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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: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:58PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:58PM (#462135) Journal

    One of the most attractive factors of LibreOffice is that there is no ridiculous "ribbon" UI. Why would they waste development time making one?

    First off, lots of people actually like the Ribbon in MS Office. (I don't get it, either. I've always hated the Ribbon. But I'm not going to pretend there aren't people who want this option. Look at the LibreOffice forums and you'll see posts for many years about it.)

    But, setting all of that aside, one of the primary motivations for people to migrate away from MS Office a decade ago was because LibreOffice (then OpenOffice) looked similar to the UI they were used to. Most people don't adapt well to new interfaces -- they just want to get stuff done, and Microsoft's decision to revamp its UI completely disrupted that for many people. Hence, as you rightly note, a good "selling point" for LibreOffice/OpenOffice was that it looked familiar.

    Well, guess what? It's been a DECADE since MS put the Ribbon in. There's a whole young generation of computer users who basically never used anything else in an office suite. And if you want to attract them to migrate to an open-source free alternative, most will want to keep using a similar UI to what they're used to (just as the people fleeing MS Office a decade ago did).

    If LibreOffice did NOT do it, they'd risk becoming increasingly difficult for migration from MS Office users (who already tend to be put off by minor incompatibility and formatting issues).

    That effort could have been spent better elsewhere, and now it makes LibreOffice scream like an imitation of MS Office rather than being its own "office" suite solution that's an alternative.

    Here's the reality -- most people don't give a flying crap about any potential "advantages" LibreOffice may have over MS Office other than that it's free. Many of the "advantages" have to do with choices about how more "advanced" functions operate or whatever, stuff that 90%+ people won't ever use as they type up their simple letters or create a budget spreadsheet or whatever. The "advantage" to those people is "free." But if you put up barriers to adoption, like "This won't look like what most people are familiar with in the world's most popular office suite... but GET USED TO IT!" That latter rhetoric sounds more like Microsoft's own perspective on forcing users to adopt their new UI without a choice....

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