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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#171

Post by rbg246 »

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…

I am also the same, I have a complete block on how to find things, they just aren't where I remember even though as others have pointed out its 12 years since the ribbon appeared.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#172

Post by mikece »

Maybe I'm seeing what I want but it seems that the plan is for the document formats and editing programs to be free while generating revenue from infrastructure around delivering something "Sharepoint-like" (or a SaaS service to do similar), complete with a throat to choke/vendor to blame if things go sideways. I don't see this as fundamentally different from the choice of running CentOS versus paying for RHEL: the latter is the same software but comes with enterprise assurances that allow the CIO to sleep at night.

I'm sure there's someone could write a compelling essay along the lines of "Free Software isn't free of charge" if someone were inclined to pursue it. Even people like RMS have to eat from time to time.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#173

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

There is a population of people who just hate the ribbon. In my experience, they are usually attorneys talking about word. It's the same argument that their attorney ancestors made about Wordperfect 5.1 keystroke commands.

Personally, I don't see the big ribbon issue. It's easy to search for arcane features in the help menu.

IMO, they really need a Mac where you get the top menu bar and a ribbon-like thing. Or some sort of gnarly keyboard mode that would become emacs for lawyers.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#175

Post by criddell »

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…

> It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces.

You might be interested in checking out the work of Donald Norman. He makes a great case that attractive things work better. Old isn't necessarily a problem, but ugly is.

https://jnd.org/emotion_design_attractive_things_work_better...

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#176

Post by MagnumOpus »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #92
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. Came here for this. The first version of Office for windows (which is what most people are familiar with in terms of UI) is from 1998, so the non-ribbon interface has been around for 9 years, vs 13 for the ribbon interface.

> The first version of Office for windows [...] is from 1998. [...] 9 years, vs 13 for the ribbon interface.

You are not even close to right. Excel for Windows is from 1987 (20 years with non-ribbon menus), Word for Windows is from 1989 (18 years with non-ribbon menus). And of course the menu bar paradigm itself is older still.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#177

Post by airstrike »

craftinator wrote: post #161
XorNot wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a "Power User" and I've memorized every single hotkey on the Excel ribbon interface to the point that I don't care where they are.

Wrap text? Alt H A W

Open settings? Alt T F T

Change to page break view? Alt W I. Go back to normal view with Alt W L

Take the border I currently have on the top edge of a cell and swap it to the bottom? Alt H B M Alt+T Alt+B

Paste values transposing? Alt H V S V E. Want to follow the old accelerator? Alt E S V E also works

Power users don't need to care what the ribbon / menu looks like. They learn hotkeys.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#178

Post by simion314 »

About people hating change, in my IDE an update renamed a menu from "revert" to "Rollback" , for a while I had issues finding this menu because my brain was searching for the old text and just skipping over the new one.

Is it my fault that change causes productivity loss? Should we take a pause and train ourselves after each software/webpage does a change?

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#179

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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…

> 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.

I think you hit on something here with the irregular size of the buttons, probably moreso than the icons. The arrangement makes it difficult to just read through all the options left to right, because they're all jumbled.

A common/recommended design pattern for older Mac apps is to have a top toolbar of large icons, which is actually quite similar to the Ribbon in some ways. But there, the options appear in a single horizontal row. https://i.ibb.co/wd6MR9c/Screen-Shot-2020-07-10-at-11-58-37-...

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#180

Post by ocdtrekkie »

red_admiral wrote: post #80
goto11 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface it not just a "fad", it is a clear UI improvement since it removes a level of indirection. If you wanted to see how a font looked in the classic Word UI, you highlighted a text and selected a font from the dropdown. When the dropdown was changed to show the actual font, it was the first step towards the ribbon, where the UI generally shows the actual effect of the options. Programmers does not un…

I don't think the ribbon itself is a bad idea, but I absolutely hate the following two things: 1. Latency. When you click a dropdown, the whole interface can freeze for several seconds while Word presumably renders the menu or something. I can just about understand that for the fonts menu, but for the "bullets and enumerations" dropdown it's just plain bad. 2. Things moving around in the ribbon because Microsoft deci…

I think they've improved it a lot since then, but I remember the Fonts menu getting incrementally slower as you piled more fonts into your system. At one time I think it actually held up Word loading entirely.
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