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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @01:26AM
Every single item on the ribbon has a shortcut key. You don't tell a person to click on a bunch of things, you tell them to press four keys and you're done.
It amazes me the hate for the ribbon. People are simply hating just because they want to. Don't like it taking up space? Turn on auto-hide. Don't want it to be dynamic? Turn that feature off. Back when we used menus, there were constant complaints about the menus being too long (having to hover over the little arrow to scroll the menu, forgotten that?), nested menus making it too hard to find something, constant complaints about not perfectly moving the mouse from one menu to another sub-menu so your place 3 menus deep suddenly closes and you have to start over again. Etc... Now all the whining is from people too ignorant to learn how to use the tool's they're using. All the real UI complaints are gone.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @03:38AM
Every single item on the ribbon has a shortcut key
I see 3 possible tracks out of the scenario I presented:
1) The guy being helped has a great memory and remembers the keystroke sequence from that point onward.
2) He has the presence of mind to say, "Wait a moment while I write this stuff down."
3) He doesn't write it down, doesn't have have a particularly good memory, and, the next time he encounters the same thing, he's right back to scrolling through goofy-looking icons that are devoid of meaning to anyone except the guy who created those graphics.
Which do you think will be most common?
I agree with the folks who like regular old dropdown menus with the shortcuts printed right beside the clickable commands.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14 2017, @02:15AM
When you press Alt, all the shortcut keys are displayed next to their icons. You only need to remember one key: Alt