[tdf-announce] 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/


Link to blog post:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2019/02/07/libreoffice-6-2/

-- 
Italo Vignoli - Marketing & PR
email italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
mobile/signal +39.348.5653829 - skype italovignoli
hangout/jabber italo.vignoli@gmail.com
The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, DE
Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint
GPG Key ID - 0xAAB8D5C0
DB75 1534 3FD0 EA5F 56B5 FDA6 DE82 934C AAB8 D5C0

-- 
To unsubscribe e-mail to: announce+unsubscribe@documentfoundation.org
Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/announce/