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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: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @08:22PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @08:28PM
With all that development time being 'wasted' on this ribbon UI, that frees up a spot for you to contribute your skills... why not put your money where your mouth is?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:05PM
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.
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Thursday February 02 2017, @11:18PM
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
"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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @08:31PM
Let me hear an "amen".
The ribbon is one of the most god-awful interface changes Microsoft made to their office suite. It's turned any attempt to use any feature I'm not already familiar with into a painful hunt. (And even features that I use with some frequency turned into a fricking waste of time to hunt down when I was forced to "upgrade".)
That said, there are apparently some not-right-thinking people out there who have been sucked into believing that the cult leaders of Microsoft's UI design actually have a grasp of interface design. If slapping something similar to that bit of nastiness gives them incentive to consider LibreOffice as a viable alternative to MS Office, bring it on. Just make sure it remains perpetually optional for those of us who prefer menus.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zz9zZ on Thursday February 02 2017, @08:43PM
As long as it stays optional then I see zero harm including a ribbon UI for anyone that wants it. Software should be about freedom and choice, hopefully the choices don't get limited or obfuscated the way browsers seem to love so much.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:15PM
That's the problem. Office XP had a barebones version of ribbon in the form of smart menus that would hide things that it didn't expect you to use frequently. The next version, Office 2003, the ribbon came and was mandatory.
The problem with things like ribbons is that once you've paid for developers to create it, either via pay or taking time away from useful work, there's no incentive to maintain duplicate UI and the old one tends to be trashed.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:52PM
The next version, Office 2003, the ribbon came and was mandatory.
Sorry, but 2007 was the version with OOXML and The Ribbon.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:49PM
As long as it stays optional
I guaran-fucking-tee you in 5-10 years it won't be optional anymore.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @09:33AM
As long as it stays optional then I see zero harm including a ribbon UI for anyone that wants it.
If Firefox[1] is anything to go by, the optional feature will become the default, the setting to switch back will be removed, then you'll have to install an extension to get rid of the default feature, and finally the extension API will be broken a few times and then removed.
[1] You know, that other end user focused, copy everything people dislike about the competition project.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:04PM
I'll give you an 'amen', but I would argue that the Windows 8 UI was a catastrophe far worse than the ribbon disaster.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @09:38AM
Two sides of the same coin. The Windows 8/10 UI just took it up to eleven.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @08:37PM
>"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. My guess is that most of the people who hate the ribbon and are able to switch to Libre Office have already done so. Thus lack of a ribbon option is now getting in the way of increasing market share. As long as it is optional, it will be a significant advantage for Libre Office.
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday February 02 2017, @08:48PM
The whole concept of an office suite is completely wrong to begin with. Word is neither fit as a text editor nor as a DTP program. Excel might work ok if you could find anyone that actually uses it as a spreadsheet (I don't know, never seen that happen) but it's normally used as a really shitty substitute for a database. Assume it's implemented flawlessly it's still junk. A perfect implementation of a brain damaged design is still junk.
But it's far from a perfect implementation and it must be absolutely soul-killing for the people that work on these things, to spend your time duplicating Microsofts shitty designs and even duplicating their bugs to maintain compatibility.
This is what chasing the mass market brings you. Because the mass market, and this is no less true in computers than in dozens of other fields, the mass market is a very ignorant thing. It's mostly interested in buying the same thing it bought last year. It worked (to some degree) last year it should work this year. It's really a poor tool for the job? You have a much better one cheaper? Don't care, it's the one we already use, we fear change more than anything. What if we can't figure it out!?!?!?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:13PM
Once the great unwashed hoardes began using computers, applications were bound to be used in unnatural ways that God never intended.
Example:
Back in the mid 1980's when Macintosh was new. A woman went on and on about how much better than Macintosh was for typing her text than using the typewriter. She could backspace and correct mistakes. She could erase entire paragraphs. Or re-arrange paragraphs. Etc.
What was her wonderful word processing software?
.
.
.
.
.
.
Mac Paint
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Murdoc on Saturday February 04 2017, @07:25PM
That is so true. It's bugged me for so long how people do things like using IRC and email for file transfers, or facebook/forum posts like they were IM. Sure they can do it, and it's ok in a pinch, but come on, for regular and large jobs? Use the right tool for the job!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:42PM
But it's far from a perfect implementation and it must be absolutely soul-killing for the people that work on these things, to spend your time duplicating Microsofts shitty designs and even duplicating their bugs to maintain compatibility.
