LibreOffice 5.2: Release Notes

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About this page

This is an in-progress scratch-pad of notes to build release notes from as and when we release. Please do not list features that are to be shipped already in the 5.1 release! Please do not add wish-list features that you hope will be implemented, but only what actually is implemented already.

What does a good feature look like here:

  • It has a description, and a way for a busy reviewer, to find and play with the feature. Target someone who is extremely busy, and knows little-to-nothing about the product. So if a user interface element is key to the feature, be very explicit about where it is, e. g. Menu ▸ Format ▸ Character ▸ Position [tab] ▸ ‘90 degrees’ paths to the elements you changed. Of course, you know your feature is important, and that everyone should care about the Extensible AutoShapes Properties dialog – but often the guys taking the screenshots and writing the notes do not.
  • It credits the main authors who did the work – just add them in brackets after the feature, where possible.
  • If the feature can be shown off with a sample / test file – particularly for new import-able features, it would be wonderful to have a link to/up-load of a test file that we can use to show that feature off to best effect. That really helps us to make good screenshots to show off the features, and allows reviewers to do their testing.

Thanks in advance for your help filling this out!


Writer

  • New drawing tools were added, including Filled Curve/Polygon/Freeform Line, as well as Polygon (45°). tdf#89646 (Gülşah Köse)
  • New button added to standard toolbar for showing/hiding track changes toolbar. tdf#90187 (Gülşah Köse)
Trackchangesbar.png
  • Data Sources keyboard shortcut was changed from F4 to Ctrl+⇧ Shift+F4 to unify it with Calc. tdf#97906 (Yousuf Philips)
  • The Standard (Single Mode) toolbar was created to be used as an single toolbar alternative to the standard two toolbar arrangement and it contains the most used function, insert, and formatting operations. tdf#92218 (Yousuf Philips)

Selection Filter in Cross Reference Tab

  • Added a "filter" to Insert ▸ Fields ▸ More Fields ▸ Cross-references tab. Users can type a few characters to narrow the list. tdf#32364 (Akshay Deep)
Cross Reference Tab: Selection Filter UI

Calc

  • New drawing tools were added, including Filled Curve/Polygon/Freeform Line, as well as Polygon (45°). tdf#89646 (Gülşah Köse)
  • Easy ability to freeze the first column or first row of a sheet through the toolbar or menu View ▸ Freeze Cells. tdf#91013 (Gülşah Köse; Maxim Monastirsky; Yousuf Philips)
  • Cell References keyboard shortcut ⇧ Shift+F4 was removed in favor of F4, but is still available in OpenOffice.org Legacy keybindings. tdf#97906 (Dennis Francis; Yousuf Philips)
  • Column Select keyboard shortcut Ctrl+⇧ Shift+Space was replaced with Ctrl+Space. tdf#96969 (Yousuf Philips)
  • Keyboard shortcut Ctrl+, to insert date and Ctrl+⇧ Shift+, to insert time is available to various European keyboard layouts. tdf#88027 (Yousuf Philips)
  • Option to delete border from adjacent cells too in the borders tab of "Format Cells" dialog. tdf#34449 (Dennis Francis)
The new checkbox option to remove border from adjacent cells as well
Left - remove border of cells with option is not select, right - option is select
  • Multiple status-bar functions can be active at the same time. tdf#42629 (Dennis Francis)
Status-bar functions Sum and Count are active at the same time
  • Currency drop-down list attached to currency toolbar icon makes it easy to choose and use desired currency format. tdf#82641 (Mohammed Abdul Azeem; Michael Meeks)
Currency drop-down list

