Graham Morrison needs to find a collective noun for people who love word processors
We must admit. Despite their prosaic nature, and a tendency to be associated with open plan offices, we quite like office suites. This may be something to do with the Amiga, and the emergence of proper graphical word processors like Wordsworth and Final Writer. Even to our younger selves, opening the physical packaging around those (costly) products and patiently installing a single application off several floppy discs was exciting. To be then presented with a WYSIWYG view of your writing, as you typed, seemed revolutionary.
We had the same warm and fuzzy feeling when Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice in 1999 and then open sourced the project in 2000. We had the same feeling when The Documentation Foundation was formed to help LibreOffice fork itself from the then incumbent OpenOffice.org, which remained under the control of Oracle Corporation after its acquisition of Sun. Even now, when installing the latest version of LibreOffice, it feels wonderful that we have such a powerful suite of office applications, free in both cost and principle. That there's a graphical database, a spreadsheet, a presentation creator and a drawing tool alongside the wordsmith feels like a free pass to an all-you-can-eat buffet. It's a good job major releases like this don't come along too often.
High five
LibreOffice 5 comes three years after 4.0, but it's also a little unexpected. It was due to be version 4.5, but perhaps because the 4.x release cycle has consistently delivered great upgrades, the project has 'done a Linus' and upped the major number as a demarcation of everything that's been achieved. Notably, we loved the new icon theme that came with 4.2, and the OpenGL and Ul overhaul of 4.4, which was only released in January 2015. Our huge datasets have also been grateful for the re-written computation engine in the spreadsheet, along with many other small updates and refinements along the way.
The LibreOffice report for 2014, released by The Document Foundation in June 2015, for instance, is worth a perusal just to see how much has been achieved. It's great to know, for example, there were a total of 67,500 donations throughout 2014, raising nearly €595,000.
As usual, the release notes that accompany LibreOffice 5 are longer than a Microsoft EULA. It's good that they're comprehensive, because so many projects fail to document what they've been working on. But they’re also too long for immediate gratification. It would be great if alongside the release notes there were a visual overview of what was new and what had changed.
Close to the edit
We’ll start with the word processor, Writer, as this is likely to be the most commonly used component of the entire suite. There are small graphical refinements everywhere. Some of the menus have changed, and there's a new icon set based on Breeze from KDE. Whether this looks good is subjective, but as this review is written by a KDE user using exactly that icon set on the desktop, it's a very pleasing update, especially when KDE integration always feels a few steps behind GTKand what the Ubuntu team does themselves for better unification.
Styles now have a rendered preview, just like the font selector does, which is a great help if you use more than a few styles. If you want to flag your friend's spelling mistakes, text highlighting is now compatible with Microsoft Word formats, and images can be cropped with your mouse. We'd like to see the integration of word definitions, perhaps using an offline database, so we can look up a word while writing. We'd also love to see a more configurable writing environment where we can remove all distractions and have an on-screen word count for the total document, paragraph and selection.
Editing and creating text documents, especially if you need Word compatibility or if you're working with downloaded templates, works brilliantly. We use it almost every day for label printing, for example, and we’d be lost without LibreOffice and its exceptional format support. One of the best new features is the addition of the timestamp protocol to PDF exports. This enables you to sign a document with an external authority that guarantees the authenticity of the timestamp. It's easier than getting an image of yourself with today's newspaper, and is a serious requirement for all kinds of legal and archival uses.
Almost too good?
We love new features, but we still think that LibreOffice could do with a feature purge, or at the very least, some menu and option pruning. The suite seems to have continued getting more complex for over a decade, despite there being a minor revolution in distraction-free editors and online suites. We know LibreOffice needs to compete with Microsoft Office and match as many features as it can, but we'd love to see a genuine overhaul of the interface, and we don't mean by adding the abysmal ribbons.
The spreadsheet has had some cosmetic changes made to the data bars, plus conditional formatting, which can now be exported to XSLX. There are also a handful of new spreadsheet functions to improve compatibility with Excel. We still experienced stability issues when using large spreadsheets. This may be because Calc has received a lot of internal work for this update, as part of the computational engine rewrite. Similar updates have been made to the other applications in the suite. Draw and Impress both look smarter, and the entire suite works well with our High DPI display now.
LibreOffice is undoubtedly looking to the future, with the new editable Android app and the soon-to-be-released cloud version. This is particularly clever, because it encapsulates the real code and functionality of the native application, rather than being a web interface connected to an API. We know of no other online office suite that's as comprehensive, and LibreOffice could genuinely find success with cloud/online users who want something more comprehensive than the low-fat office suites currently available.
LibreOffice 5.0 is another strong release, tempered perhaps by its own successes and the expectations that come with a major version number. We may be beholden to LibreOffice for its cross-platform compatibility, but development has never stalled. Each release adds hundreds of features, fixes and improvements. It still has rough edges - especially around the GUI - but we can't imagine Linux being a viable alternative to OS X or Windows without it.
We'd like to see some Ul rationalisation, but version 5.0 is a strong update to this cornerstone of FOSS success.