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LibreOffice 6.1 Released
The Document Foundation said on Wednesday it is releasing LibreOffice 6.1, the latest major update to its productivity suite. It is available to download for Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms. The new version offers, among other features, Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows based on Microsoft's icon design guidelines, which it says, makes the office suite visually appealing for users coming from the Microsoft environment. The Document Foundation also reworked the image handling feature on LibreOffice to make it "significantly faster and smoother thanks to a new graphic manager and an improved image lifecycle, with some advantages also when loading documents in Microsoft proprietary formats." Other new features and changes include: The reorganization of Draw menus with the addition of a new Page menu, for better UX consistency across the different modules. A major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated, though still available, and the new Firebird database engine is now the default option (users are encouraged to migrate files using the migration assistant from HSQLDB to Firebird, or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server). Significant improvements in all modules of LibreOffice Online, with changes to the user interface to make it more appealing and consistent with the desktop version. An improved EPUB export filter, in terms of link, table, image, font embedding and footnote support, with more options for customizing metadata. Online Help pages have been enriched with text and example files to guide the users through features, and are now easier to localize.
LibreOffice 6.1's new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 72% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as SIL and Pardus, and 28% are from individual volunteers. In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system text and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy at a local level. You can read the full changelog here. Here's a video that walks through the new features and changes that LibreOffice is receiving with v6.1.
LibreOffice 6.1's new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 72% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as SIL and Pardus, and 28% are from individual volunteers. In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system text and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy at a local level. You can read the full changelog here. Here's a video that walks through the new features and changes that LibreOffice is receiving with v6.1.
Still not?
Literally unusable.
I used OpenOffice for years, followed by LibreOffice.
Look, I'm glad to not have to pay Microsoft's stupid licensing fees when I can get LibreOffice for free. I get it. I still use LibreOffice every day. But man, after all this time how is it still so buggy on Linux? Spell check randomly stops working correctly. Formatting randomly messes up. Even documents saved in MS Office format sometimes don't convert properly.
No wonder the FOSS movement suffers from lack of mainstream users. It's still apparently too much of a challenge to have a reliable office suite.
Here's my analysis on the root cause of why very few people still use this. From TFA (or at least the summary):
...individual volunteers taking care of ...user interface design and user experience
>> new features have been developed by...: 72% of commits are from...companies...like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB
When you have your JV team on the part consumers care most about (i.e., can I actually use this thing; is it easy enough to use that I'd install it on my mom's/grandma's/kid's computer), and you're developing a consumer product, you are really just shooting yourself in the foot. Because:
>> major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated
No one cares. Really.
Company I'm at is small, about 30 people, we moved to Google Docs a while ago for office documents. A major win was not having to administer local backups and access controls, and another win was access from any machine in any location with nothing to install, but the killer feature was online collaborative editing. It's super common we are in a meeting and 8 or 10 of us have the same doc opened on our laptops and we can all edit it with edits reflected instantly on everyone else's laptop.
That is HUGE for our workflow. Unless Libreoffice has this it would be a non-starter in our environment or dare I say many others like us.
The real question is, with Red Hat a core contributor : how long before systemd becomes a required dependency?
I'm sure there are exceptions, but if you have any office suite on your resume and you have ever had a relevant job it is not a good sign. You might as well list your gym membership under professional licenses.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Still the go-to office suite after all these years. Very glad to see improvements in functionality rather than "me too" marketing bullshit. Great job management & implementors. As a heavy user of at least the spreadsheet I think it is brilliant.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
>> if you have any office suite on your resume
OK, I'll bite. There are at least three exceptions to this that I can think of:
1) you're applying for a top desktop support role, where you might want to list a successful Office roll-out that you designed/managed/cleaned-up-after
2) you aren't at least a 8 (or a 6 in some states) and female, and you want an entry-level receptionist/assistant job
3) you need to get your resume past a brain-dead HR department that stapled "Microsoft Office" to its "languages" requirements (in addition to C#, Ruby, etc.)
Daaaaaayuuuum! I gotta get me some of that.
Funny. Mentioning MS Office would be an exclusion criterion around here. We don't hire foulmouthed people.