New spreadsheet functions

  • RAWSUBTRACT to subtract numbers without canceling out small roundoff errors. tdf#71459 (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))
    • =RAWSUBTRACT(a,b,c) is like =a-b-c, but the - minus operator cancels out small roundoff errors that are due to the fact that not every decimal number can be exactly represented as a binary floating point number and effectively the operation snaps to zero. RAWSUBTRACT uses the IEEE754 operation the platform/compiler provides. For example, =0.3-0.2-0.1 results in 0, whereas =RAWSUBTRACT(0.3,0.2,0.1) results in 2.77555756156289E-17
    • This can be used to compare whether a result exactly matches an expected number, i.e. if =RAWSUBTRACT(result,expected) equals 0.0
  • FORECAST.ETS a set of forecasting functions that use triple and double exponential smoothing and handle seasonal effects. tdf#94635 (Winfried Donkers)

The Holt-Winters algorithms are used. Both Additional and Multiplicative methods are supported for triple exponential smoothing. The set consists of the functions FORECAST.ETS.ADD*, FORECAST.ETS.MULT, FORCAST.ETS.SEASONALITY*, FORECAST.ETS.PI.ADD*, FORECAST.ETS.PI.MULT, FORECAST.ETS.STAT.ADD* and FORECAST.ETS.STAT.MULT. The functions marked with * are interchangeable with MS Excel2016.

Example of forecasted range with prediction intervals for 95% confidence.

Statistical wizard (alternative to supplement package MS Excel analysis)

  • Statistical wizard in Data ▸ Statistics
    • …

Support wildcards to be compatible with XLS/XLSX and with ODF 1.2

Simple wildcards as known from other spreadsheet applications can now be used in formula expressions. (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))

Wildcards are

  • * (asterisk) any sequence of characters, including empty sequence
  • ? (question mark) any character, exactly one
  • ~ (tilde) escapes the special meaning of the following asterisk, question mark or tilde

See also tdf#72196 and related section in ODF 1.2 table:use-wildcards and OpenFormula Host-Defined Behaviors

Wildcards are supported in all functions that already supported regular expressions, which are: all database functions DAVERAGE, DCOUNT, DCOUNTA, DGET, DMAX, DMIN, DPRODUCT, DSTDEV, DSTDEVP, DSUM, DVAR and DVARP; the functions COUNTIF, COUNTIFS, HLOOKUP, LOOKUP, MATCH, VLOOKUP, SUMIF, SUMIFS, AVERAGEIF, AVERAGEIFS and SEARCH.

Accordingly the setting was changed, under Menu ▸ Tools ▸ Options ▸ Calc ▸ Calculate there is now a Enable wildcards in formulas radio button grouped with Enable regular expressions in formulas and No wildcards or regular expressions in formulas. When reading ODF spreadsheet documents with table:use-wildcards enabled or importing Microsoft Excel spreadsheet documents the option is set to wildcards enabled.

Impress & Draw

  • Effects list moved from dialog into the Custom Animation sidebar tab tdf#8781 (Rishabh Kumar, GSoC 2015; Yousuf Philips)
  • Custom Animation list has more details in it that can be seen at a glance. tdf#87812 (Akshay Deep; Yousuf Philips)
  • Showing/Hiding draw functions with button option can be used in impress and draw too. tdf#89540 (Gülşah Köse)
Drawfuncbuttondraw.png
Drawfuncbarimpress.png

Base

  • …

Math

  • …

Document signing

  • Added support for signature descriptions. blog entry (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
New signature descriptions
  • Added support for reading SHA-256 hashes in ODF documents. tdf#76142 blog entry (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)

Core

  • …

Kernel

  • …

Help Contents

  • Updates in help pages (Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, Stanislav Horáček, Eike Rathke, Maxim Monastirsky, Yousuf Philips, Olivier Hallot)

Extension

  • …

Performance

  • …

Infrastructure

  • …

Programmation & Support

  • …

Code Rebuild

  • …

Filters

  • Better import of DOCX and RTF linked graphic into LibreOffice Writer tdf#59699 blog entry post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Microsoft Word for DOS files can now be imported, via libwps. (Sean Young)
  • EMF files now display dashed and dotted lines correctly tdf#79679 (Chris Sherlock)
  • EMF files now import with correct line caps and joins commit (Stephan van den Akker)
  • JPEG files now export the DPI correctly tdf#85761 (Chris Sherlock)

