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LibreOffice 5.1 Officially Released
prisoninmate writes: After being in development for the last three months or so, LibreOffice 5.1 comes today to a desktop environment near you with some of the most attractive features you've ever seen in an open-source office suite software product, no matter the operating system used. The release highlights of LibreOffice 5.1 include a redesigned user interface for improved ease of use, better interoperability with OOXML files, support for reading and writing files on cloud servers, enhanced support for the ODF 1.2 file format, as well as additional Spreadsheet functions and features. Yesterday, even with the previous version, I was able to successfully use a moderately complex docx template without a hitch — the kind of thing that would have been a pipe-dream not too long ago.
Big thanks to everyone who contributed to the LibreOffice project! Great product I couldn't live without. Your work is much appreciated!
They're just haters. No modern computer user can honestly say they'd prefer searching through dropdown menus over the ribbon that focuses on putting the most used features at the users fingertips.
*Raises hand*
I dislike the ribbon. But then I'm a keyboard shortcuts guy. I know dozens of them for MS Office, and whenever there's a feature that I use often, I look up a keyboard shortcut if possible.
Which means the ribbon is useless to me. It takes up a bunch of space with buttons I don't need, and on the rare occasions when I need a feature advanced or rare enough that I don't know a shortcut, it's often not even on a ribbon button -- I end up going through advanced feature dialogs anyway. I use a Mac at work, so luckily I still have the drop down menus, which are usually at least twice as fast as wading through a bunch of non-intuitive icons in a half-dozen ribbon tabs with 20 buttons each.
Text was invented for a reason -- it communicates quickly, clearly, and efficiently. So I find it a lot easier to navigate when I'm searching for a feature I don't know -- which is the only time my mouse generally goes up to that part of the screen.
If you actually use the ribbon for common everyday tasks, I can understand how it might be useful for you. I'm not against offering a ribbon interface, but I do think it should be one option rather than the only one. I'm not a "hater." I just work differently and I'm just glad Mac versions of Office still give the menu options.
Hear, hear. Google is your friend. It took me all of 10 minutes searching and reading to learn how to customise the toolbar system in MSOffice versions prior to the ribbon, e.g. remove and add toolbar buttons for features as desired, and even create a keyboard shortcut for things in frequent use.
Thus, the features that I use most frequently *are* at my fingertips, and the items I don't use are banished back to their menus. It seems the ribbon was created to pander to those people who weren't able to figure out toolbar customisations. The ribbon is harder to customise, takes up far too much screen real estate in the "full" version, is almost useless in the minimised version, and it took a long time to get used to it.
And while we're at it, Microsoft's UI design team should be sent to a real design school. White, light grey, and dark grey are the colour schemes available in Office 2013, and I had customers complaining that they couldn't see things easily. How did such a design get past testing and QA? The response from the "experts" on answers.microsoft.com was to set the entire computer's colour scheme to "high contrast" - never mind ruining the interface for other programs, sheesh.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
I deal with it just fine, as do most people who care to run Linux.
I pay nothing for Linux. I pay nothing for LibreOffice. I don't complain about having to do a little work, which has the side benefit of allowing me complete control and choice over what I have on my system.
If you want it all done for you, more like if you want it all done to you, stay with Microsoft.
I can't believe you got upvoted. Means none of them, including you know that you can use keyboard shortcuts with the ribbon. Just press the damn ALT key, watch and learn.
It's a better interface. Sometimes change can be good, and i tell you this as a hater of windows 8 menu and even windows 10 inferior start menu.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
If it were truly a better system I wouldn't have to switch endlessly between ribbon tabs while performing simple formatting tasks. Once configured (even minimally), the toolbar stayed *put*, allowing muscle memory to speed operation.
The ribbon is great for discovery and people who never get past "ransom letter" documents. It sucks ass for experienced users.
Social isolation for Linux geeks is a stereotype which, like most stereotypes, don't apply universally, and in this case (Linux users) I suspect don't apply even to the majority.
Nice try, but you get a fail on this one.
Programmers aren't designers. And one of the things they do the worst is design UIs for end-users. Every time I hear a programmer complain about how graphic designers don't know anything all I do is laugh, because it's elitist and pretentious to presume you know about designing graphics. You don't. You weren't trained to do that, and you probably don't even have the aptitude for it.
MS's ribbon UI, which is getting so much hate, is because programmers are biased. They're biased because they know what "Window" is but not what "Review" is. They know what "Format" should do, but not what "Design" should do. You're so caught up in your own jargon that you stop thinking like other, normal people do. Do you honestly people think that the Window menu item is going to have everything you need that would manipulate a window object in it? Come off it.
There's a reason why Office and Windows have such a large marketshare. The only reason ANY business, outside of maybe some select tech companies even use libreoffice is because its free. It's time to wake up and realize it's not MS's aggressive business tactics that really make them win the game here: it's that they sell a superior product and you can leave your overly convoluted menus to yourself and the few select people who mistakenly think it's better because they're too inflexible to learn new ways of doing things.
Enjoy your coding in C, since I'm sure you have the same issues with thinking everyone should be managing memory.
I have a nice, pretty, and many years my junior girlfriend. Why? Because I just happened to have my laptop bag with me and a Live USB disk handy. It was Lubuntu (as we seem to recall) but she's been using Mint Cinnamon lately.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."