LibreOffice 6.1 Released 106
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.
LibreOffice isn't very good (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'd give it a few weeks before jumping on this update.
I made the mistake of trying out Kicad V5.0 on release day. The Windows build was simply broken. A day later they released a new V5.0 that supposedly fixed a lot of the issues, but without any notifications or real explanation.
It wouldn't be so bad if you could install V5.0 along side older versions like you can with most CAD software. Like IDEs, many people like to keep old versions around to avoid having to upgrade and potentially break old projects.
Re:LibreOffice isn't very good (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: LibreOffice isn't very good (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the entire point unfortunately, MS goes to extradinary lengths to ensure nothing will ever threaten truly be able to be compatible with their formats...including launching their own "standards"...that's what Libre and Google should concentrate on, rather than adding point less features that 90% of users never need or even understand.
Can open and modify a simple "word" document, fine...people will get over the UI differences...
Cannot open a PPT or PPTX that your boss has stuffed some weird animations in using MS PowerPoint, bam, your shiny new competitor is dead.
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MS goes to extradinary lengths to ensure nothing will ever threaten truly be able to be compatible with their formats...
Libreoffice has pretty damn good compatibility with Microsoft formats and improves with each release. That is particularly impressive considering the intentional and unintentional roadbocks. In some cases, Libreoffice compatibility with older formats is better than Microsoft's. But that is increasingly not the point, as Microsoft office formats are used less and less for data interchange. Today, if you want send around a finished document you send pdf. If you want to collaborate on a document, then docx is
Re:LibreOffice isn't very good (Score:4, Insightful)
Publishing specifications and claiming adherence to standards is quite "good enough" for Microsoft from a business point of view - which of course is the only point of view it has ever had.
The number of people who notice that the software doesn't quite jibe with the specs, or doesn't quite implement the standard (or, usually, both) is small. And, by their very ability to understand software, they are wholly without influence in business circles.
So, from Microsoft's point of view, screw 'em.
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I have contributed to the libreoffice core... In no universe do I learn anything new or gain any cred by it.
If you had posted with a registered nick you would have gotten a bit of cred right here. If you put it on your resume you get major cred translating into dollars. If you send good patches then you get cred from your peers, that often translates into career-boosting networking. You know that.
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Sick of dimwits like this blaming C++. Face it, poster. You're not smart enough to learn C++ or maybe you're just too lazy to learn it. So you hate what you don't understand. Yeah Python rocks but there's a reason people don't write hardcore applications in it.
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Sure, blame me for not understanding C++ when I wrote and shipped C++ projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of code (which I really shouldn't have). "Hardcore" big applications are exactly where C++ sucks with its non-existent module system, non-standardized ABI (including non-rules for template specialization in object files), memory micromanagement and weird integers.
I thought about not mentioning C++ in the first place - it always ends up with ego-invested people defending it with appeal to emotio
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I have never had spellcheck stop working on me, and I have a massive spelling and hyphenation dictionary installed in it (not the standard one that comes with it) as well as a bunch of other third party extensions. Not a single hiccup through writing 3 complete novels.
As for Ms Office formats not converting properly, I did an experiment a few months back (while still in college) and found that a single .doc file opened across 5 different versions of Ms Office had inconsistencies in 4 of the other versions.
Re: LibreOffice isn't very good (Score:2, Funny)
Spell check randomly stops working correctly. Formatting randomly messes up. Even documents saved in MS Office format sometimes don't convert properly.
By this description it sounds like MS Office was emulated perfectly!
Re:LibreOffice isn't very good (Score:5, Insightful)
Even documents saved in MS Office format sometimes don't convert properly.
The same is true of different versions of MS Office, of which there are many.
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And yet, it has Microsoft's offerings dead to rights, because Office just plain sucks.
Microsoft Office is expensive, it breaks your files if you pass them along between different users, especially if they happen to use different versions, it's frequently just plain incompatible with itself and once your files are broken, they are FUBAR, unless you can rescue them with LibreOffice. How is it still so buggy on Windows? It's been what by now, 30 years?
Oh, and yeah, the interface is probably the worst ever. Com
Problem with much Open Source (Score:1)
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 th
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I have used LibreOffice.org on Linux for past few years and previously OpenOffice and do not find your faults.
Linux is openSUSE (versions 9 through 15).
I also use at work MS Office and for 98% documents find no problem in interchange (the few with problems have included 'video' inside document).
May be your Linux is not set up will all necessary LibreOffice.org dependencies or Java environment, However user experience is always each to his own.
Re: LibreOffice isn't very good (Score:1)
Not everyone is a programmer, O' Great One.
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Not everyone's sarcasm detectors work worth a damn, apparently.
Why adoption is low (Score:4, Insightful)
>> 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.
