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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday February 02 2017, @08:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the that-only-took-10-years dept.

Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports

LibreOffice 5.3 is the newest version of the popular open source Office suite, and one of the "most feature-rich releases in the history of the application".

The Office suite, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, is now also available as a private cloud version, called LibreOffice Online.

LibreOffice, at is[sic] core, is an open source alternative to Microsoft Office. It features Writer, a text editing program similar to Word, Calc, the Excel equivalent, Impress which is similar to PowerPoint, and Draw, which enables you to create graphic documents.

LibreOffice 5.3 ships with a truckload of new features. One of the new features is a new experimental user interface called Notebookbar. This new interface resembles Office's ribbon UI, but is completely optional [submitters emphasis] right now.

In fact, the new user interface is not enabled by default, and if you don't look for it or know where to look, you will probably notice no difference at all to previous versions.

To enable the new Ribbon UI, select View > Toolbar Layout > Notebookbar. The UI you see on the screenshot above is enabled by default, but you may switch it using View > Notebookbar to either Contextual Groups or Contextual Single.

[...] One interesting option that the developers built-in to LibreOffice 5.3 is the ability to sign PDF documents, and to verify PDF document signatures.

[...] The Writer application got some exciting new features. It supports Table styles now for instance, and there is a new Page deck in the sidebar to customize the page settings quickly and directly.

There is also an option to use the new "go to page" box, and arrows in the drawing tools which were not available previously in Writer.

Calc got a new set of default cell styles offering "greater variety and better names", a new median function for pivot tables, and a new filter option when you are inserting functions to narrow down the selection.

The article also has 4 demo videos embedded.

In the comments there, Donutz notes that the Ribbon UI requires the Java Runtime Environment.
Oggy notes that the suite is available from PortableApps. (Martin's site is largely Windows-centric).


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @08:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @08:56PM (#462094)

    The submitter's emphasis was on "completely optional", but I suspect the emphasis should be on "right now"...

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  • (Score: 1) by butthurt on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:29PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:29PM (#462114) Journal

    Does the project have a history of foisting unpopular changes on users? This isn't Microsoft or Mozilla.

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:55PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:55PM (#462132)

      Mozilla didn't either, until suddenly they did.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @10:13PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @10:13PM (#462142)

      The current, trendy thing to do in software is to make major changes, claim they will be optional, and then suddenly the old feature/interface/thing is "deprecated," never mind who uses it. Shortly thereafter it gets a bullet through the head unceremoniously in an arbitrary update. If you are lucky (if you want to call it lucky) you might be informed halfway through the beta that the old feature is going away, or more likely they might quietly drop the "optional" in the description. Otherwise, you can assume the main "warning" you will get is that they put something in the release notes a couple of months before it goes into effect, and it will probably not be noticed by anyone until around a week before it goes into play.

      AFAIK LibreOffice is not known for this, but I don't think they've ever made a change like this before, really. Certainly not to the interface subsystem, and considering the comments in this thread, it's pretty obvious that this is one of the more divisive changes they could have possibly made. Considering the sheer arrogance of some of the comments asserting their way is inherently better and that anyone who disagrees are uncivilized barbarians (granted, that's hyperbole as of this writing, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it becomes literal by the time the comments stop coming), people have every right and reason to wonder, especially since I doubt many, if any, here have any idea of what the thoughts are in the development team on the future of either interface, or whatever political sacred cows it may be tied to.

      Also, contrary to popular belief, the fact that it's OSS doesn't "save" it - it takes a lot of knowledge, time and resources to make effective changes to large software projects like this. Not everyone is a developer, and just being able to write code doesn't mean one has the time or energy to learn the ins and outs of a large software project such as LibreOffice in order to make meaningful changes. While OSS projects are free to run themselves as they wish, in the end, these sort of changes will only hurt the projects (and their user base, before it's alienated). In the end, many may find themselves out of a userbase outright, or in some cases relegated to a relatively small group of ideological purists, not unlike many Apple fans who are now used to this sort of change. Unlike Apple, however, they won't be making billions for their trouble.