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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).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @04:01AM
The issue is that ribbon is MS Office specific and requires you to spend time learning how to use it in order to get marginal benefit. If you applied the same amount of effort learning shortcut keys you'd get even better results. But, with ribbon, you're forced to jump through hoops if you want to do anything that isn't statistically determined to be the most common thing to be doing.
What's more, because of the pictorial representation, it winds up taking up a ton of space and forces you to move the mouse all over the place in order to make your selection.
Proper UI for desktop apps was largely perfected in the late '90s early '00s with a menu bar on the top of the application and each entry being roughly sorted into categories that were themselves stored in menus. For the most part, you'd know that if you were looking for one type of function or another you could reliably guess where it was without having to know. You could navigate it efficiently with just keys if you wanted to, but if you wanted to use the mouse, you didn't have to move it very far. Just compare the distance the mouse has to move with the ribbon compared with the distance you have to move it with traditional menus and you'll realize just how inefficient the ribbon is.