Rutba Office 1.48 to 1.50: new ribbons, and not one greyed-out button left

Every button in Rutba Office’s ribbons that did nothing yet used to be greyed out, with a sentence saying what it needed, and the suite kept a register of them. On 9 September there were 257. On 8 October, at 1.29.10, there were twenty. Since 1.49, released on 14 October, there are none.

Most were built. A few were taken out instead, because they only work with an online service: Translate, Dictate, Presenter Coach, online videos and the like. Rutba Office runs on your computer with no account, so a button that needed somebody else’s server would only ever have stayed grey. Macros are still kept untouched in a file, and still never run.

Ribbons drawn to Office’s measure (1.48)

• One height on every tab, so the page no longer jumps as you move between tabs, with large buttons over names that wrap to two lines.
• A picture for each command, in the app’s own colour, with 36 new ones where one picture used to stand for several commands.
• A narrow window folds the ribbon instead of scrolling it: large buttons become small ones, then pictures alone, and finally a group becomes one button that opens its controls. Nothing is cut off, and the room comes back as the window widens.
• From the keyboard: Alt or F10 shows KeyTips with Office’s letters where Office has the tab, and the arrow keys move through the controls with a ring that always shows.
• Icons only, for those who know the pictures, with each name in its tooltip.

1.49 followed with panels you can resize in every app, by dragging, with the arrow keys or with a double-click to reset, and a visual pass over every app at two window sizes in light and dark.

Review tools in Documents and Presentations (1.50)

• Forms, as Word makes them. A Developer tab adds text, check box, combo box, drop-down, date and picture controls, and Restrict Editing’s “Filling in forms” lets only the fields take input.
• Redact. Mark the selection, every match of a search, or patterns such as email addresses, phone numbers and card numbers. Apply saves a copy with the marked words gone from everywhere in the file, headers, footnotes, comments, tracked changes and properties included, and black bars in their place.
• Inspect Document finds, and removes when you ask, comments, tracked changes, hidden text, personal information and the document’s properties, as Word’s Document Inspector does.
• Compare for decks. Presentations merges a reviewed copy and lists what changed slide by slide and shape by shape, each change marked on the slide and accepted or rejected one at a time or all at once.
• Ink drawn in Word now opens, and ink drawn here saves as Word saves it.

Templates and QR codes (1.46)

A templates gallery now opens the way Word, Excel and PowerPoint’s do, with sixteen of our own: six documents (from a letter and a CV to meeting minutes), six workbooks with working formulas (a budget with charts, an invoice that adds itself up, a loan calculator and more) and four decks. Templates you save yourself appear under Personal. Insert → QR Code turns a web address or any words into a code a phone can scan, from the suite’s own encoder, and the picture carries the words as its alt text so a screen reader reads them too.

The PDF app, text recognition and Mail’s archive work arrived in the same releases and have posts of their own: the PDF app, text recognition and Mail as an archive tool.