TQ
dev.com

LibreOffice 5.2 released

07 Aug 2016 - by 'Maurits van der Schee'

On August 3rd, 2016 the Document Foundation released LibreOffice 5.2, "a feature-rich major release of the best free office suite ever created" as they say on their website. I think they are very humble, because it is not only the best free office suite ever created. No commercial office suite (not even Microsoft Office) comes close to the UI consistency and speed of this office suite.

3 notable new features in LibrOffice 5.2:

• Google Drive's Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) now supported.
• Pressing Shift + Return in the multi-line input will now insert a new line in Calc.
• Calc now has a set of forecasting functions that use triple and double exponential smoothing and handle seasonal effects.

See: release notes

3 notable new features in LibrOffice 5.1:

• Open remote files for opening file on remote resources such as Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc.
• Apple Keynote 6 files can now be imported in Impress.
• PNG export in LibreOffice Calc was added.

See: release notes

3 notable new features in LibrOffice 5.0:

• Emoji and in-word replacement support in Writer.
• Styles & Formatting deck of the Sidebar now displays a preview of the available styles in Writer.
• Both highlighting and shading are preserved during import / export of Microsoft Word documents in Writer.

See: release notes

Microsoft keeps alienating users

Microsoft keeps alienating it's users, by revamping the user interface every version. It introduced "ribbons" and weird upper left "Microsoft Office Button" (source). It introduces OneDrive and (almost) forces you to use it while you probably rather use Google Drive or DropBox. Microsoft also constantly changes their file formats, forcing people to upgrade or accept reduced functionality. I sometimes wonder why Microsoft is doing this as it is clearly hurting their product.

Steady improvements

LibreOffice on the other hand makes small incremental steps that you hardly notice. It has a release schedule in which a minor updates (like the ones above) are scheduled every 5 months and each minor version has a 10 months of support with bugfixes. It makes no bold moves in the UI or the feature set, therefor being a much better choice for professionals that cannot be bothered by relearning their Office suite every 2 years.

Available on Windows and OSX

LibreOffice is part of most Linux repositories, but is also available for Windows and OSX. I highly recommend you to use it on these platforms as well.

Download LibreOffice 5.2

PS: Liked this article? Please share it on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.