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LibreOffice 6.2 Brings New Interfaces, Performance Improvements To the Open Source Office Suite (techrepublic.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: New interface styles and feature improvements are available in version 6.2 of LibreOffice -- the most popular open-source office suite -- released Thursday by The Document Foundation. As with any software update, bug fixes and feature enhancements are present, making this release a significant upgrade, particularly for users coming from Microsoft Office, or working with files created with those programs. LibreOffice now supports SVG-based icons for toolbars in the Breeze, Colibre, and Elementary icon sets as an experimental feature, to better support HiDPI displays increasingly found in notebook PCs. The Elementary icon set was also improved significantly, adding a 32px PNG version, and fixing inconsistencies between the 16, 24, and 32px versions, as well as adding more icons across the set to prevent reverting to defaults. In LibreOffice 6.2, the "Tabbed" interface is now available for Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw, and is considered sufficiently stable to be a default option. This interface mimics the oft-maligned "Ribbon interface" in Office 2007. The "traditional" Office-style toolbar is default, though the Tabbed interface can be enabled through the "View > User Interface" menus.
With all the important capabilities that need to be in a doc processing suite, you decided that FancyShinyIcons was what matters?
What I want, and would have hoped most users want, is improved workflow and an absolute minimum of changes to the interface. Why learn a new set of icons when we just finished learning the last set of icons? Why deal with commands getting rearranged in Ribbon submenus? Let us do our work and just facilitate interfaces and filetype conversions.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I'm waiting for the ability to apply a style to a sentence, and not have that style applied to the entire paragraph.
Make all your paragraphs only one sentence long -- problem solved. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The world has lots of volunteers for all kinds of 'worthy causes'. If people want to donate their own time and/or money to something that they feel passionate about, then good on them! But I really wonder about all the users out there who complain when someone chooses to make changes that they do not like. It is free software! The people building it do not get paid to make it do what YOU want. They work on features that they think are fun, not ones that necessarily add value for you. You are not a customer, but rather a recipient of someone else's largesse. Take it or leave it.
I love LaTex. It's the one document production software that I feel really gets me since Nota Bene disappeared. I learned to use it when I was helping my mathematician wife with her PhD thesis (I was no help with the math part, but I like to make nice documents). My publications were all written in LaTex. Years later, it's still on every computer I own because if I want it to look just right, it's the best way.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Menus hide features almost as thoroughly and are much more tedious to use. Until you click on the menu, you have very little idea what's on it (except what you've memorized), and if there's no icons, and you haven't memorized positions, then you have to read through every option to find the one you're looking for. They're made worse by the fact that functions are very often not located on the menu you would expect, or menus are named such that *none* of them would lead you to believe they hold the function you're looking for.
Really, when you get right down to it the Ribbon is essentially a hybrid of a toolbar and a sticky-menu - click the menu header, and the associated toolbar is displayed.
The loss of text is quite annoying though - even though you rarely use the text for frequently-used functions, it's invaluable for trying to figure out which F'ing icon is associated with the rarely-used function you're looking for.
Hmmm, actually..., what if you made a ribbon that simultaneously displayed the tool-tips for everything on the bar whenever the mouse was over its tab? Essentially you'd get a 2D menu, where the bulky text was only displayed on demand.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
>I don't really understand why small firms would do so. One word: compatibility.
Cool story Bro!
Microsoft Office isn't even compatible with itself. We used to get PowerPoint files that were done on the Windows version, annnnnd...... Nope, don't look at all the same. Weird printer business, and font issues in word processing despite supposedly identical fonts. Version differences not working, and often within one platform.
I kept a copy of OO because it could handle that kind of stuff.
Now I have control of some Linux, some MacOS, and some Windows system. And we don't cut Linux out of the loop, so it isn't a matter of compatibility, it's no options at all.
So here comes LO, and the work done on any platform looks like the work done on the others,
That's compatibility, not just saying "compatibility" Because MSO isn't even compatible with itself.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I have the exact opposite experience.
1) "Until you click on the menu, you have very little idea what's on it" Unless you keep the ribbon open all the time (in which case you're wasting a lot of screen space because of those icons), you can't see what's in them. And even when you do open a ribbon, you *still* can't see into half (my guestimate) the icons, specifically those icons that have a bunch of choices inside them. Take the Paste icon for instance; it has several sub-commands, but you can't see them without opening that icon.
2) "if there's no icons, and you haven't memorized positions, then you have to read through every option to find the one you're looking for" Well yes, that's a skill I learned in first grade. What's wrong with that? I have to do the same thing with the icons in the ribbon, because interpreting an icon is pure guesswork. (Unless you're an ancient Egyptian, in which case maybe you're used to memorizing hieroglyphs.) In short, you have to memorize positions on the ribbon, or find the text under each icon (which is much harder than simply finding the text in a menu).
3) "made worse by the fact that functions are very often not located on the menu you would expect": Where is the "insert row" command in Excel? It's under the "Insert" tab, right? Wrong! As I found out when I needed to insert a row in Excel the other day. I find very little logic to the layout of commands in the ribbon.
4) "menus are named such that *none* of them would lead you to believe they hold the function you're looking for." Umm, yes. What's in the "Home" tab on the ribbon? Things that have to do with your house, right? Or what's the diff between the "Design" and "Layout" tabs? And then there's that all-important Mailings tab, which is perfect for 1980s-style mail merge.
And don't even get me started on the Files tab, which teleports you into an alternative universe where you're not allowed to see what you're writing.