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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.
I'm waiting for LibreOffice 365, with the $0/year subscription fee.
This is good. I never used anything before Word 2007 so the tab grouping are a lot more familiar to me.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
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 grateful to the LiberOffice folks. They're been the "Office-but-better" suite on my computers for a while now, and I'm very happy with it.
If you use LIbreOffice (like I do), you should go donate if you can (like I do) and/or contribute to improvements if you're capable (I am not).
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm going to put a hold on LibreOffice updates until I get around to loading it up in a VM for testing,
Why would you do that if you weren't doing it before?
I'm all for feature and security updates but after having to deal with all the UI "improvements" in the UI's of various application (Firefox, Word, Windows, etc.) over the years I am hesitant to give up what I have become familiar with if I can avoid it.
You didn't read the summary. They didn't change the interface. They merely gave an alternative option that is NOT the default. The default is approximately unchanged. Some people like or at least are used to the current Microsoft interface so why not have an option to make those people comfortable? It won't be what I use but if it works for someone else then that is fine. My user interface preferences do not have to be universally shared.
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.
Many years ago, I was using Microsoft Word. I wrote something for more than 3 hours. I then discovered that Microsoft Word was not able to load that file! Yow!
I was able to load the file in LibreOffice. Since then, I don't use Microsoft Word.
I would love to roll Libre out to our company, but it still can’t open up 10 year old word or excel docs without screwing up the formatting.
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I've heard The Ribbon has improved a lot since it's introduction, so perhaps it's getting good enough to be worth cloning.
It would also be quite hilarious if LibreOffice manages to make a ribbon that is actually an improvement over traditional toolbars, exposing the fact that the problem is not ribbon interfaces themselves, but Microsoft's general incompetence at making UIs.
I know the times I've used MSOffice I've felt like the ribbon had a lot of potential, if only it weren't so infuriating to use.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The biggest thing for me is that they are working on the animations. Which is big because right now animations is the number one horrid thing in LibreOffice. If they can fix this aspect then the office suite will be instantly tons more usable.
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.
Microsoft Office doesn't offer the compatibility its proponents claim. I've seen a lot of documents that don't render the same way across successive versions of Microsoft Office, so forward compatibility is shot. Microsoft Office 365 won't load and render all of the documents Microsoft Office 2016 (with all updates) will generate, so compatibility across current versions is not there either. Word also isn't designed for large documents; I never would have advised using Microsoft Word to begin this documentation project, but I wasn't asked when the project began so now the question is what to do with this huge document that doesn't work as it should on Microsoft's OS (either Windows 7 or 10) running Microsoft's word processor with all of Microsoft's updates applied.
A few weeks ago a Word user generated a multi-hundred page document with Word from Microsoft Office 2016 and she was stuck with choosing between watching Word 2016/32-bit crash relatively slowly when editing the document (so she had some time to make a few edits and then watch the app die), Word 2016/64-bit crash more quickly, or Word/Office365 render the document so far away from anything reasonable it wasn't worth using. LibreOffice Writer also didn't render the document perfectly, but it did not crash so it was wiser to spend time fixing the lack of fidelity there and continue using LibreOffice than not knowing when the entire app would die and take the last edits after the most recent save with it.
So I'm not convinced that even within Microsoft their programmers have written code to properly support even the currently-supported variants of Word documents. I have found this to be true across every version of Microsoft Office, this is not news to me. When considering the cost of Microsoft Office365, consider how much it will cost you to lose fidelity of documents even within Microsoft's proprietary software. I believe that cost is too high: I wouldn't trust any document I cared about to a program that locked me into their way of doing things. There's just too much at risk on top of the awful anti-user problems facing all proprietary software users.
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