LibreOffice 6.2 New Features Include Notebookbar UI Interface, Performance Improvements, And More
The Document Foundation yesterday announced the release and immediate availability for download of the popular free and open-source office suite, LibreOffice 6.2 for Windows, Linux and macOS. It comes six months after version 6.1 was released in August last year.
The significant major release of LibreOffice 6.2 is the NotebookBar, which was in an experimental phase for quite some time, is based on the MUFFIN concept (“My User Friendly & Flexible Interface”). The NotebookBar is available in three variants: Tabbed, Grouped and Contextual and is not enabled by default. Each flavor has a different approach to the menu layout, and complement 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,” says the official blog post.
Let’s have a glance at 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.
Further, LibreOffice 6.2 will be the last version for which the project offers Linux x86 32-bit binary packages. You can find all the details of the latest LibreOffice version here and also a short video on the same. LibreOffice 6.2 is available for download for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
