Since my PC got infected in June and with all of the other things going
on in my life it's been a few months since I've used LibreOffice.
Version 5.0 is now out and I am hoping, with all of the changes they've
made, that accessibility is still good. Version 4 worked pretty well
with NVDA and with JAWS. If I'm going to be honest, Microsoft Office
provides richer accessibility and, when possible, I still recommend
Microsoft Office for blind screen reader users who are required to
complete major writing projects and who require the most information
they can get while editing their documents. Office 365 can be purchased
for a relatively small annual fee, $69.00 or maybe less, depending on
where you can acquire it or you can get it for around $8.00 a month.
Having said that, LibreOffice is free and provides a decent enough level
of accessibility to accomplish many document editing tasks and it may be
worth considering or at least trying out for people who don't have
Microsoft's suite. www.libreoffice.org is the Web site for more
information or to download a completely free copy. Here's the press
release for the new version.
LibreOffice 5.0 stands out from the office suite crowd
Windows 10 compatibility and superior interoperability features
Immediately available for Linux, MacOS X and Windows
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Berlin, August 5, 2015 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice
5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project and the
first of the third development cycle. LibreOffice is a full feature open
source office suite which compares head to head with every product in
the same category, while it stands out for superior interoperability
features.
LibreOffice 5.0 builds on the success of the 4.x family, which has been
deployed by over 80 million users (source: TDF estimate, based on users
pinging for updates), including large organizations in Europe and South
America.
LibreOffice 5.0 sports a significantly improved user interface, with a
better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition,
it offers better interoperability with office suites such as Microsoft
Office and Apple iWork, thanks to new and improved filters to handle non
standard formats. Other improvements have been added to every module of
the suite, and Windows 64bit builds (Vista and later) have been added.
LibreOffice 5.0 Highlights
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A new version for new endeavours: LibreOffice 5.0 is the cornerstone of
the mobile clients on Android and Ubuntu Touch, as well as the upcoming
cloud version. As such, LibreOffice 5.0 serves as the foundation of
current developments and is a great platform to extend, innovate and
collaborate!
A beautiful office suite designed by a fantastic community: With new
icons and major improvements to menus and sidebar, LibreOffice looks
nicer and helps users in being creative and getting things done the
right way. In addition, style management is now more intuitive thanks to
the visual preview of styles right in the interface.
Spreadsheets that rock: LibreOffice 5.0 ships with an impressive number
of new and enhanced spreadsheet features: complex formulae, new
functions, conditional formatting, image cropping, table addressing and
much more. Calc’s blend of performance and features makes it an
enterprise-ready, heavy duty spreadsheet capable of handling all kinds
of workload for an impressive range of use cases.
Better filters for better documents: LibreOffice 5 ships with many
improvements to document import and export filters, for an enhanced
document conversion fidelity all around. In addition, it is now possible
to timestamp PDF files generated with LibreOffice.
A complete list of the most significant new features is available on the
accompanying press release, and has also been published on the website
at the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.
LibreOffice 5.0 has also been improved “under the hood,” thanks to the
precious work of hundreds of volunteers. According to Coverity Scan, the
number of defects for 1,000 lines of code is now consistently below
0,001. This translates into an open source office suite which is not
only easier to develop but it’s also easier to maintain and debug. In
fact, the amount of solved bugs is now over 25,000, and is increasing
rapidly.
Last, but not least, LibreOffice 5.0 has been improved in terms of
quality and stability thanks to a large number of tests performed on new
builds by going through thousands of documents to spot crashers, bugs
and regressions.
“In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made
cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the
office suite we were envisioning for the long term,” says Michael Meeks,
a Director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. “Since 2010, we
have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to
clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more
responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of
user interface.”
A summary of what has happened “under the hood” of LibreOffice 5.0 is
available here:
http://users.freedesktop.org/~michael/under-the-hood-5-0.html.
“LibreOffice 5.0 is such a good product that people used to legacy open
source office suites feel overwhelmed by the amount of new features and
improvements,” adds Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman and leading
LibreOffice developer. “Switching from any OOo derivative to LibreOffice
is a giant leap into the future of free office suites.”
Availability and enterprise deployments
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LibreOffice 5.0 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for
open source office suites, and as such is targeted to technology
enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.
For enterprise class deployments in organizations of any size, TDF
maintains the more mature 4.4.x branch (now at 4.4.5). In any case, TDF
suggests to deploy or migrate to LibreOffice only if the project is
backed by certified professionals providing Level 3 support, migration
consultancy or training courses according to recognized best practices
(http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).
LibreOffice 5.0 is immediately available from the following link:
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice users, free software
advocates and all community members can support The Document Foundation
with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.
by Italo Vignoli at August 05, 2015 10:02 AM
--
David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology Specialist
Feel free to visit my Web site
www.davidgoldfield.info
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