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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.
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.
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.)
for the love of tux, put it to rest already, ffs. there's nothing in libreoffice to even fucking use systemd for.
if you don't like systemd... don't fucking use it. don't fucking talk about it (most don't even know what they're talking about).. don't whine about it, either. and shut the fuck up already. it's NOT going anywhere.
and besides, you could always use the real openoffice, part of the apache family since 2011, instead. perhaps its slower pace of development and stable performance on all supported platforms would suit you better. slow and steady wins the race, after all. and if you're that fucking paranoid about new shit in your precious linux, why the fuck would you use libreoffice's hack job?
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
>> what happened when Microsoft inflicted everyone with the ribbon
Well that was evil brilliance. Microsoft introduced the ribbon in part to stave off the challenge from open-source office projects. People grumbled but switched because the open source alternatives were really primitive back then. Microsoft then copyrighted/patented the ribbon and made it free to anyone who was developing anything BUT an office product so open source projects couldn't easily follow it. Over time, the ribbon has become a de-facto barrier to user switching because the bulk of office users are now used to it...and open source projects can't license the ribbon.
e.g., https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=26031
From Microsoft's site (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/11/21/licensing-the-2007-microsoft-office-user-interface/):
"...licensing program for the 2007 Microsoft Office system user interface which allows virtually anyone to obtain a royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product, including the Ribbon, galleries, the Mini Toolbar, and the rest of the user interface."
"For almost everyone, there's no catch at all. Just sign up for the license, and follow the guidelines. That's all there is to it. You can use the UI in open source projects as long as the license terms are consistent with our license. You can use it on any platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. If you're an ISV, you can build and sell a set of controls based on the new Office UI. There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license."
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.
The obvious reason is for simple documents with large text on them. I'd normally go to a real DTP product, but if someone handed me a word processing document to edit and I didn't feel like bringing it into something else, I might well want kerning.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is it serious that you've never seen the difference between one text with proper kerning and one text without kerning? Really?
In editors like MsOffice kerning is used by default, it is rarely necessary to tinker with the default setting. That's why you hardly ever hear of kerning, because it's usually done correctly by default (and also on most applications that need to show text, Firefox for example). Except in LibreOffice after version 5, in LibreOffice kerning is done so bad that it is common for certain character sets to be printed with no space between them.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time