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This is a common problem with FOSS software. Proper UX and the general stability and ease of use are not major developmental concerns. It isn't sexy. Most FOSS contributors fall into one of two camps. They are either employed by a company that contributes code or they are a volunteer. The corporate coders write what they are told to write which is almost never going to touch on stuff that consumers care about. Red Hat does servers so they care about server side systems software. Microsoft is mostly interest
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My analysis is that your analysis is incorrect. I don't use Libreoffice because it is not available at work. That's it. MS Office is unbelievably slow and unusable though, so I mostly use Notepad, and paste it on to Word once I'm done. Seriously. Why does it take 14 seconds to load? Libreoffice used to be that slow and everyone complained. Now that it takes 2-3 seconds to load, every complains that it's still too slow, and ignores the increasing bloat and sluggishness of MS Office. Usability is not
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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.
Re:So, What Happened? (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:So, What Happened? (Score:5, Informative)
"...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."
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So much this. These OSS teams have to understand: there are REASONS people are using software from Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe. It simply works better: it's been designed with careful attention to the needs of real users in real enterprises, not by turning loose people to " go do what's cool" and whatever they feel like.
If you want to compete with them, you have to buckle up and do the parts of a software project that aren't FUN. The parts that volunteers don't want to do, but are required for widesprea
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...When you have your JV team on the part consumers care most about...
As opposed to having the top-notch UI team at Microsoft that came up the screen-hogging ribbon toolbar? It was the awful UI of Microsoft Office that drove me to try, and stay with, LibreOffice.
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Funny. The fact that it DOESN'T have a ribbon is why I don't want to use it.
I moved on 10 years ago and can't live without out it now as I can see my functions without navigating 3 layers of nested Word 2003 menus.
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Here's my analysis on the root cause of why very few people still use this...
This old troll. Nobody knows how big the LibreOffice market share really is, because finding that out costs money. Of course, Microsoft knows, but they aren't telling. Here is a German government sponsored study that reported massive worldwide penetration for OpenOffice, eight years ago when it was much less capable than today:
Openoffice installed on up to 22% of computers in some countries [webmasterpro.de]
Eight years ago. It would be great if somebody sunk some bucks into a new study, but why? We already know that Libreof
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The reason I gave up and my exwife gave up on LibreOffice was when we were applying for jobs.
Monster and various HR departments REQUIRE .DOC files. You write them in LibreOffice and they look sharp and great. They open it in Word 2003 and it is a garbled mess and assume you're retarded and don't know even how to use a basic word processor and filter you out. :-(
She still uses LibreOffice for her lesson plans but I added her to my Office 365 pack so she could be accepted by HR departments for other school di
Does it have collaborative online editing yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
You Have Got To Be Kidding (Score:1)
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?
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You seem to be confusing "responsible" with "burdened". What's wrong with automating the time-wasting due diligence/workflow-enhancing stuff? It should also be auditing automatically for rollback/accountability in the process, too - would that be satisfactory for your concern?
R O
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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I like being able to use style sheets. It's 90% of what makes using Word an enjoyable experience. Google Docs' response to finding style sheets in a document is converting it to inline formatting which defeats the entire purpose of having style sheets in the first place.
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systemd? (Score:1)
The real question is, with Red Hat a core contributor : how long before systemd becomes a required dependency?
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Dude, LibreOffice will become the managment GUI for systemd within 30 months.
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There might be one benefit. If I stopped using OpenOffice I could get rid of Java once and for all.
Just my 2 cents
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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 pla
Great stuff (Score:3)
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.
So Good that I Turned Down MS Office Disk (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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I don't know if you know this, but MS Office also GZips their files after saving them. Its kinda part of the document specification.
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Microsoft's "x" files are zipped, too, and are considerably smaller than the class pre-MOOXML format files.
Not that I'm not with you on having used OOo from the beginning and followed the crowd to LO, but "it has smaller files because they're zipped" isn't a good reason to claim LO is better than MSO. Preferring real, usable menus to ribbons, on the other hand...
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Cut and paste works way better in LibreOffice than it does Excel, it's just normal Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V. That's huge for me. I find navigating in large models is better too.
Can do proper kerning now? (Score:2)
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Can I ask why you need kerning?
Supporting thousands of users, I don't think I've ever once seen anyone use kerning in Microsoft Office.
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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.
Re:Can do proper kerning now? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
They should be touting No Subscription Required! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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 m
Re: I've already lived this (Score:1)
It's 90% of MS Office + 100% more bugs than you're used to.
Old Tango Icons Much Better than New Ones!!! (Score:2)
Or better yet, work with all files (Score:1)
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
Galaxy icon theme: gone (Score:2)
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... [libreoffice.org]
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.
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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.
Re:It's still crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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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.
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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 yo
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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 :)