I canâ(TM)t wait to not install this
I've used LibreOffice since it started, likewise OpenOffice before that. I like LibreOffice enough that I turned down a friend's offer for a MS install disk.
LibrieOffice's menus are much more coherent than MS Office. At least when I used it, MS office had serious problems with Word loosing formatting on text, whereas if you backspace you lose formatting.
LibreOffice has smaller file saves than MS Office because the file is gzipped after, so I am more likely to keep more backups--in less space.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Yeah, agreed. Though if you rolled out LibreOffice that would also be worthy of a mention. Re number 3, if you are just sending out cold resumes, absolutely make sure you repackage their canned job description inside your document.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
>> Old habits are hard to change is more likely the reason
Actually, I think we agree. Take a couple minutes to look up the user experience "principal of least surprise" (or "astonishment")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment
In other words, the software that requires people to change the least will get used the most.
So what happened when Microsoft inflicted everyone with the ribbon and Open/Libre Office was the one that required people to change the least? For a while Open/Libre Office were more desirable because they were closer to the interface that everyone was use to after decades with MS Office.But, people still switched to the new Office and now you're saying that the problem is that Libre Office looks too different due to the fact that it still looks more or less the same as it has for the last ~8 years.
8 - 10 people all editing the same document at the same time? That sounds like a massive, cluster fuck to me.
As a consultant, I get to see inside many many companies, small and large. I have yet to see anyone doing simultaneous collaborative document creation/editing even in shops that use O365, GSuite, SharePoint...
What industry is your company in? How many people in the conference room have plaid shirts and waxed mustaches?
I'm stuck with Libre Office 5.1.1 for being the last released version able to use kerning correctly (spacing between characters) and also be the last version where the text rendering is passable.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I have this installed at home (linux) but I rarely use it - once or twice a year maybe.
At work I use MS Office all the time... Excel and Powerpoint mainly, Word and Visio if I have to. Recently I wanted to create a database ERD, so I fired up Visio 2016. Apparently we have the standard version, and after lots of googling found out that the crow's foot diagrams aren't included in the standard version. They used to, but got removed. You can't even download and install them. What makes it worse is that you can pick that as a template when creating a new document, but none of the shapes are there to use.
Of course, we do have an Office 365 subscription, but even there Visio is not included in it. This was something standard in older versions of Visio.
In fact, I have a damn MSDN license, but when I go to the site and look in my product keys page, all of them throw errors for any version of MS Office.
Microsoft is really screwing the pooch on Office 365, so I am glad to see LibreOffice still making strides. I just recommended it to a co-worker yesterday who was trying to navigate the labyrinth of how to get Office installed at home now.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
User: Where is Office?
IT Grunt: We don't use Office. Here, here's Libreoffice.
User: I can't use this!
IT Grunt: Why not? It's 90% of Office and more than 100% of anything you know how to do in Office.
User: The icons aren't what I'm used to...
The current (actually several revs back) works perfectly fine for my limited needs. I spend money on software that's important - like Vegas & After Effects.
The only thing that would get me interested is something that's been missing & requested since 2011 ( https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34002 ) and 2002 for OpenOffice ( https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3395 )
Regardless of the bugs, I use 5.4 and would gladly make a donation because it's the best alternative to M$
But they take Bitcoin as a donation, and I don't support the use of crypto currencies for any reason. Crypto currencies (aka blockchain) will enslave the people.
Crashes every few clicks. More so when your spreadsheet is somewhat large (read as usable)
"If you're a technology enthusiast, early adopter or power user, this version is for you!". I ran my 6.0 version and it says it up to date. Let other people beta test for free.
4. You are applying for an unpaid internship at The Document Foundation
Really in-your-face ui bugs have remained unfixed for years, e.g. LibreOffice can't even render a PNG image properly: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86675
I don't know how anyone expect LibreOffice to be taken seriously under the circumstances.
I have this installed at home (linux) but I rarely use it - once or twice a year maybe.