GUI

  • Print to File now available within the list of printers in Print dialog. tdf#94097 (Katarina Behrens, CIB)
  • Video clips, charts and OLE objects will resize proportionately by default. tdf#97919 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)
  • Improved resizing behavior for images, videos and OLE objects: Dragging a corner will resize proportionately while dragging an edge will resize unproportionately. tdf#84953 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)
  • Native gtk3 menubar in LibreOffice. blog post. (Caolán McNamara, Red Hat)
  • Native gtk3 tooltips, popovers and context menus. blog post. (Caolán McNamara, Red Hat)

Start Center

New expert configuration option "RecentDocsThumbnail" to disable thumbnails in the Start Center (Pierre Sauter) tdf#74834

Window

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Menu

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Configuration

  • The Tools ▸ Customize... dialog has now a new Context Menus tab, where it's possible to customize most of context menus. tdf#93837 (Maxim Monastirsky)
  • …

Basic Editor

  • Tabs in Basic Editor have been moved to an own row to not depend on the scrollbar height (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB) tdf#96683

JVM Start Parameters

  • Added the possibility to edit existing JVM start parameters. (Akshay Deep) tdf#97425

Localization

  • …

New languages/locales with locale data

Available as default document language and for locale specific formatting.

  • …

Additional languages in the language list

Available for text attribution.

  • Apatani [apt-IN]. tdf#97386 (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))
  • Interlingue Occidental [ie]. tdf#96647 (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))

Incorporation of other languages

Our goal is to support as many languages as possible. We would like to thank the following people for voluntary translation in LibreOffice and help in preserving their native languages:

  • …

Improvements to proofing tools and language support

  • Proofing tools for Portuguese language (pt-PT) have been largely improved tdf#97439 (Marco A. G. Pinto, Olivier Hallot, )
    • 168 new entries for pt-PT autocorrection
If you speak an endangered language and want to help us to achieve our goal of providing free tools for every single person on the Earth, please join us.

Feature removal / deprecation

General

  • Support for embedding NPAPI Plugins (mostly Adobe Flash) in documents has now been removed.
  • ActiveX support is considered deprecated and may be removed in the future. If this change negatively affects your Windows application please email the LibreOffice development list with your use case and plan for moving off of ActiveX. We specifically want feedback if you use ActiveX to embed LibreOffice components into your application.

Impress

  • The feature to show the Navigator during the presentation has been removed. tdf#96414 (Bryan Quigley)
  • The pointer (pen) button and its command uno:NavigatorPen have been removed from the Navigator. (Bryan Quigley)

API changes

UNO API changes

  • The PathSubstitution service now has a substitution for $(username) which is replaced with the currently logged in user. tdf#98407 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)
  • It's now possible to manipulate context menus via the com.sun.star.ui.UIConfigurationManager API, by using URLs like private:resource/popupmenu/menu_name. tdf#93837 (Maxim Monastirsky)
  • Users of the com.sun.star.ui.XContextMenuInterceptor API, can now get the resource URL of the currently executing context menu, as the ActionTriggerContainer attribute of the com.sun.star.ui.ContextMenuExecuteEvent struct implements the com.sun.star.container.XNamed interface. (It was implementing it earlier too, but was returning empty string.) tdf#93837 (Maxim Monastirsky)

Dispatch Commands

The .uno:TaskPane command and the underlying TaskPane code have been removed. The command used to show the TaskPane which was used in Impress before it has been superseded by the Sidebar. Legacy extensions using TaskPanes are still supported by the Sidebar. core commit 7dd77a12713c0557c5826d3541e97ef6120e1d00 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)

SDK

The regcompare command-line tool in the SDK has been superseded by unoidl-check (running the latter without any arguments prints out usage information). (It had already been used as a replacement for regcompare inside the LO build environment, as it supports more input formats than merely the old-style binary .rdb format, so this is a move to consolidate on a single tool again.) core commit 532b47a650ce5189e1fb759201129d7d1f434133

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