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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#201

Post by angus-prune »

HeckFeck wrote: post #37
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…

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…

> eg "Insert -> Image -> From File".

In the latest version of word the progression is:

"Insert > Pictures > From This device"

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#202

Post by domador »

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…

Yes, the ribbon interface was initially pushed on the world in 2007, and it's still as bad as ever.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#203

Post by Fiveplus »

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.

Which also begs the question: How many such projects in different industries (eg, agriculture, aviation, food, healthcare, etc) would need a slice of that defense pie?

---

[Note: I'm not advocating for/against the idea of the parent comment, just adding a layer to it]

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#204

Post by staticvoidmaine »

ubercow13 wrote: post #30
maxmouchet wrote: post #7

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!

Thank you so much for saying this. I had no idea until I read your comment and immediately opened the view menu. I am blown away I didn’t know about this after over 10 years of using LO...

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#205

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

mgbmtl wrote: post #25

I hate to rant, but there is a weird sense of entitlement in many comments. An assumption that software should "just work", be completely bug free, have the best design, have developers quickly responding to bug reports, etc, while giving away the product for free. I might not use an office suite very often, but when I do, I'm grateful it exists and is free/libre. Some orgs (gov, companies, service providers/reseller…

In the early days, one of the things that was heavily hyped by FOSS advocates to drive adoption was the "free as in beer" aspect. It worked but, unsurprisingly, it resulted in a large userbase that only cared that the free beer kept flowing and nothing else about the FOSS philosophy nor contributing.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#206

Post by nxc18 »

rbg246 wrote: post #171
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 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.

In 2020 there is a search feature (similar to VS Code) so there's really no need to have to find anything anyway.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#207

Post by galacticdessert »

It might sound stupid, but looking at the marketing plan attached to this article ( https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/jzryGw7XDkJadmo#p... ) I wonder how they could deliver such an important message in such a messy way. There are context slides together with strategy slides, together with marketing slides, together with analysis slides. the best one is slide 48, which seems to be a leftover of the initial storyline?

I really like LibreOffice and I try to push its usage where I can, but reading about a potentially risky development strategy in such a messy way makes me wonder if it has been thought out so well or it is a muddy idea reflected in unclear writing.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#208

Post by pseingatl »

Spooky23 wrote: post #173
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…

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 s…

Attorney ancestors?

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#209

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

stefankeys wrote: post #67

Wordstar and Wordperfect were easier to use imo.

I still remember the inconveniently tall keyboard templates (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&q=wor...) for WordPerfect to tell users where all the function were. Give me the ribbon bar anyday.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#210

Post by nxc18 »

stefankeys wrote: post #66
bluGill wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care how ugly it is. I care about how quickly people can get their work done. The ribbon is better for this because the things most often used are right there and easy to find. Sure rarely used stuff takes longer, but that is a good trade off.

Is there some way to move stuff in word so that it is more accessible. Just wondering.

Yes, since ages ago the ribbon is customizable. You can create a new tab with exactly what you want in it.

There is also a search feature now, so its not like you need to know where rarely-used things are.

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