Marketing

Rough outline of the script so far -- Calc and Impress to come. As mentioned, a condensed and polished version of this will be used to create the final 5.3 New Feature videos for the general public.

GENERAL

Keyboard shortcuts now appear in context menus on Windows and Linux - change behaviour in Tools > Options > View > Menu (to enable on macOS)

Improvements to area fill: when you select a bitmap fill, instead of only being able to choose the available bitmaps, you can also import them as well

Speaking of area fill, the Area dialog (from context menu) has been cleaned up a lot as well. This colours tab used to have lots of buttons scattered around almost randomly, but now much neater. Same for gradients, hatching and bitmaps

New patterns tab provides a default set of fill patterns to improve compatibility with other office software, and lets you edit them as well

When you're working with embedded media, a new media playback panel lets you quickly start, stop and navigate through the file

Styles sidebar deck now has a checkbox to enable and disable the preview mode

It's possible to insert PDFs as images, which is handy if the PDF is being used as a vector image format

Open drop-down button now has Open Template option to save you going through the menu

If you experience problems with your LibreOffice installation, you can now start it in Safe Mode via the Help menu. This creates a fresh user profile where you can disable extensions

Finally, new options have been added to the Help menu, including direct links to the user guides and community-supported forums.

WRITER

Table styles: in previous releases, it was possible to use Table Autoformat to apply one-time formatting to a table. If you changed the table, by adding a new column for instance, you'd have to apply the autoformat again. Table styles are proper styles that can be imported and exported, changed in the sidebar, and there's a UNO API to work with them

Edit > Go to Page, in previous releases would bring up Navigator. This time it's a separate dialog box, can also be accessed with Ctrl+G. This feature came about from a Bugzilla discussion, where someone pointed out that many other apps have these simple Go To boxes

New page deck in sidebar: before this just had four icons, but now it's a lot more detailed with the page format, styles, header and footer

Arrows toolbox: drawing tools that were only available previously in Draw and Impress

Another smaller change is the small capitals toolbar button, which also has an underlying UNO command that you can use from macros

I've finished researching everything that I'll cover in the video -- the list is below. Hope to film this in the next few days.

https://www.paypal.me/libreoffice

GENERAL

Keyboard shortcuts now appear in context menus on Windows and Linux - change behaviour in Tools > Options > View > Menu (to enable on macOS)

Improvements to area fill: when you select a bitmap fill, instead of only being able to choose the available bitmaps, you can also import them as well

Speaking of area fill, the Area dialog (from context menu) has been cleaned up a lot as well. This colours tab used to have lots of buttons scattered around almost randomly, but now much neater. Same for gradients, hatching and bitmaps

New patterns tab provides a default set of fill patterns to improve compatibility with other office software, and lets you edit them as well

When you're working with media in a document, a new media playback panel lets you quickly start, stop and navigate through the file

Styles sidebar deck now has a checkbox to enable and disable the preview mode

It's possible to insert PDFs as images, which is handy if the PDF is being used as a vector image format

Also on the topic of PDFs, can sign existing PDFs now

Open drop-down button now has Open Template option to save you going through the menu

If you experience problems with your LibreOffice installation, you can now start it in Safe Mode via the Help menu. This creates a fresh user profile where you can disable extensions. It's also possible to do this via a command line parameter and a start menu entry in Windows

New options have been added to the Help menu, including direct links to the user guides and community-supported forums.

Notebookbar as experimental feature. Tools > Options > LibreOffice General > Advanced... check Experimental features. Then View > Toolbar Layout > Default/Single toolbar/Sidebar/Notebookbar, and View > Notebookbar > Tabbed/Contextual Single/Contextual Groups

WRITER

Table styles: in previous releases, it was possible to use Table Autoformat to apply one-time formatting to a table. If you changed the table, by adding a new column for instance, you'd have to apply the autoformat again. Table styles are proper styles that can be imported and exported, changed in the sidebar, and there's a UNO API to work with them

Edit > Go to Page, in previous releases would bring up Navigator. This time it's a separate dialog box, can also be accessed with Ctrl+G. This feature came about from a Bugzilla discussion, where someone pointed out that many other apps have these simple Go To boxes

New page deck in sidebar: before this just had four icons, but now it's a lot more detailed with the page format, styles, header and footer

Arrows toolbox: drawing tools that were only available previously in Draw and Impress

Another smaller change is the small capitals toolbar button, which also has an underlying UNO command that you can use from macros

CALC

Much better default cell styles. In LO 5.2, only five, and with pretty uninformative names like heading1, result2 and so forth. Now there are many more with sensible names, accessible here in the sidebar

When merging cells, can select empty hidden cell so that formulas referring to these cells will be updated

Creating pivot tables, median function is now available

Go to Menu > Tools > Options > Calc > Calculate, and there is now a Enable wildcards in formulas – this is now default in 5.3, instead of regular expressions. This is for better interoperability with other spreadsheet applications and a better experience for users who are not familiar with regular expressions

Insert > Functions – can now search the list by typing, narrow down selection

Arrows toolbox: drawing tools that were only available previously in Draw and Impress

IMPRESS

When you launch Impress, a template selector allows you to choose a template to start with

Two new default templates have been added, Vivid and Pencil, while others have been improved

Single toolbar mode has been added, via View > Toolbar Modes > Single

Insert > Media > Photo Album - note how images inserted this way can be linked, instead of embedded into the document itself

Go to View > Slide Master mode, and slide properties are now available in the sidebar. In previous releases, this would just say "Properties are not available for the current selection"