sort of a self-perpetuating cycle. In IT, we know that the vast majority users expect Outlook, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, so we only offer full support for those programs. I know that I, for one, do not want to support the user who wants to show how technically-inclined and smart they are by using LibreOffice but will put forth about zero effort to learn it on their own and regularly demonstrate ignorance of the features Word and Excel have.
I wonder who decided that you need to be smrt to use a computer and that anybody who uses a computer without needing their hand held every five minutes must be rly smrt.
So also add stupidity to that list. Not because you have to be smrt to use a computer, but because of the people who are too stupid to realize that their notion that using a computer makes one a mathematical genius to rival the greats of history is wildly inaccurate.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ledow on Saturday July 29 2017, @11:16AM (1 child)
Stop faffing about and link to the only thing that matters with Libreoffice:
The proper, full, examples-in-picture, best-ever changelogs:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.4 [documentfoundation.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Saturday July 29 2017, @05:11PM
I don't care for those release notes. At all.
The release notes focus mostly on shiny new features. I really don't care too much about new features - I care about compatibility fixes. These are hardly mentioned in these "proper" release notes.
The only way to see those is to manually walk through the release candidates' bugfixes, e.g.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.0/RC3#List_of_fixed_bugs [documentfoundation.org]. And from there go back to RC2, RC1 and before.
Bonus: that is *much* more informative than that other list.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lester on Saturday July 29 2017, @01:46PM (2 children)
File size is good accomplishment, but that's not the most important.
What about about slowness? What about buggy import OOXML? What about little buggy things like unexpected tables behavior?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @03:08PM (1 child)
Slowness? Sure, on a 386 running off a rusty HDD.
Buggy import OOXML? The problem with OOXML is the export (on other office suites), Micro$oft doesn't follow its own "standard".
Care to elaborate on the tables thing?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 30 2017, @05:22PM
If your computer has a non-rusty HDD then you have a bigger problem on your hands (SSDs being an unrelated technology)
(Score: 2) by tadas on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:57PM (4 children)
Wake me up when they add Outline mode to the word processor. It's the only reason I keep using Word.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @06:55PM (3 children)
What's that?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Saturday July 29 2017, @08:12PM (2 children)
Outstanding feature request from about 2002, back in OO days: https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959 [apache.org]
Masses of discussion on it at that link, also most voted feature request at one point (think it might still be but it's been closed now), indicating a lot of interest in it. But not from those doing the dev. Same situation in LO now, I think (I've stopped bothering to keep up with it). Based on number of votes and the discussions, and comparing to those for other "missing" features, there are quite a lot of users who are still using MS Office solely for this reason. Looks like there's at least two on this forum...
Basically, if you know what it is and use it (in Word or other software), you won't want to work without it for anything other than very short documents. If you don't know, then you won't understand what's so good about it or what you are missing and will probably suggest some entirely dissimilar feature in LO as a substitute.
Bit like if you've never been skiing you won't really understand why people want to chuck themselves down a snow covered mountain with a bit of wood strapped to each foot, but you can see there's a mode in LO where you strap a skateboard to each foot and push yourself round a grass track, so that should be equivalent (and less cold) so that means "CLOSED WONT-FIX".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:15PM (1 child)
Outlining does exist. Its just the Name and minor features that differs.
Its not done quite as slickly as Old versions of Word, but it works similar. Perhaps it is as close as patents will let them get.
Its called Navigator. Uses buttons to move paragraphs up/down/left-right rather than drag and drop. Other than that it does everything outline mode did.
Probably the discussion died down because its good enough, at least if you are open minded enough to stop reading the MS Word manual when trying to figure out how LO works.
I've had tp maintain several big-ish user manuals in Word/Office and Migrated them all to LO over the years. This simply hasn't been an issue.
I've also written new manuals completely in LO, starting from an outline.
Open you mind, Close your wallet.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday July 30 2017, @10:25PM
Navigator is not outline view. There are countless examples already written of why navigator is not an outline view, both in that bug report and elsewhere (LO has a bug for it too), but don't take my word for it, take the word of the developers themselves:
"the whole Writer team agrees with you that the Outline View is one of the most important missing features in Writer" ( https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959#c54 [apache.org] )
"I suggest those who find outlines to be an indispensible feature find a product where the feature is available. Here it is at best available someday in an indefinite and very speculative future." ( https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959#c299 [apache.org] )
Or look at:
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/FAQ/Writer/FormattingPagesAndDocuments/What_is_the_equivalent_of_MSO_outline_mode_in_OpenOffice.org%3F [openoffice.org]
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer_Views [openoffice.org]
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer/View_Concepts [openoffice.org]
Pretty sure that is not the MS Word manual I have open in those links, but maybe the people who wrote those pages don't know how OO/LO works either?
Patents are not the problem, you are just showing your ignorance there. Decent outliners predated Word and have been produced since, including open source. Impress apparently has a good one (never used it myself so I have no opinion on it) such that several requesters were simply saying "put the Impress outline view in Writer".
The discussion died down because it became clear no one was going to fix this, to my knowledge that has not changed and as far as I am aware carries over to LO. The real problem, as admitted by the developers (or those who were the developers) is that the architecture of Writer, which dates back to its origin in a commercial product, is simply not up to the job without major refactoring work, so it isn't going to happen, probably no one even knows how to start it after the teams and development efforts fractured and stalled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @08:55PM
keep up the good work!
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Saturday July 29 2017, @10:16PM (2 children)
Even though some people will always manage to find a feature that they don't like, I'm very happy with LibreOffice, using Calc and Writer on a daily basis for a lot of different tasks. That includes opening, editing, and returning a lot of routine MS Word documents.
Are there some exotic things that LO can't handle as well as MS Office? No doubt. Are they things that 95% of users are likely to want? Probably not.
I remember the bad old days of early OpenOffice, have to say that LO is pretty damned impressive, and in my experience rock solid. I literally can't think of the last time that I had a problem with it.
Besides, if you don't want to pay money to Microsoft you're pretty much limited to Google Docs. Shudder. Some of us remember the time when you had a real choice in Word Processors.
(incidentally, am writing this on a fresh install of Pop OS, an Ubuntu variant from System 76 [system76.com] and am really liking the simplicity.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @10:34PM
NOT just works: cross references.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @10:43PM
Furthermore, to add an alternative to LO. You can buy CrossOver for $20 and MS Office 20xx for $10 on eBay and it works OK. Not as good as vintage XP + office 2002 but as long as you remember to save every few minutes you won't get bit by the crashes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @06:46PM
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91415 [documentfoundation.org]
Gonna continue using 4.3.7.2 until this is fixed.
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Monday July 31 2017, @04:18PM
Did they fix the issue with librecalc not saving data validity properly in MSoffice formats and vice versa? I currently have to manually update two separate versions of a massive spreadsheet because the two programs don't like each other's version of data validity. One copy for people with MSOffice (worked on in Excel in Windows to xlsx) and one copy for people without (worked on in LibreCalc in Linux to ods).