11 May 2012

New and changed functions; you can experience and test them … now!

Posted in QA By Cor Nouws On May 11, 2012

Without doubt you are very much interested in the latest news for LibreOffice and the new and improved functions that will be in the next version!
Now, this is your chance to both get to know these and to help the developers working on all this!
You can simply download the latest nightly build, and install it on your computer. It will be placed beside your current LibreOffice. (Or you may want to do a custom parallel installation.) Look at the features of your desire or that you work with most, and give some feedback. Simple as that.
Found something worth a bug-report? Then this page will help you. There also is a list with the people that are there to help you helping! For that list and for general information in LibreOffice QA, look here (warning: it’s a lot 😉 ).

Now… features and functions added or worked on recently are:

  • The file picker now has a list of bookmarks, 2012-04-02, commit message / info, related issue: –.
  • Added Presentationsize 16:9 Widescreen, 2012-04-18, commit message / info, related issue: 42986.
  • Add a “Save cell formulas” checkbox to the CSV Export panel, 2012-04-21, commit message / info, related issue: 45664.
  • Proper sort SelectionTree control of Custom Setup with a custom action for all languages, 2012-04-24, commit message / info, related issue: 46355.
  • Border width in Calc and Writer tables, lots of ongoing fixes…
  • RTF import improvements, lots of ongoing fixes…
  • Install only one language on Windows during silent install, 2012-04-25, commit message / info, related issue: 40481.
  • Enable insertion of OLE objects into external applications, 2012-04-26, commit message / info, related issue: 47944.
  • Paragraph and lists: don’t overwrite numbering properties with paragraph properties, 2012-04-26, commit message / info, related issue: –.
  • Make detection of certificate folder ui-configurable, 2012-04-27, commit message / info, related issue: 39825.
  • Ruler: implemented new design, 2012-04-27, commit message / info, related mail on the list.
  • Cleaned up command line arguments, behaviour has been changed slightly, 2012-05-02, commit message / info, related issue: –.
  • Autoformat in tables saving more information, such as column width, margins, text orientation, 2012-05-03, commit message / info, related issue: 31005.
  • Wiki-publisher: media-wiki export was broken (testing highly appreciated to add fix to 3.5 branch!), 2012-05-09, commit message / info, related issue: 46509.

This is the first post in what we expect will be a long series. We hope it’s useful and look forward to feedback, results and suggestions!

Comments

  1. By JB

    Many good news and good work !

  2. By PalleS

    Hi,

    A killing feature that I miss in this and the competition is useful revision marks. By useful I mean the ability to mark diff’s by color coding across specified versions of the same document aka in writer (or similar): Deleted content are marked with a clear RED background. A changed paragraph (or cell or graphical object) is marked with a clear CYAN background and new content is marked with a clear YELLOW background. No strikeouts, no bars at the side or other b/w nonsense, no markings of changed typography no unreadable TOCs – just plain, clear useful markings in the payload for a rapid walk thru with co-workers and/or clients.

    This is not critique it is an improvement suggestion 😉

    Cheers,

    • By cornouws

      Looks as a good suggestion – so I would say: look at the wiki on how to get it in “the pip-line”!

  3. By Sleeping

    Great news.
    Could you please tell me the differences between theese nighlty bulds? 🙂
    Win-x86@6-fast/
    Win-x86@7-MinGW/
    Win-x86@9-Voreppe_Win32/
    Win-x86@15-Prague_Win32/

    • By korrawit

      Short answer: just use Win-x86@6-fast 😉

      Long answer: @7 is an experimental cross-compiling with MinGW, @9 and @15 is now inactive, and @15 was building libreoffice-3-5 branch (will be 3.5.x), not master branch. See also at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Tinderbox

      • By Sleeping

        Thank you. You’v been very kind and precise.
        I had read that wiki but it didn’t seem to clear to me as your explication.
        🙂

  4. By kso

    The file picker now has a list of bookmarks => http://hg.services.openoffice.org/hg/cws/kso47/ (unfortunately never got integrated in DEV300; was planned for OOo 3.5)

  6. By AJ

    Screenshots would be nice, where applicable.

    • By cornouws

      Ah well, the idea is that you and others play&test with the functions. Maybe you find some situations yourself that are nice for a screenshot 😉

  7. By Andrew

    It would be useful if you also did a blog post on howto install the daily builds. I am on Ubuntu and the only dailies that I see can be downloaded is the libreoffice dev-libraries, not the actual program.

  8. By Alex

    Will there be any improvements on Office Open XML support? It’s a deal breaker for most people.

    • By Sleeping

      I agree. It should be as good as possible, since it is one of the most used features.

  9. By Jon

    My clients have been asking for improvements in these areas:

    1. Printing envelopes is a task full of trial and errors. On a Dell 1355cnw with Libre Office for Mac you have to do just the opposite of the screen pictures to print an envelope.
    2. Toolbar colors on the Mac – it would be nice to shift the color from stark white to a nice grey that matches the rest of the system.
    3. View, Zoom, Variable – type in a new zoom scale and it takes almost 30 seconds before the new size is displayed in the dialog box. This does not happen in the Windows version.
    4. Separate icons for the programs on the Mac.

  10. By anomymous user

    Hi, here’s some stuff I found not functioning properly in your open-code office program, and could be corrected. Unfortunately, I don’t know any programming language, so I leave to you. Sorry about any eventual mistake on my English writing… Here goes:

    1. When you select an option like Bold, Italic or Underline, write the text and change paragraph with Enter, the option should de-activate automatically.

    2. When you create a textbox, each time you open the file it is in, it streches a bit – each time you open it.

    3. The drawing tools in the writing program and the the drawing program itself don’t have a rubber/eraser function.

    4. The writing program has two functions less, than MSWord, in the top toolbars…and could be included: the setting of the space between lines and paragraphs, and the option which lets you write smaller caracters in an upper or lower position from the textline.

    5. I also tried to copy a segment of text from a blog to the writing program and it stopped the program from working…i had to close it and then recover the page, when i opened the file again.

    Now, two suggestions:

    1. The shift+f3 trick to instantly change a segment of the text from small to capital, and even only the first letter in each word to capital could work better in one thing: if it would also change the segment of the text to small keeping only the first letter of the entire segment as capital.

    2. The LibreOffice could be improved if it contained one more program…a statistic calculation program, like SPSS. It’s not the same thing as using a general calculation sheet…

    Guess it’s all…

  11. By Kevin

    Is the totally ridiculous Bug 33484 resolved yet?

    Printing multiple files from Windows Explorer at once makes LibreOffice unusable

  12. By anoynimous reader

    Here’s a 6th not-functioning-properly thing: when you write some text in italic, the last letter of the text becomes slightly “cut” at the end…

    • By cornouws

      thanks for your contribution here. Did you try to write a bug report, or comment to a possibly already existing one for the topic? If so, pls give the bug report number.

  13. By Guillermo Alejandro

    Hola:
    soy nuevo y estoy probando libreOffice en español, hasta ahora me parece mejor logrado que OOffice al tomar los archivos de MOffice 2010. he notado que los números de las imágenes y las referencias cruzadas no las toma bien. Por otro lado Base me obliga a programar nuevamente las consultas, formularios, informes y código VB. tendrá solución en el futuro? espero que si porque en Argentina necesitamos una alternativa para los equipos de casa.