LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/07/28/libreoffice-5-4/

by mksaunders • 9 years ago

178 63 9 years ago

blog.documentfoundation.org

I love seeing plain-text-related features appear every once in a while. Stuff like this[0] makes it much easier to use LO with my home-grown notetaking system which is kept in plain text.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNWOWJul4w&t=1m9s

vedranm• 9 years ago

Thanks to the efforts of developers, the XML description of a new document written by LibreOffice is 50% smaller in the case of ODF (ODT), and around 90% smaller in the case of OOXML (DOCX), in comparison with the same document generated by the leading proprietary office suite.

Given Microsoft's record in implemeting OpenDocument, this shouldn't be too hard to do.

phonon2• 9 years ago

I think they're saying they do .docx better (or at least smaller) than MS Word does .docx

italovignoli2• 9 years ago

DOCX files created by LibreOffice are not only smaller but simpler in term of XML structure, and easier to interoperate. A two-page file created from scratch is 1100 XML lines if written by LibreOffice and 11500 XML lines if written by Microsoft Office. The 10400 redundant XML lines are there to make it difficult to properly read the file. Also, they may contain non-standard elements which have been deprecated before the approval of the standard itself but are still there after 12 years.

Freak_NL2• 9 years ago

I'm looking forward to giving LibreOffice Online a test drive. Perhaps it can replace Google Docs for us with a nice self-hosted solution.

Are there any public demo instances available?

phonon2• 9 years ago

https://demo.nextcloud.com/#short-term

Freak_NL2• 9 years ago

Still looks more than a little rough around the edges. It doesn't like the styles can be edited at this stage?

frik3• 9 years ago

Great. It works fine even on a tablet with touch. Sure, GoogleDocs is still better, but the power of the underlying LibreOffice will a lot more, and it's on-pare with iCloud and better than MS Word WebApp

0x02• 9 years ago

I'm getting the macOS gatekeeper alert about "unidentified developer". Obviously this can be bypassed by right-clicking and choosing open, but don't the libreoffice developers code-sign LibreOffice.app (anymore) ?

amake• 9 years ago

I was confused by this, too. I could have sworn they were signing previous releases, but I'm not sure.

I did check the SHA-1 of my download, and it was correct.

0x02• 9 years ago

Yep, the SHA-1 matched the one listed on the website for me too.

cowsandmilk• 9 years ago

previous one was definitely code signed. I installed the previous one yesterday and it was signed. So, surprised when today's wasn't.

eklavya• 9 years ago

I just use the libreoffice in App Store. It's older but for my needs it suffices.

bbayles• 9 years ago

Love LibreOffice - I've used it and OpenOffice for over 15 years. I've been heartbroken by recent releases, however - the keyboard shortcuts in Calc (and other components) have changed.

This is like breaking my fingers - I'm so much slower now. It's not just that there's a difference - I can adapt to that. It's that they've re-labeled menu entries with duplicate index keys. You can't do some things quickly now (e.g. optimize column widths with Alt-O-M-O, which worked for years).

There's a reason why MS Excel has keyboard shortcuts that make no sense - they match to menu entries from old versions, and they've kept them in so people who have been using it for decades don't have a reason to switch.

Please, LibreOffice developers, make your menu shortcuts sensible again!

EvanAnderson4• 9 years ago

It's nice to hear that somebody else feels this way, too.

I'm running an older LibreOffice release simply because I won't put up with the hit on my productivity in Calc. I'm not going to waste my effort learning new keyboard shortcuts, particularly when they're key shortcuts that also work in Excel and have kept working there from Excel 2003 - 2016.

An idealistic part of me would love to spend the time to figure out how to stand up a build environment for LibreOffice to fix this myself, but I've got a lot better stuff to do.

maxerickson• 9 years ago

Why not use the in application customization to set the shortcuts?

