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LibreOffice 5.3 Released, Touted As 'One of the Most Feature-Rich Releases' Ever (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the anything-but-Microsoft-Office dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A new month, and a brand new version of open-source office suite LibreOffice is now available to download. And what a release it is. LibreOffice 5.3 introduces a number of key new features and continues work on improving the look and feel of the app across all major platforms. The Document Foundation describes LibreOffice 5.3 as "one of the most feature-rich releases in the history of the application." One of the headline features is called MUFFIN interface, a new toolbar design similar to the Microsoft Office Ribbon UI.

7 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Multicore for spreadsheets..? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you need multi-core threading to evaluate your spread sheets you are doing it wrong. Cell errors in spread sheets of that size can be pretty much impossible to find. At that size the process described by the calculations in the spread sheet is too big to be checked/audited. There are better ways to do things that are less subject to errors than multiple page thousand line spread sheets.

  2. Not really... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...One of the headline features is called MUFFIN interface, a new toolbar design similar to the Microsoft Office Ribbon UI....

    From TFA:

    ...We’ve told you about the MUFFIN interface project — MUFFIN stands for My User Friendly & Flexible Interface — a fair bit over the past few months, but if you haven’t heard of it it’s a new UI initiative that introduces 4 different layouts for LibreOffice applications, including a Microsoft Ribbon-esque tabbed UI and a slim, simplified, single panel toolbar....

    .
    It appears that the new interface will allow the user to use the ribbon-esque interface, a feature for the one or two people who actually like that UI. Muffin also provides other interfaces besides the weird ribbon-esque one, if you prefer a more intuitive UI.

  3. Ribbon...?!?!?! by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Well, I was happy to read this, till I saw they fscked it up with the "ribbon" interface....

    This has been the worst thing MS has ever done to a GUI interface.....and now, Libre has copied the abomination.

    If they at least will give you a choice of that or menus, that would be cool, but if ribbon only, I guess I'll stick with the older versions....

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    1. Re: Ribbon...?!?!?! by jonnyj · · Score: 4, Informative

      People still complain about this? Seriously, you get used to it, and its not nearly as horrible as slashtards keeping going on about. You going to make fun of systemd next? How about throwing around an M$ insult?

      I can understand the principles of the ribbon, but the implementation in MS Office is dreadful. The icons shown on the ribbon include dozens of things that no normal user ever uses, while things that are used every couple of minutes are hidden away in pop-up modal dialogue boxes. Most of the cell formatting functionality in Excel can't be accessed through the ribbon, for example, even though almost all users need to prettify or format their spreadsheets. Other crazy omissions include one-click icons to email the document, to export to pdf or to save the file to a new folder.

      The other problem with the ribbon is discoverability. I use Excel most days, but I regularly need to use google to help me find functionality that I use infrequently. The ribbon would be much more effective if it had a built-in search facility.

  4. Re:Not Another Office Clone! by chipschap · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think there is an OpenOffice extension that outputs latex. :-)

    There is, and I've used it a number of times, once to convert someone's 700+ page manuscript so I could produce a proper book with LaTeX. It works reasonably well, actually, and is so much better than trying to typeset with a tool (like a word processor) not really suited to producing press-ready output.

  5. Re:finally, Ribbon in LibreOffice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's optional. Did you really read the article?

  6. Re: Multicore for spreadsheets..? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    ProjectLibre is the leading open source alternative to Microsoft Project. It has been downloaded over 2,700,000 times in over 200 countries and has won InfoWorld "Best of Open Source" award. ProjectLibre is compatible with Microsoft Project 2003, 2007 and 2010 files. You can simply open them on Linux, Mac OS or Windows.