LibreOffice slips out another 7.0 beta: Spreadsheets close gap with Excel while macOS users treated to new icons
- Reference: 1593507972
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/06/30/libreoffice_70_beta/
- Source link:
[1]
The addition of soft edges support fixes some cases where a PowerPoint graphic looked completely wrong in LibreOffice
The LibreOffice release cycle brings a significant new build every six months, so this one is [2]the follow-up to 6.4 in January . The major version number gets bumped every two or three years. The team follows a fixed schedule, [3]arguing that: "Time-based release trains have been shown to produce the best quality Free software."
The initial major releases are intended for early adopters, with mainstream users invited to wait for a minor point release. The suite consists of five main applications: Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress (presentations) and Base (database). There is also LibreOffice Math, for working with mathematical formulas.
[4]
Mac users get the benefit of a new icon set designed to conform to Apple's colour palette guidelines
In this release Mac users get a new icon set, called Sukapura, which follows Apple's recommended colour palette as defined in its Human Interface Guidelines. This is now the default on the Mac and a big cosmetic improvement.
Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool [5]READ MORE
There is also a major, though less visible, change on Windows, which is that the Cairo/OpenGL backend has been replaced with the Google-maintained [6]Skia library , as used by Chrome but also many other open-source products, and the Vulkan GPU/CPU acceleration API. This explains, perhaps, why when you run LibreOffice 7, an Nvidia "GeForce Experience" option pops up if you are using an Nvidia GPU. This should give better performance, though you are most likely to notice if you are dealing with large documents or complex graphics.
Graphics
[7]
The About dialog on Windows shows the use of Skia and Vulkan for core graphics
On the graphics side, there is also new support for a glow and "soft edges" effects, which does not sound like much, but the lack of the latter was enough to wreck a PowerPoint graphic, so this is important for interoperability.
The [8]test document still looks wrong on the Mac, though. Apple's Keynote could not display it either; it was perfect in PowerPoint on both Mac and Windows. You can also now use semi-transparent text in Writer.
Also new is "experimental support for very large spreadsheets", according to the [9]release notes , which in this context means 16 million rows and 16,384 columns. This is disabled by default, requiring the user to set an "experimental features" option which has a suitable warning. The old limit is just over 1 million rows and 1,024 columns.
Microsoft Excel is limited to just over 1 million rows and 16,384 columns, so LibreOffice is catching up on columns and leaping ahead in rows, presuming you believe that such a large spreadsheet has any plausible use.
[10]
A new accessibility checker identifies issues in Writer documents
Accessibility is enhanced in this version with a new accessibility check tool in Writer which informed us of things like "text contrast is too low" and "no alt text for graphic image".
The tool looks basic but will no doubt be enhanced and added to other applications in future. There is also support for PDF/UA, a standard for accessibility in PDF documents.
LibreOffice 7.0 adds support for newer versions of the ODF (Open Document Format) standard, 1.3 and 1.3 extended. There is also a change to the DOCX (Office Open XML) export, which is now in the 2013 version rather than the 2007 version. This may cause problems for Word 2010 users, to whom the advice is to "upgrade to LibreOffice".
There are a bunch of other changes, many of them minor bugfixes. Thin perhaps for a major version release? True, but the improvements are useful. Some are happy typing into a web browser, but for countless businesses desktop office applications are still heavily used, and the existence of strong open-source alternatives to Microsoft's suite is valuable not only for saving money on licences, but also for "digital sovereignty", which remains an [11]EU aspiration .
It is good to see the fit and finish of LibreOffice improving, though fonts and font display are still a weak point. Overall, though, this is excellent open-source software and 7.0 looks like another strong release. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/29/blurrededges.png
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/30/libreoffice_64_released_with_qr_codes_automatic_redaction/
[3] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan#Introduction
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/29/macicons.png
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/30/libreoffice_64_released_with_qr_codes_automatic_redaction/
[6] https://skia.org
[7] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/29/skia_vulcan.png
[8] https://mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/soft-edge-effect-on-objects-in-libreoffice/
[9] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.0
[10] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/29/accessibility.png
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/19/eu_digital_strategy_next_five_years/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I'm a big fan of LibreOffice so it's nice to see a release that seems to be strengthening it. I already use LO a lot at work, as it tends to crash much less than the Micros~1 version (although that might be a consequence of our support guys insisting we stick to the 32 bit version, presumably forever)
We have to stick to the 32 bit version because if we don't the program that everybody uses daily which generates the letters for them won't work.
