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.

Comments

LibreOffice isn't very good

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:LibreOffice isn't very good

[Anonymous Coward]

I have contributed to the libreoffice core (the part that does the formatting, even) before, to the point of being paid for it. There are quite a few reasons I don't do it anymore:

(1) It's fucking boring. In no universe do I learn anything new or gain any cred by it. Replicating what has been done before is a waste of my lifetime.

(2) It's horrible C++ code. If it were C++ code it would be bad enough - but it's not just C++, it's horrible C++.

(3) Microsoft Office has "funny" interpretations of their own file formats in their software. For example Powerpoint doesn't really store the directory of the MSOLE file as specified but it abuses the tree structure as ... fixed-offset store. It's difficult to be compatible to a black box that doesn't even do what it's own documentation says it does (sometimes hangs instead).

(4) Even in newer standards, Microsoft Office doesn't do what the standard says (or the standard DOESN'T say what to do in the first place).

All in all this was not a good use of my time.

Does it have collaborative online editing yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

They should be touting No Subscription Required!

[gosand]

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.