LibreOffice 4.4 Is Coming Soon With New Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice 4.4 Is Coming Soon With New Features

The release plan puts the LibreOffice 4.4.0 as being just days away, but what features are in store for this open-source office suite? Let's take a brief look...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-4.4-Features-Coming

[Tuxee]

Full Qt5 port and these:

Thank god that I don't have to work with this UI abomination which goes by the name "ribbons"...

[DeepDayze]

Thank god that I don't have to work with this UI abomination which goes by the name "ribbons"...

I personally prefer the scheme that Office 2013 has...clean and simple. The Ribbon as in O2007 and O2010 is confusing enough.

[nanonyme]

I personally prefer the scheme that Office 2013 has...clean and simple. The Ribbon as in O2007 and O2010 is confusing enough.

I agree, the ribbon is a significant regression in the usability of MS Office

[plasmasnake]

The ribbon is the single best improvement to the Office UI since Office 97, imo. It makes it so much easier to find stuff, instead of searching through those tiny icons and having to mouse over them and read the tooltip to find out what they are supposed to do. I honestly don't understand how anybody could view it as a regression, after using it for a couple of weeks. I've yet to meet a person in real life who has disagreed.

That being said, the ribbon UI is patented, so LibreOffice would have to wait 20 years before they would be allowed to implement it! It's a royalty-free patent, but Microsoft disallows its use in competing products.

[ua=42]

It would be nice if they switched from using their home-brew gui system to Qt.

I disagree with the ribbon. The sidebar in Libreoffice is a significantly better solution that they need to expand upon. (allow custom groups to be added to it.)

[duby229]

The ribbon is the single best improvement to the Office UI since Office 97, imo. It makes it so much easier to find stuff, instead of searching through those tiny icons and having to mouse over them and read the tooltip to find out what they are supposed to do. I honestly don't understand how anybody could view it as a regression, after using it for a couple of weeks. I've yet to meet a person in real life who has disagreed.

That being said, the ribbon UI is patented, so LibreOffice would have to wait 20 years before they would be allowed to implement it! It's a royalty-free patent, but Microsoft disallows its use in competing products.

Which is exactly the problem with software patents. Patenting ideology is illegal, but that's exactly what software patents are.

[nanonyme]

The ribbon is the single best improvement to the Office UI since Office 97, imo. It makes it so much easier to find stuff, instead of searching through those tiny icons and having to mouse over them and read the tooltip to find out what they are supposed to do. I honestly don't understand how anybody could view it as a regression, after using it for a couple of weeks. I've yet to meet a person in real life who has disagreed.

That being said, the ribbon UI is patented, so LibreOffice would have to wait 20 years before they would be allowed to implement it! It's a royalty-free patent, but Microsoft disallows its use in competing products.

I've used it in both Outlook and Office for more than a year at this point on a work machine and I regard it a regression. All of my colleagues I've talked to about it agree. Guess this is observer bias

[marccollin]

side bar is the way to go with the 16/9 screen.

[schmidtbag]

side bar is the way to go with the 16/9 screen.

Agreed - I think the MS Office 2010 (and newer) ribbon bars are pretty nice and I prefer them over the classic toolbars, but they REALLY need to focus on a vertical bar. I like that LibreOffice uses the vertical side bar but it's very lacking compared to MS Office's ribbon bars. LibreOffice in general is somewhat behind when it comes to simplifying and cleaning up the UI. I think where MS Office exceeds is how much easier (yet powerful) their UI is.