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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#131

Post by gitgud »

duncanawoods wrote: post #78
asddubs wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yup, that's the thing, people love to complain on random social media platforms, but most people can't be bothered to report bugs. been guilty of it myself as well of course

The sad thing is that it's almost futile raising a bug against complex software like this or IDEs. It doesn't matter if it's FOSS or commercial, they already have backlogs of 10000s of bugs so unless loads of other people are reporting the same bug, it almost certainly won't be fixed. I have never had a Visual Studio or Windows bug report fixed and only a few JetBrains ones fixed. However, if it's a small tool or lib…

> It doesn't matter if it's FOSS or commercial

It does matter, you can't fix a problem with IntelliJ, you need to wait until the company considers it economically viable to fix, ie enough people report it or its critical.

But if something in an Open-source system pisses you off, you can fix it yourself.

It not for everyone, but at least it's possible to fix FOSS systems yourself...

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#132

Post by grandinj »

kleiba wrote: post #81

Do people use LibreOffice because it's open-source or because it you don't have to pay for it? In either case, the "enterprise edition" they envision will fail to service either camp. 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.

The idea is to entice Enterprise and similar customers to pay for support, spending a small fraction of the money they save from not buying MS, to help keep the LibreOffice eco-system going.

So still much cheaper than MS :-)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#133

Post by signal11 »

osrec wrote: post #114
rakoo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/

But, the new ribbon interface was much more inconvenient. If I recall correctly, pasting data while removing duplicates in the ribbon interface was Alt+AQORT, but only Alt+XY in the old Excel (I don't remember what X and Y were, but I know it was a 2 key combo!)

Excel kept the old Alt based keyboard shortcuts, e.g. Alt D F F for Data > Filter > AutoFilter still works.

If there was an alt-keyboard shortcut for paste removing duplicates, that should still work.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#134

Post by edoloughlin »

Jonnax wrote: post #38
openfuture wrote: post #20

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…

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

I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I switch to the other ribbons (tabs?) I find myself hunting, wondering if I've got the right tab.

There's something about the spatial layout that seems to impose an extra cognitive load. I know menus are spatial too, but it seemed easier to remember them. Perhaps, because each menu occupied its own area of the window when expanded. With the ribbons, the same area is reused when you switch tabs.

With Word and Outlook, I've got slightly better retention. However, with Excel, where I seem to have a wide distribution of seldom-used functionality, it's an exercise in frustration. I know something exists, but it takes ages to find it because the last time I used it was probably a few weeks ago.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#135

Post by monk_e_boy »

ghaff wrote: post #51

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…

Agreed - students have already moved to google docs or MS Word with OneDrive. We are used to giving feedback using these tools, students making changes and getting those signed off by us.

Full history of changes. Full history of lecturer comments. Backed up online. Editable on phones, laptops, PCs...

This is the world they are expecting when they enter employment, or start their own start up.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#136

Post by ubermonkey »

kleiba wrote: post #81

Do people use LibreOffice because it's open-source or because it you don't have to pay for it? In either case, the "enterprise edition" they envision will fail to service either camp. 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.

The people I know use LO for essentially political reasons.

I've never really tried to use anything other than MS Office, because for my whole career I've been interacting with people on Windows using standard Windows/MSFT tools, and so any inconsistency / glitch in document exchange would automatically be my fault if I insisted on using LO or Apple's tools or whatever.

Plus, honest go God, Word and Excel are really, really good at what they do. Word got their more slowly, but once Excel ate Lotus 1-2-3, there really never was another competitor there, and Excel just kept getting more and more powerful. It's a wonderful tool.

(Now, there ARE people who learn Excel but refuse to go further -- into a true database, or into a proper business intelligent /reporting tool, or whatever -- and end up creating their own really janky versions of these things within Excel with macros and insane formulas hidden out in AA:5234 or whtaever; that's a problem for sure. But it's not so much an Excel problem as it is a problem with the lack of an obvious next-step ramp for those users.)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#137

Post by unglaublich »

ubercow13 wrote: post #41
unglaublich wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS) automatically attracts more designers yielding better UX/UI I find this a bit questionable. What are some examples of this good UX and UI? Many HTML-ish UIs I can think of are not good. Slack, Discord, modern Windows apps such as the new settings app for example. They tend to suffer from poor reimplementations of native widget functionality, poor implementation…

Apart from the remarks about flat design, whitespace and information-density, which are very personal imho, I would say Google Drive, Google Docs, Microsoft Office Online, GitHub source code editor, Visual Studio code, Atom, all do a good job.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#138

Post by ako »

edoloughlin wrote: post #134
Jonnax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I…

The key question is: would somebody who learned to use office after 2007 with the ribbon interface appreciate moving back to the pre-2007 interface?

My guess is that more people learned to use office after 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no problems using the ribbon.

I still yearn for ms-word on dos, and oracle forms on terminal interfaces, once you learned the keyboard shortcuts, nothing was faster. Kind of like knowing vi(m).

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#139

Post by sp332 »

XorNot wrote: post #121
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's kept Bob from committing the ribbon interface to memory in the past 17 years?

The ribbon interface removed customizability, and inflated the size of all the common commands (and also made it impossible to get them back without 3rd party extensions). Pre-Ribbon I could have the menus, file operations, font and paragraph settings, and the reviewing tool bar at the top of my screen. I could have the object and image editing at the bottom. Post-ribbon the exact same amount of space is does a third…

Just to be clear, the ability to customize existing tabs, and make new ones with whatever commands you want on them, is insufficient? Or is this only a complaint about the defaults?

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#140

Post by ModernMech »

osrec wrote: post #115
sxg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the ribbon interface been the original UI and the traditional menu-based interface the new UI, it sounds like you and your colleagues would have still faced the same frustrations. To me, it sounds like your issue is with change rather than the effectiveness of either type of UI.

No, not really. Some 1 or 2 key shortcuts became 5 key shortcuts with the new ribbon UI. It was a real nightmare! Especially when the old shortcuts were also remapped to a completely different function, and your moving s so fast you don't realise where your data has gone!

The ribbon allows you to add your most common used commands to a quick shortcut list that are only 2 keys.
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