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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#161

Post by craftinator »

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…

They've optimized it for the least common denominator, not for specialized use or for power users. Short term this is a positive approach as it's more approachable for people who are just learning or are very lightweight users. But for people who have a lot of experience or use it often, it's a serious regression.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#162

Post by ghaff »

ubermonkey wrote: post #136
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,…

>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

This is something of a general issue that was essentially created by the success of MS Office. With "everyone" using MS Office or something quite similar, there really wasn't a huge market or interest in a different program that was just an incremental step up.

There are exceptions but, for the most part, people tried to push MS Office to do things it wasn't really designed to do because the next step was jumping to some complex and expensive program from Adobe or whoever.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#163

Post by craftinator »

danShumway wrote: post #142
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.

For me, that's the point. For a program as ubiquitous as Word (and as complicated as Word), unless there were clear benefits from the new interface, it shouldn't have been changed. The change itself was the problem. Your comment is getting at an important, fundamental UX principle: all conceptual change is inherently painful, and every time you ask a user to re-learn something you are always wasting their time, even…

I think that choices like this come from a weird symbiotic relationship between UI designers and product managers. The UI people need to justify their jobs; if they sit on their hands all day because the UI works well, they can't make that justification. Managers don't want to "see a product stagnate" and to fix that they want a "fresh new look". The users don't enter into this relationship.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#164

Post by andyjohnson0 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #116
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 is one of the best things to happen to office. It was horrible to use before that. For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. Not to mention context specific menu tabs. Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.

> For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands.

With some reluctance, I agree with you. But it does bother me that I rarely use much of that complexity, while still being required to engage with a UI that seems mostly designed around hiding things that I don't need anyway. I wish there was a way to use the Office apps with a simplified feature set. Of course, I understand why not: everyone's essential features are different. So I carry on poking at ribbons looking for things.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#165

Post by jaxr »

I don't mind LibreOffice's interface in general. Only a sublime style Ctrl+p find would make a huge difference. That alone would put it's interface on top of MS office in my opinion.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#166

Post by kumarvvr »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #164
kumarvvr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface is one of the best things to happen to office. It was horrible to use before that. For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. Not to mention context specific menu tabs. Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.

> For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands. With some reluctance, I agree with you. But it does bother me that I rarely use much of that complexity, while still being required to engage with a UI that seems mostly designed around hiding things that I don't need anyway. I wish there was a way to use the Office apps with a simplified feature set.…

That is a by-product, and a testament, to the complexity of the software.

Take Word. It has millions of users around the world. And everyone of them uses at most a different 20% set of the full features 80% of the time.

But, it's only one software. It has to satisfy everyone.

So you end up with a reasonably complex UI that everyone has to bear.

However, you can customize it, and I wish there was more documentation and more effort put into customization of the menus.

I mean, let there be a menu customization system that is fully drag and drop, rather than the clunky stuff presently there. It would be a game changer.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#167

Post by jodrellblank »

shawxe wrote: post #149
edoloughlin wrote: post #134

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 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…

I agree with this completely. It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of things in some category than it is for me to scan through a bunch of irregularly sized tiles for the icon and description of the configuration I need. For me, all of the pictures just lower the density of the information and cause it to take longer to parse every single time. I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is…

> “I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point.”

Uh, yeah there was? Go dig through the wayback machine for Jensen Harris’s blogpost series about the design of the ribbon, or watch his MIX08 talk on it; he was the design team lead for the change, and the reason they did it was because the old UI was failing their users. There were usability studies done during the ribbon design which fedback into, and changed, how it worked to adjust to ordinary people’s expectations and needs.

> “I would think that it would be easiest for new users to have options sorted into neat menus”

Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#168

Post by mikece »

Is there a manifesto or document anywhere which lays out the economic case for (US) Federal grants to develop free software? How many developers and how many projects could be staffed full-time with a billion dollars set aside annually for an Office of Open Source Software?

(Of course such an office would descend into a cluster-[bleep] of political warfare over topics that have nothing to do with developing software so spending nothing probably gets as much done in this area than creating a government office which costs money and doesn’t get anything accomplished.)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#169

Post by wazoox »

JTon wrote: post #157
mapgrep wrote: post #141

Democrats in the US House of Representatives just approved a $741 billion defense spending package. It will almost certainly clear the senate and be signed by the president. Imagine taking enough of that money to support these 40 LibreOffice developers and maybe say 20 more. There would be no need for these acrobatics around source availability. I understand why the companies need to do this. But there is an existing…

It begs an interesting question: does defense spending have a positive ROI? I don't know the answer to this question. But I'm thinking funding R&D, trade route protections, and perhaps some nefarious things can all contribute positively to American interests and thus American society.

Ginormous defence spending is how the US do a "social state". That's pretty obvious once you see how defence money is peppered all across the country.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#170

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

Angostura wrote: post #110
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…

> What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. That keep changing and moving about. I use Word on Mac. It has the ribbon. 90% of the time I use the old style menu bar at the top of the screen.

Word for Mac is almost the perfect evolution of the UI.

It has the menu bar, which every Mac app has since it's a fixed and global UI element. It has the ribbon which is good for many users and makes many tasks easily accessible.

I'm not sure how you'd make this compromise on Windows without making a mess of things, but on the Mac it works very well.

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