Obviously in general not wanting to bother is a perfectly valid reason, I'm asking in comparison to setting up a build environment.

frik3• 9 years ago

Just for your info, no better in MS-land, Microsoft broke most shortcuts between Office 2003 and Office 2007, a few got reverted with 2010. Still it's mind blowing how bad shortcuts are nowadays. Instead of Ctrl+<char> one has to type Alt+<char>+<char> and other nonsense for many shortcuts. (Sure system wide shortcuts and a few ones like Ctrl+C still work) But try to paste a text as plain unformatted text, good luck with that.

EvanAnderson4• 9 years ago

Interesting observation. I've had the opposite experience. Perhaps it is sbecause I'm not using "shortcuts" but rather am operating the pull-down menus with accelerator keys via muscle-memory. Inserting columns, rows, formatting cells, and many other functions continued to work with the various ALT-x-x combinations that I was used to. I never used any of the CTRL-x variants, except for cut/copy/paste.

edoloughlin2• 9 years ago

try to paste a text as plain unformatted text, good luck with that.

CTRL-V, release. Press & release the CTRL key, then press T

ratherbefuddled• 9 years ago

It was when they brought that idiotic ribbon in and it was apparently more important to meet the engineering need for implementation elegance (consistent shortcut keys across all the office suite that matched the ribbon click path) than to let users continue to work efficiently. Insert row went from alt->I->R to something I can't even remember now. I hope someone in product management got flogged for that.

andyhnj• 9 years ago

There's a reason why MS Excel has keyboard shortcuts that make no sense - they match to menu entries from old versions, and they've kept them in so people who have been using it for decades don't have a reason to switch.

Yep. I've been typing "/edr" to delete a row in a spreadsheet for 25 years, and I'm not going to stop now. :-)

kiwijamo• 9 years ago

That doesn't seem to work in Excel 12.29 for MacOS. Is it a Windows only keystroke?

neves• 9 years ago

I understand you. I loathe the Microsoft Windows guy who translated the shortcuts of MS Office. Ctrl-S does not save my Excel file. I've already lost a lot of work due to this poor soul.

phkahler2• 9 years ago

How is the native Wayland support these days?

jhasse• 9 years ago

5.3 already runs perfectly for me on Wayland (native, not through Xwayland). So I guess 5.4 will be the same :)

phkahler2• 9 years ago

That pleases me. Now if Firefox could catch up....

cwyers3• 9 years ago

Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, LibreOffce developers have focused on fle simplicity as the ultimate document interoperability sophistication. This makes ODF and OOXML fles written by the free offce suite more robust and easier to exchange with other users than the same documents generated by other offce suites.

So, two notes here:

1) Microsoft Office and Google Docs at least have figured out how to make their web versions so that when I copy-and-paste from them, any i following an f doesn't disappear because of whatever they're doing to kern letters.

2) "Shorter XML output" is about 978th on the list of things that LibreOffice needs to do to improve interoperability, and the fact that it's a focus is deeply weird.

italovignoli2• 9 years ago

You are probably not aware of the issues related to Microsoft Office files, which are intentionally bloated with useless XML contents to make interoperability almost impossible. A cleaner XML improves interoperability, even if you do not think it helps. The reality is that until people will consider Microsoft Office files as a reference, anything else will fail WRT interoperability because those files are developed to kill interoperability.

cwyers3• 9 years ago

which are intentionally bloated with useless XML contents to make interoperability almost impossible.

That's just a conspiracy theory. The reason they're "bloated" is because Microsoft Office is optimizing for interoperability with its largest competitor: older versions of Microsoft Office.

Maybe Microsoft Office having "cleaner" XML would improve interoperability. But as long as Office is the standard, the ability to consume messy XML is worth more than the ability to emit clean XML.

FatAmericanDev• 9 years ago

Libreoffice is too slow with large documents.

vram222• 9 years ago

At what size (in MB) of document have you noticed that it gets too slow? asking because I am planning to use it for a writing project.

keithpeter• 9 years ago

I do course guides and question sets to support teaching in LibreOffice Writer (at home) and OpenOffice (at work). In the 60 page range, with lots of formulas, diagrams (drawn with drawing tools) and some bitmap images (scans of hand drawn graphs). I also copy in charts and graphs and more complex drawings from Calc/Impress as needed. No complex 'section' schemes or restyling though just writing straight through.

