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LibreOffice 5.3 Released, Touted As 'One of the Most Feature-Rich Releases' Ever (omgubuntu.co.uk)
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.
I didn't like using Word for large documents.
I invested time and learned to use Latex. It has addressed my problems.
Using an alternative office clone that doesn't also solve the problems of wysiwyg editors is not appealing.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Touted As 'One of the Most Feature-Rich Releases' Ever
That is a very Microsoft like statement, "goodness" defined by feature count, and probably not a good path to go down.
In my experience, there's a direct correlation between "feature rich" and "buggy" for any new release.
In other words, I'll presume it to be the most buggy release ever, until I hear otherwise.
I've been holding off switching away from Office because I use the Ribbon constantly and navigating through the maze of pulldown menus in other office suites seems like transporting back to the 90's and using punch cards. I'll dl this version and give it a shot.
Was there serious demand for this? I suspect one of the features that many -- if not most -- users of LibreOffice enjoyed was that it didn't have the damned ribbon.
I do more writing using Emacs/LaTeX than I do with any word processor but when I do need to create a Word-compatible document I do resort to Writer (and save as ".doc"). Thanks guys for bringing the Office ribbon hassles to Writer. I'm sure everyone's tickled pink to now be able to experience Word's ribbon headaches on Linux.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
Editing Latex on a mac in bbedit is pretty snappy.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I could tell you a story that would make you weep, but in the interest of brevity let's just say that sometimes you are Igor and you just do what Dr. Frankenstein says.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...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....
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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.
Huh? I use the latest LibreOffice regularly on a late 2008 MacBook Pro with a 128GB Crucial SSD, on El Capitan. Works great, and that's a Core 2 Duo CPU with 8GB of DDR3 RAM. It'd be considered obsolete by pretty much anyone these days - yet it performs admirably.
OS X versions past 10.7 suck donkey balls on mechanical hard drives for some reason. The CPU on your Mac Mini has nothing much to do with its sluggishness. Replace the drive with an SSD and you'll fell like you've got a completely different, new machine. Just do it, you'll thank me later.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
One disadvantage Calc has had compared to Excel, is it didn't support multicore when processing large spreadsheets. Has this been addressed yet..?
They put HSA support in a while back which had the interesting side effect of meaning a puny AMD APU absolutely caned the top end i7 for spreadsheet calculation. One of those tasks where having near zero latency, memory coherent access to a huge array of floating point processors helps I guess.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I was reading a prospectus on Mathworks and was surprised that they listed Excel as the main Matlab competitor. It is simply horrifying what some people will do with Excel.
It's easy to sneer at big spreadsheets but, if you used them yourself, you'd realise that sometimes they really are the best tool for the job. If you were to try building flexible financial forecasts across a group of companies with fast-changing assumptions and a wide range of scenarios, you'd understand what I mean.
But there are other legitimate reasons for big spreadsheets. We have complex financial models that are coded in C# for production use but which also exist in spreadsheets for the purposes of documentation and independent model validation. Some models would take an age to refresh on a single core machine, which would seriously undermine our ability to test the production systems. How else would you suggest that we test the end to end results coming out of C#?
when the job needs to be done and you can't get approval to get the proper tools installed, you sometimes need to use improper tools.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
It's great software but I do wonder when they will fix the spell checker so you can change the language from US English to the local language without the need to read help pages every time.
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.........
OK...
I got a call from a guy that I used to work with. He was an engineer who went for a lobotomy and came back as a manager at a company that I contract for. He knew that I was good at VBA and that I was contracting, and he had an idea to track and plan all engineering resource allocation in a half-billion dollar company through the use of Excel spreadsheets. Specifically, he envisioned a system where his master Excel sheet would burp out individual worksheets that each functional manager would fill out, then send back to him. He would then compile them all and run the analysis.
I tried to talk him out of it - first of all, there are off the shelf resource planning apps. Nope. Well, I could make you an intranet site. Nope. Hey, you guys shell out for Sharepoint - I could put together something using that. Nope. Excel. "The managers all know how to use it." Uh-huh.
So, I'm a contractor and I need the work... what the hell? I spend some time on it, and it was beautiful in its horrificness. Lots of delightful event-driven macros, changing things automatically as you copy or create sheets or change cell contents. It interfaced with Active Directory to get the list of engineering employees and contractors and their direct managers. I worked with HR to have the proper data fields filled in. It verified the integrity of the HR data in Active Directory. It even eventually lived on Sharepoint and did automaticy things when people opened and closed it. It churned through and made sure that everyone in the company was allocated to a project and that all the allocation numbers add up to 100%. It gave detailed analysis in pivot tables for pretty much anything that they wanted to see.
Anyway, I created this abortion, fixed a few bugs upon initial use and then didn't think about it again. The guy got fired for obvious reasons. Maybe a year or so after that, I was again contracting for this company and one of the other managers calls me into his office. I get there and he starts asking me questions about some error message he got in "my macro". I look at what the hell he's talking about, and to my horror THEY ARE STILL USING THIS THING. I showed him how to fix it and eventually taught the SharePoint admin how the damned thing worked so that he could support it.
So just think about that the next time you buy stock in a publicly traded company.
Also, I hate VBA.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wow! I never would have guessed. Writer2LaTeX provides Writer export filters for LaTeX and BibTeX.
LaTeX/Export To Other Formats
This about LibreOffice WORRIES me: The download web page doesn't display correctly in either Firefox or Internet Explorer.
I have done some pretty complex spreadsheets, and some things that I consider cool in Excel. Like being able to do a data extract from our system, plop it into a tab, change the name in a cell to that of the tab, and have all of my 10 tabs of graphs / charts / tables update by reading that cell. It uses an INDIRECT call, makes for big and ugly formulas, but cut down a manual process from 2 days worth of work to about 5 minutes.
[yes, I know you can set up a data source and just read the data into the spreadsheet, but I was able to hand this off to some business people to do and they loved it]
Now, having said that... :)
Excel is over-used for things it is not well suited for. People on my test team use Excel to create test data load files in csv format for an application. It has about 100 columns, and usually no more than 50 rows or so. One of the fields needs to be unique, so it's easy in Excel to make it a number, then just drag the cell to increment it. The problem arose where we were doing a load test, and needed 1MM rows. They were trying, but failing, in Excel. It struggled with 30k rows, let alone that the process to create them was painful.
With a quick shell script I was able to create a 1mm row csv in about 5 minutes. They were amazed. Then we needed to create another file. This time, I used the 1mm csv and vi, and made the new file in about 2 minutes. They were astounded! I have since made many more files for them, even a 5mm row file. Even in csv, it was 2.1GB in size although it compressed quite nicely. :)
I have also started teaching them how to fish by having them download gvim for Windows and giving them pointers on how to use it. We are a Windows shop, so to many people csv=Excel, and I am trying hard to break them of that.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Libre Office will forever be Showtime to Microsoft's HBO.
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.
OpenOffice LaTeX and HTML extensions
That's the answer - throw more hardware at it. Heaven forbid devs should write efficient code.
"The issue is that users didn't want to learn a new interface"
No. My issues with the ribbon are: