81–90 of 433 posts
If you have to spend any money at all, you might as well spend the money that MS Office costs. Or else, the main competitor is not MS Office but Google Docs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this problem is not at all exclusive to propietary software. Take blender, for example. I spent quite a bit of time learning all the bits of the interface 5+ years ago. When I tried to go back, the software UI had changed so much that basically most of my knowledge and muscle memory is now worthless, having to google how to do every tiny operation. And this is not yhe first "huge overhaul" of the UI and keybi…
Meanwhile, I’m a prospective Blender user, and I hear it’s waaaaay better from 2.80, so that for various things where I might have used another program or given up and used nothing I would now be very likely to use Blender. It’s always a balancing act: satisfying existing users, against genuine improvement that will make it better for new users and existing users that put in the effort to learn the new way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this problem is not at all exclusive to propietary software. Take blender, for example. I spent quite a bit of time learning all the bits of the interface 5+ years ago. When I tried to go back, the software UI had changed so much that basically most of my knowledge and muscle memory is now worthless, having to google how to do every tiny operation. And this is not yhe first "huge overhaul" of the UI and keybi…
I just don’t think the specific way to do each operation in the UI is an essential part of Blender. Anyone using it professionally or even as a serious hobby will pick up on UI changes quickly. The real work you do on Blender is the actual art, not just manipulating menus and buttons.
It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…
The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X…
We knew all the shortcuts keys in the old version. The ribbon UI meant that a big chunk of the previous shortcuts didn't work anymore.
Killed our productivity for a good few months.
It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…
Just use LaTex with Vim for documents if the org you work at allows it.
As much as I love free software, LibreOffice interface feels old and ugly (to me, at least). It would be nice if there was more focus on the UX/UI design in open source projects. Of course, most programmers are not UX/UI designers, and designers don't tend to work for free on open source projects.
LibreOffice has a ribbon!
There seems to be a very large elephant missing from that discussion which is the rise of SaaS office suites. Speaking personally, I'm very glad that there is a free software office suite (as well as drawing programs etc.) However, I sincerely hope that collaborating on documents and presentations by mailing them around to people and trying to merge their edits and comments is never again the norm for me. Shared docu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently, I installed Office 97 onto Wine just for curiosity. I could still do much with it. The only feature I really missed from Word was academic references. I could create documents indistinguishable from modern Word using the old drawing features combined with modern fonts. The drop down menus, combined with the floating toolbars were much more intuitive than clicking up and down some "ribbon". The drop down men…
>perfected after years of refinement and familiarity That can be a problem though. One person's familiar tool with its well-known quirks and peculiarities is a newcomer's inscrutable and illogical interface.
Office is a professional productivity tool that's been around for decades and is used by millions of people for their entire workday, every day.
Learning to use a new tool takes a tiny fraction of the time you're going to be using that tool. One should make the tool best at actually doing what it's going to be used to do.
As much as I love free software, LibreOffice interface feels old and ugly (to me, at least). It would be nice if there was more focus on the UX/UI design in open source projects. Of course, most programmers are not UX/UI designers, and designers don't tend to work for free on open source projects.
No... the problem with desktop software is that creating a good UI/UX is a hard software problem typically solved by software developers instead of designers. Whereas, the accessibility and power of web technologies show that making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS) automatically attracts more designers yielding better UX/UI.