SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:51PM
>"One of the most attractive factors of LibreOffice is that there is no ridiculous "ribbon" UI."
I agree, but the reason for adding it as an option is to attract converts who are used to using that UI.
I always believed that the reason that Microsoft came out with the ribbon in the first place was not to make it easier to use (I think they have given up on that?) but because alternatives like Open Office and Libre Office were getting far too close in form and function and they feared more and more people would notice that. Therefore they suddenly had a whole new interface so that captured users would hesitate more to use the "unfamiliar" alternatives. And please don't start in about how one can do such and such in MS Office blah, blah, blah you can't in the alternatives. Most people don't care. They barely use any of the basic formatting features, let alone anything more advanced, and god forbid they actually discover a "cool" feature or it ends up in everything they do, whether appropriate or helpful or not.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday February 03 2017, @01:18AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday February 05 2017, @10:13PM
If LibreOffice looks more like MS Office N than MS Office N+1 does, then that makes it easier to switch at your next upgrade cycle.
It did and it did, but much as most people won't change from defaults within familiar software, they won't change from familiar software names either. Especially if they have to seek out an alternative and install it themselves. Trick them into using it and you'll rarely hear a peep. At one job we were ordered to switch everyone to using Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. We could not force some holdouts to switch until we came up with the simple expedient of making the big blue e link to Firefox rather than IE. They all switched then and we never heard a single word of protest. I assume they all considered it as one of those upgrades and accepted it.