The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2 with NotebookBar, the office suite which offers the most flexible user experience

LibreOffice 6.1.5 also released, for enterprise class deployments and mainstream users looking for robust productivity

Berlin, February 7, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2 with NotebookBar, a significant major release of the free office suite which features a radical new approach to the user interface – based on the MUFFIN concept [1] – and provides user experience options capable of satisfying all users’ preferences, while leveraging all screen sizes in the best way.

The NotebookBar is available in Tabbed, Grouped and Contextual flavors, each one with a different approach to the menu layout, and complements the traditional Toolbars and Sidebar. The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from proprietary office suites and is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar, while the Grouped one allows to access “first-level” functions with one click and “second-level” functions with a maximum of two clicks.

The design community has also made substantial changes and improvements to icon themes, in particular Elementary and Karasa Jaga.

LibreOffice 6.2 new and improved features:

• The help system offers faster filtering of index keywords, highlighting search terms as they are typed and displaying results based on the selected module.
• Context menus have been tidied up, to be more consistent across the different components in the suite.
• Change tracking performances have been dramatically improved, especially in large documents.
• In Writer, it is now possible to copy spreadsheet data into tables instead of just inserting them as objects.
• In Calc, it is now possible to do multivariate regression analysis using the regression tool. In addition, many more statistical measures are now available in the analysis output, and the new REGEX function has been added, to match text against a regular expression and optionally replace it.
• In Impress & Draw, the motion path of animations can now be modified by dragging its control points. In addition, a couple of text-related drawing styles have been added, as well as a Format Table submenu in Draw.
• LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based version of the suite, includes many improvements too. On mobile devices, the user interface has been simplified, with better responsiveness and updates to the on-screen keyboard.

Interoperability with proprietary file formats has also been improved, as with every major and minor version of LibreOffice, for better compatibility with Office documents, including old versions which have been deprecated by Microsoft. The focus has been on charts and animations, and on document security features, with agile encryption and HMAC verification.

LibreOffice 6.2’s new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 74% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as the City of Munich and SIL, and 26% are from individual volunteers.

In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy at a local level.

A video summarizing the top new features of LibreOffice 6.2 is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HUnR5IoAQk.

LibreOffice 6.1.5 for enterprise class deployments

The Document Foundation has also released LibreOffice 6.1.5, a more mature version which includes some months of back-ported fixes and is better suited for enterprise class deployments, where features are less important than robustness as the main objective is individual productivity.

Enterprises willing to deploy LibreOffice on a professional basis should source value-added services – related to software support, migrations and training – from certified people (https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/) and a LibreOffice LTS (Long Term Supported) versions provided by one of the companies sitting on TDF Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/).

Sourcing enterprise class software and/or services from the ecosystem of certified professionals are the best support options for organizations deploying LibreOffice on a large number of desktops. In fact, these activities are contributed back to the project under the form of improvements to the software and the community, and trigger a virtuous circle which is beneficial to all parties, including users.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.2 and LibreOffice 6.1.5

LibreOffice 6.2 and LibreOffice 6.1.5 are immediately available from the following web page: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are also available, released as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 6.2 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Press Kit

The press kit is here: https://tdf.io/lo62presskit.

[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-document-foundation-announces-the-muffin-a-new-tasty-user-interface-concept-for-libreoffice/