Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:05PM (#462099)

    Presumably because one of the flaws in the OSS ideology is that most people aren't programmers, and most who are do not have the time, energy, knowledge or commitment to make what are potentially large changes to a project that might take months to understand well enough to be able to meaningfully contribute to it. Worse yet, considering that this is apparently a new thrust for development, the would-be contributor is undertaking a project that might very well threaten what might be a sacred cow to the internal developer politics, which means that, assuming anyone notices it exists and that it will nit become a tool used in internal bickering, it won't be taken into the main project, and the patches this would-be contributor would add suddenly become a a second job to maintain. And it's even worse if it results in a full fledged fork.

    As a result, the person says screw it and sticks with an older version or just goes to Office, because if LibreOffice is going to ditch a major feature that differentiates the two products, then you might as well go with the market leader and just bypass compatability problems between LibreOffice and the rest of the world.

    Now, I don't know what kind of skill parent poster has, but OSS is no magic panacea, even if it is a good idea. In many cases the OSS aspects are of more interest to organizations scared of being marooned with proprietary software than individuals who have little in the way of time, knowledge, or resources to make their own changes.

    Simply put, OSS software is going to be compared to commercial software and unless the authors are willing to acknowledge this their project may well be doomed to obscurity and obsolescence, ironically giving commercial competitors a leg up. The idea that most users can modify their own software (never mind the size of some of the most important OSS projects being far larger now than then) may have been true in the 1980s where OSS took root in garages and CS departments running large Unix systems. The world does not work that way anymore and hasn't for a long time.

    I have used Linux for many years, as well as other OSS projects. OSS is a great idea. But the simple fact is that one of its strengths is simply not what they think it is, and if project maintainers adopt that attitude, they're ultimately undermining their own ideology and work by highlighting its greatest weakness.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=4, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Total=6
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Thursday February 02 2017, @11:18PM

    by jimtheowl (5929) on Thursday February 02 2017, @11:18PM (#462171)
    That is a lot of effort to portray OSS has having to catch up with features in commercial software when the topic at hamd is that the said feature is disliked and unwanted by most.

    It is almost as if those commercial entities are financing and pushing those changes over to OSS so that they can cover all avenues and force those 'features' down our throats regardless of whether we buy their products, perhaps in the very hope that we will abandon OSS software and join their ranks. Now that I think of it, decreased product quality has been the modus operandi of corporate America from lightbulbs to washing machines. Perhaps there is a perceived need to extend this to software.

    "But the simple fact is that one of its strengths is simply not what they think it is, and if project maintainers adopt that attitude.."

    Your making blanket statements without justifying or explaining anything. Please consider that at least some readers here have the ability to think by themselves and will not just accept your 'facts' because you say it is so.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04 2017, @08:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04 2017, @08:09PM (#462922)

      "But the simple fact is that one of its strengths is simply not what they think it is, and if project maintainers adopt that attitude.."

      Your making blanket statements without justifying or explaining anything. Please consider that at least some readers here have the ability to think by themselves and will not just accept your 'facts' because you say it is so.

      Poster of the comment you replied to, here.

      The fact that you zoom in on this statement makes me wonder if you even read the post. I am not advocating for or against the ribbon. In fact, I think that it is a very, very bad idea for them to abandon the menu bar (if that is in fact what they do, it's too early to tell now). Rather, I am responding to the attitude of OSS projects that are along the lines of, "if you want to change it, then change it yourself," which is highly impractical for the vast majority of computer users today. This was not so much the case when it was first conceived, in the environment in which it was conceived, but it is now. It is the right of the project developer to run their project the way they want to, but this attitude will do very little to help a project building mainstream desktop software to get traction, popularity, or new contributors.

      Nor was I really saying anything for or against corporations involving themselves in OSS. I was simply stating that, in the large business context, a main feature is that a business CAN build on an OSS project with less concern than many proprietary products, because they are not stranded if a proprietary software producer goes belly up on them or goes completely off the deep end. The corporations you're referring to are likely software companies sticking their noses into OSS to promote their own agenda, which is not a good thing, but it's also not really what I was getting at. I was getting at the "change it yourself" feature of OSS being attractive to certain groups of adopters. Today, at least for mainstream desktop OSS, that feature would be more attractive to businesses that can afford to hire programmers to do the modifications and updates they need, as opposed to a desktop user who not only can't afford to hire programmers, but in most cases can't program themselves. An attitude - note, attitude, not the option via source code availability to change OSS itself - of "you want it changed, do it yourself," suggests that this feat is practical for most modern computer users. It is not, and it hasn't been for quite some time. Even for those who can, complicated software development isn't something you can just hurl yourself into, but may require weeks or months of study of the code. In most cases, you can't just bang out 25 lines, throw it into the program, and call it a day, confident it won't need to be touched for ten years, nor can you even be confident that your work will be accepted into the main project if it goes against the internal developer politics (which can be, in a word, ugly). This attitude might be more practical for developer-oriented projects where the user base is likely heavily technically inclined with a very tight-knit community of users and developers, but LibreOffice is a product that would be front-and-center of interest to the stereotypical "grandma" that many people use as a test and example for software ease-of-use.

      Unless, of course, you are aware of evidence that the majority of software users are capable of, and willing to, make large-scale changes to OSS? Because if you've got evidence of that, I'd really love to know, since it'd be a game changer for the entire computer industry. Most of the people I know who are not explicitly trained (by themselves or formally) in programming have little to no familiarity with it or software development as a whole.