The size in Mb varies according to the number of scans - the drawings and diagrams themselves take little file space. A 100 page course guide comes in around 2Mb as an .odt with half a dozen scanned plots.

Seems sprightly enough on a core-duo laptop with 2Gb ram and KDE at home and the usual 'office PC' at work.

dwheeler• 9 years ago

Works for me. I have a 750-page .odt document which I just edited today with no speed problems.

blablabla123• 9 years ago

I like LibreOffice as well. I find the whole suite useful: Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw. No heavy office person but I I use Calc several times a week.

It's funny that after so many years the tools still struggles getting traction even among Linux users. The built-in PDF was there years before MS Office which is why I wrote all my Resumes in the past with LibreOffice/OpenOffice. Google Docs might be more intuitive but it has less features than MS Works and I have little control over my privacy.

izzard2• 9 years ago

Warning to Windows users. I've just performed a clean install of the latest version, and I'm experiencing this problem:

https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/113122/menu-bar-vani...

Looks like others are having this problem, too.

izzard2• 9 years ago

Just found a solution, disabling OpenGL rendering. Not sure why this works, but it does:

https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/112724/all-the-words...

SubiculumCode• 9 years ago

I use calc all the time, and it does just fine, but one thing I'd like to know how to fix is the poor performance when having a filter applied on a long column...it crawls...

chtfn• 9 years ago

Have you submitted a bug report or looked for an existing one? https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Li...?

xixor2• 9 years ago

I try to get into LibreOffice, but I just can't: on windows the ui is quite laggy, and the fonts just look... strange. It's like both the kerning and AA are off.

ComputerGuru• 9 years ago

I remember using OpenOffice torrents back in 2004 as the equivalent of `:CheckHealth` to see if users had problems with their network configuration, throttling, connection speed, etc because of how perpetually well-seeded they were.

I tried the torrent download just for kicks, and I was pleasantly surprised that was still the case: it downloaded at over 40MiB/s. (yes, MiB/s, not mbps).

Here's a magnet link if anyone wants:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:40836b52d32f79dbb90f2453ab3ee6e6da825880&dn=LibreOffice_5.4.0_Win_x64.msi

ta33444• 9 years ago

I havent checked in a while, but have they given up on the pathetic attempt at an Access clone? It looked like someones weekend project accidentally got turned into a product.

cutler• 9 years ago

Forget features. Just make LO usable again. I had to revert to OpenOffice recently in the middle of pitching a client for a desktop db conversion from MS Access. On OS X Sierra LO has regressed.

heypete• 9 years ago

As much as I love LibreOffice -- and I prefer to use it whenever I can for several reasons -- the UI is just painfully awful.

My university and one of the journals I publish in require Word (docx) files for papers and other documents, so I'm required to use Office. No alternatives are allowed, not even LaTeX or sending in PDFs: their whole internal editing and typesetting system is based around Word. Still, while I disliked the ribbon in 2007, I've found the Word UI to have improved significantly over the years, with 2016 being remarkably decent and producing quite presentable documents. I would not object to there being a similar UI them in Writer.

I wanted to use Writer for several papers and my PhD thesis, but it has some difficulty importing my otherwise-not-very-complex Word 2016 files. While the text is imported more or less correctly, table widths and alignments get all screwy (which is a big deal), Word's internal cross-references (e.g. "See Figure X", where X is a number representing a specific figure and if that figure is re-ordered in the document, the number changes) get horribly broken, among other issues. Having Word export as ODT and opening that in Writer fixes some issues but creates more issues to the point where there's no real alternative for me than Word, at least for papers and other academic documents.

It really bugs me, and I blame Word for the interoperability issues. Even so, I have no alternatives due to the requirements of the journal. Bah.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

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