I use Libreoffice Calc often and I love it. I use Writer any time my text needs exceed the capabilities of a monospace programmer's editor, what do you use? For serious publishing I use Lyx (TeX). There is a learning curve, but nothing touches TeX if perfection is your goal. If you aren't publishing in a peer reviewed journal or such then you don't need this.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The new icons rot. The old Tango icons are much easier, much faster. Thanks for leaving them intact!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Yes. Open Source is a lovely ideal. Free software. Yay! Some great success stories. Yay!
Problem is because users don't PAY for the software to be written and maintained you rely on charity from people who donate their time until other life need like paying the rent become more important.
Look at Blender. It can produce high quality 3D on par with the top tier commercial applications BUT has a shitty user interface which the unpaid developers don't have time to overhaul.
Same with Open Office and Libre. If they had the money, of course they could clean this stuff up, But they don't.
Freeware appeals to us because we like getting something for nothing. But what you're doing is sponging off developers who you expect to work for you for free.
I would say 'DONATE' but that doesn't work either. A few people will chip in but most want to sit back and sponge.
In the end: You get what you pay for.
MS buying up Visio was a bad day for everyone in IT
Unlike Word, Outlook, Thunderbird, and many other packages, LibreOffice *still* does not have any form of incremental search. Oddly enough, this means I can't afford to use this free product for real work. Damn it all to hell anyway.
I use vi... so it's pretty tough to exceed it's capabilities as a text editor. :)
I say that tongue-in-cheek, but it is true a lot of the time. e.g. at work I saw someone struggling to create a data file with 500,000 rows using Excel. They wanted to read an existing file, modify the values for a couple of columns. Of course, they had Excel set to open csv files. Notepad even struggled with this file size.
I have vi installed within MSYS64 and was able to edit that file to their liking within a couple of minutes. With vi and a few other command line tools I was able to create other large input files easily. One example was a 5 MM row file with 2.5 MM unique rows and 2.5 MM duplicates.
I know vi isn't everyone's cup of tea, and I certainly don't push it on anyone. They've tried to learn it, and I've tried to teach them, but instead I am just the go-to guy for large data files now.
My needs for writing documents though are largely non-existent. I will use Writer for that, and I have used Calc for a couple of things. My wife uses Excel and Word though. We have an older version, maybe 2007?, on her laptop which runs Win7. If it ain't broke....
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but if you have any office suite on your resume and you have ever had a relevant job it is not a good sign. You might as well list your gym membership under professional licenses.
... Wait? You think geeks screen the resumes out?? Ha. The clueless HR girl fresh out of school who is 22 years old decides whether you know your own job or not. Not you. Professional using Office and project for colloboration bla bla under job requirements is what she puts in Taleo.
Taleo filters you out as unqualified and some retard who puts it in gets a higher score in Taleo HR and the 22 selects the dufus for resumes to send to the higher up.
Basically, you have to cut and paste the job description in your experience to get through is the secret
http://saveie6.com/
Like I told the other guy, I agree that if you are sending out resumes out to companies in response to job postings, you absolutely need to make sure that your resume contains as much of the keywords from the job description as possible. Game the stupid filter. But your "real" resume shouldn't have room for MS Office :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
it's not so good at dealing with different file types. Improving that would be nice.
When I create an RTF document in Write/Wordpad and want to check for spelling errors in Libre office,it screws up the bullet lists.
Bullet lists.
This isn't a huge Word document which automatically generates a table of contents and an index, or a doc made by an obsolete program from the '80s. It's a two-pager made in a well-established standard-ish format, with nothing fancier in it than indenting, centering, bullet lists and maybe some bold text.
Is is foolish to use RTF in this day and age? Should an unwise format choice on the user's part excuse such failure? Am I an ungrateful whiner, considering the price of Libre Office? Calc works pretty well, after all.
OK, a "Yes" on the last one.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
The galaxy icon theme, which used to be the default icon theme, was removed.
There is no mention of this change in the ChangeLog.
However, you can download an extension with the icon teme here:
https://extensions.libreoffice...
I use this icon set so this was a nasty surprise, compounded with the lack of any mention in the release materials. Not good, LO folks.
Thankfully the functionality is just an extension away.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."