It's also why we aren't using LibreOffice. Doing so an generating everything manually would cost more than the software licenses.
While I can understand sticking with 32-bit because of the add-on/integration problem, I don't see what's stopping anyone providing something similar for LibreOffice / OpenOffice which have both provided a rich API for automation for decades.
The majority of add-ins tended to be 32 bit a number of years ago, not sure if its still the same.
Also an accountant able to use more than 3GB of memory in excel spreadsheet is just plain scary!
Changing the backend is one thing
One thing I notice on Windows in 6.4 is a serious rendering issues when resizing windows. For example, if I resize the window frame horizontally or vertically the repaint of the content lags badly behind. In the meantime it suffers nasty layout juddering and gaps with black / garbage and/or suffers clipping issues depending on the new size being larger or smaller.
So changing the background is great and may speed rendering a little but the perceived experience to the user matters too. A little spit and polish on the user experience and usability would a go a long way to making the suite more popular.
Any news of a Libre_mail client
Its nice to see them improve the suite and accelerate the development.
a big thank you.
but is there any news if they will develop/create/integrate an Outlook/Lotus Notes/Thunderbird/Zimbra alternative ?
I find it a big missing point in the suite.
Re: Any news of a Libre_mail client
Evolution does everything I need for communicating with people and managing future tasks: e-mail, contact management, calendar plus a task list and memos.
"presuming you believe that such a large spreadsheet has any plausible use"
Reminds me of a vehicle dynamics project I was working on in the early 2000's.
I was told to "collect lots of data" so it could be post-processed. The data was in CAN messages, so I just stuffed the lot in the specified CSV format file. Each run fitted easily enough on a CD, but the team that were processing them reported that "they wouldn't open". Turns out they were trying to use Excel to read them, and it didn't like the 2.5 million "rows". Was never a problem using "proper" data analysis software like Matlab...
Input of accents on mac
Have the developers fixed the accents input issue on macs? The one where most of the other apps allow you to hold down a key to scroll through the accents for that key character. Libreoffice doesn't! It seems a really really stupid omission to me.
Re: Input of accents on mac
Oh hey! A new Mac OS X feature which is actually useful!
Of course, built-in since 1984 MacOS 1.0 is the ability to enter almost ANY accented character in 2 keystrokes. So maybe they just assumed people remember that.
Eg, hold down Option and press "e", then press "e". Voila!
Option i , i. Option u, u. Option a, a. Etc.
Fire up KeyCaps (now renamed) and press Option key to see at a glance all the options available. Note Option-Space might be a bit cryptic; it's the non-app-specific nonbreaking space.
Re: Input of accents on mac
God, I miss MacOS. You just got things DONE.
I remember a Unix admin legend and LaTEX guru at work labouring over a formula for his thesis for 2 weeks, with many yet to come, and he couldn't get it right. Took him into my uni Mac Plus (I was working 2 jobs during my Masters), handed him the whole lot in less than half an hour.
"I _could_ have done that in LaTEX, you know...."
"Yeah. But that quick, that easily?"
"..."
This used to be trivial knowledge for everyone. People so un-tech they wouldn't notice the power cord was unplugged and complain the computer had crashed, casually banging out stuff like this, and casually hacking their kernel. Without even realising that that was what they were doing, let alone how awesome it was.
Your now-ubiquitous Autocorrect, btw, was originally just a casual MacOS kernel hack. Thunder II, IIRC. I can't remember right now whether it was Apple or Microsoft first nicked and reimplemented the idea and issued it for free and built-in (in MS's case, first in MSOffice: the MacOS GUI recreated-ish on Windows), but either way, those poor bastards got rolled.
What do you call a spreadsheet with 1 million rows? A database.
Not really, a table at best. But at least Excel provides some kind of data typing, which is why it's become so ubiquitous. I've recently seen this confirmed in a project which relies on data passing through several hands before it can finally get into the database. Using Excel as the file format has led to far fewer errors than I would ever have imagined.
Low-level data format tip: bin CSV, go with TSV.
Compatability
which is now in the 2013 version rather than the 2007 version. This may cause problems for Word 2010 users, to whom the advice is to "upgrade to LibreOffice".
Unlikely: the transitional spec was really developed for MS Office 2007 and was incomplete, so that changes were made even after it shipped. Microsoft itself deprecated Office 2007 a while back so it's not uncommon to come across OOXML documents that Office 2007 cannot process completely but I've not seen such problems with Office 2010 which saw far greater adoption, largely on the promise of stable document formats.