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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).


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:53PM (#462128)

    Everything had a shortcut with few exceptions for things people didn't routinely do prior to the invention of the ribbon. The ribbon itself makes it a lot harder to discover things as the organization is a complete mess. It's roughly ordered by type of thing to do and then it's purely a matter of statistics about what is in there.

    The result is that you don't have any obvious way of figuring out what's where or even if it's in the interface at all. If all you ever do is things that everybody spends their whole day doing, then the ribbon probably isn't that big of a deal, but it can take ages to figure out where things are if you don't already know. And it certainly doesn't help you remember where they are.

    Some things are the way they are because that's the best way of doing it. Just because there's a newer method doesn't automatically make it better. The older system was relatively consistent between programs and so you didn't need to spend a lot of time figuring out where things were, in most cases there'd be 2 or 3 places to look and you'd generally find it in that first or second spot. No need to learn how to use a program apart from functionality specific to the program because you could easily find most things without having to think.

    A UI isn't supposed to be front and center.

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  • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday February 02 2017, @10:13PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Thursday February 02 2017, @10:13PM (#462143) Journal

    I wouldn't exactly call the menus well organized either. Same thing. If you don't already know where it is, you're going to have a hell of a time finding it.

    I also don't see how the ribbon is any more front and center than the menu. It's bigger, but they both take up space. Plus, if I pull down a menu, then it hides what's behind it. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but the ribbon stays put.

    There are only two programs I use that have things in relatively the same places in their menus: the old Office menu and LibreOffice. So I'm not sure what all these other programs are that have the same menu options as well.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday February 02 2017, @11:34PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Thursday February 02 2017, @11:34PM (#462180)

      Apple went to some effort to standardize pull-down menus:
      Menu Bar Menus [apple.com]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @04:08AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @04:08AM (#462231)

      Yes, but there's a solution to the imperfect organization of menus that doesn't require dumping it for something that's far less efficient.

      Yes, the menu does cover things up, but when has that ever been a problem? Most of the time it only covers a small part of the screen and most of the time there's a short cut listed anyways. So, if it happens to cover something important, you can remember the shortcut for half a second while you type it after closing the menu.

      Virtually all programs use the same set of menu items with relatively little variation. You're obviously not somebody who's computer literate if you're suggesting that old MS Office and Libreoffice were the only ones, because most wordprocessors used the same one as did most software in general. That was a huge advantage. You didn't really have to take a class to start using most programs as the basics were all in the menu bar. Classes for computers were mostly for the purpose of mastering their efficient use and getting to the more complicated tasks.

      What's more, for a mouse driven interface, the ribbon is even worse as it requires that you move the mouse all over the screen to use. The shortcut keys aren't listed next to the items and you do have to move the mouse a much farther distance if you need to access anything in the ribbon.

      People who like the ribbon are mostly people who weren't computer literate to begin with. People who were computer literate actually understood how the interface worked and didn't have any trouble getting around in it. You shouldn't have to guess where it's located, scan a quarter of the screen trying to figure out if it's there and if it is there, if there's an option it's hidden under. That's terrible UI designed and MS ought to be ashamed of themselves for having loosed it on the world.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday February 03 2017, @03:44PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Friday February 03 2017, @03:44PM (#462439) Journal

      Yeah, because 'HOME' is so much more logical as a label for text formatting options than 'FORMAT'...
      Well, except the formatting options that aren't under 'HOME' that show up under 'LAYOUT', which makes a bit of sense, although there's also some under 'DESIGN' -- although you better not get used to finding it on those tabs since they aren't always present. And several options appear in both or all three locations, because even Microsoft knows there's no logical place to put it so they just put it everywhere...

      And then you go to 'Page layout' and change the spacing...and instead of applying to the PAGE, as you would expect from PAGE layout, it only modifies the selected paragraph. And you can add a footer from references, but ONLY a footer -- if you want a header, you have to go to insert.