This is an interface thing; there's no need for them to worry about compatibility at all. It's not like the file format system.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday February 03 2017, @05:51AM
As others have mentioned, an obvious reason for adding a ribbon interface is so people migrating from Microsoft Office will have less to learn. For that purpose, the more similar it is in the way it looks and works, the better. Some tasks are done in a fundamentally different way so it won't be possible to make a complete clone.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday February 03 2017, @07:22AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @07:31AM
But would you use instead of a word processor? LaTeX is a lovecraftian madness built upon a monkey patching foundation. Or that's the impression I've got from the 3 times I tried to learn it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @10:39PM
LaTeX is for monkeys with half a brain, designed and implemented by one of the greatest CS minds alive.
Our apologies that this excludes you.
-OSS Community
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:13PM
I think we now know where all those laid off Mozilla developers went.
The lack of ribbon interface is a huge part of why I use LIbreoffice rather than Office. The fact that it's also free and supports open file standards are just that much better. I've hardly touched office as a result of the ribbon and the only reason I touch it at all is that I have people asking for help with it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:18PM
Free and open standards. Also the ability to open some really obscure file formats. Claris Works?
Also it runs on the OSes I use, including Windows.
I can save a document directly to PDF -- and if I save it as a PDF/ODF hybrid, it can be re-opened in LibreOffice for editing. A PDF generated from Writer is much better than a PDF from MS Word that is generated by 'printing' to, oh, say, CutePDF. The LibreOffice generated PDF can have a table of contents in the sidebar based on the structure of the Writer document.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:45PM
I can save a document directly to PDF -- and if I save it as a PDF/ODF hybrid, it can be re-opened in LibreOffice for editing.
I don't understand why so many people want to edit PDFs. Isn't the format intended just for printing? But now we have all kinds of crazy interactivity. Heck, I submit my tax return via an interactive PDF that submits data to a server! Augh!
P.S. FYI you can export directly to PDF from LibreOffice, too.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:55PM
It's meant for printing primarily, and back in the day, it was rather expensive to buy the software needed to edit it anyways.
Sticking to something like an .ODT is usually much better anyways.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday February 03 2017, @10:56AM
Speaking from the digital print industry:-
Acrobat 3 (1996) was a great improvement over everything before, but still just a little bit buggy. Design goal was "your piece of paper displayed on the screen".
Acrobat 4 (2000) was the pinnacle. Rock solid and printed exactly the same everywhere. Could make some text edits with Acrobat Pro, to fix typos etc., but more than that and you went back to the source and fixed it there. If you had Acrobat Reader (free, and back then did not phone home), and could open a document then the printout would look exactly the same.
Acrobat 5 was a steaming pile of unstable shit that nobody ever used anywhere ever in the entire universe. I think Adobe deny that it ever existed. They were drunk. It was a joke, They were hacked. IT'S NOT THEIR FAULT. [/Blues Bros. Elroy]
Acrobat 6 (2003) was not as stable as 4, but added some "useful" features so eventually replaced it. (Useful to designers, not the printers) Started to get much more anal about "do you have a licence for this font" so many documents printed with the wrong fonts.(It would substitute fonts that were unlicensed. (also, separate licences for display and print W..T..F.. ))
I still used 4 for any document it could open.
I moved on to IT about then, so had much less to do with day to day printing, but my impression from the digital guys is that each version since has slightly improved in stability, while adding features mostly unrelated to printing, but has still not quite reached Acrobat 4's level of rock solid "this is what your piece of paper will look like".
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday February 03 2017, @02:45PM
Not to edit just any PDF. I like that I can generate a PDF that can be opened as the original ODF document in LibreOffice. In other words, the PDF is bigger because it also contains the ODF document. If you open *that* PDF in LibreOffice, you have the actual ODF document from which the PDF was created.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday February 03 2017, @02:33AM
...Like MS Works documents, or documents from old versions of MS Office. Or WordPerfect files (many of the locals here use old computers).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @10:49PM
For what it's worth, WordPerfect's "ribbon" was a strip of paper you put above the F1-F12 keys, which had a list of what the button alone or in meta-combinations would do. It was pretty useful.
And even scarier, I know professional writers (two!) who continue to use WordPerfect because it's got the fewest distractions, the best throughput for their use cases. Honestly. I have *seen* one of them. Blue screen, white text on it, menu bar at the top, all of it in monospaced fonts with lines from the old ANSI tables.
Except - why is this scary? Most of us would probably get all warm and fuzzy if someone said "I use my grandpa's speed square and hammer." The truth is that if a tool works well for one's purposes, its age doesn't matter at all.
Something that HR might do well to learn...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:58PM
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....