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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#221

Post by mook »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #97
red_admiral wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to disagree here. Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and 2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the new one. Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it doe…

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

I believe it's because the ribbon is context-sensitive. What shows up depends on what has focus, and that makes it harder for retention, similar to how Office 2000 has automatically hidden menu items that ended up being confusing.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#222

Post by Someone »

Macha wrote: post #111
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Office 95 doesn't look that functionally different from Office 2003: Office 95: https://i0.wp.com/isoriver.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/06... Office 2003: https://imag.malavida.com/mvimgbig/download-fs/office-2003-s... Honestly even Excel 3.0 (1990) doesn't look that disimilar ( https://goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/about-excel.... ) So that's 17 years for toolbars vs 13 for ribbon

Still, I guess more MS Office users will have used the new interface for longer than the old one than vice versa (I googled for data, but couldn’t find numbers)

It even wouldn’t fully surprise me if, a few years from now, there were more MS Office users who never used the pre-ribbon interface than who had used it.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#223

Post by nabilhat »

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,…

> Now, there ARE people who learn Excel but refuse to go further...

Since Power Query was first included by default in 2016, I've introduced tens of regular Excel users. Because there's no way to work cell by agonizing cell, there's a mental tension for a few minutes then usually the concept of working with fields and sets clicks into place so well you can practically hear it. Even if they never use PQ again, they often change how they use spreadsheets for the better. If you're really lucky they don't just start using PQ, they find the advanced editor and start doing some basic fiddling around. While it's fair to criticize M [0] as a niche language that only exists in a tiny corner of one company's data modeling features, it's also what finally motivated me to learn functional programming. That accessible step by step ramp from introduction to functional language data modeling in a common office tool is an underrated juggernaut of a feature.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#224

Post by x87678r »

mikece wrote: post #168

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…

A better deal would be Fed paying MS, then MS charging other countries all over the world and MS collects big $$$ in profits and US tax paid. Much of SV started like this too.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#225

Post by buovjaga »

blendergeek wrote: post #91

I have a few questions that don't seem to be fully answered in the post. > This “Personal Edition” tag ... has the purpose of differentiating the current, free and community-supported LibreOffice from a LibreOffice Enterprise set of products and services provided by the members of our ecosystem. Will this "LibreOffice Enterprise" be Free as in Freedom? Would I be able to package it up myself and call it "Community EN…

These enterprise versions are already available since years, for example:

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-office/

https://libreoffice.cib.de/

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#226

Post by agumonkey »

zucker42 wrote: post #217
agumonkey wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 99% agree with you, except that I believe LibreOffice is not just old, it's subtly bad. I didn't notice it before but it's too adhoc, just too laggy, just too crummy at times. It lack tastes, consistency and responsiveness that you got even in office 2003. I wish LO to improve everything, they came from far and did a lot. But it's not enough.. kinda like blender 2.7 to 2.8.

Isn't Blender 2.7 to 2.8 widely considered a successful redesign? Blender is experiencing continuing and dramatic industry support. I've heard Blender is comparable to the proprietary alternatives. I've not used Blender much though.

Oh sorry, bad phrasing, I meant right now LO is stuck at blender 2.7 and needs a 2.8-like push.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#227

Post by andrewshadura »

npteljes wrote: post #52
aphroz wrote: post #6

Is there a hosted service for LibreOffice online ? I wish I could find a better replacement for Google Drive.

I recommend checking out ONLYOFFICE. They have a personal tier with a small online storage for free. And everything is AGPLv3. https://personal.onlyoffice.com/

OnlyOffice are not a community-oriented project, with their aggressive usage of AGPL+CLA, previous policy of withholding parts of code and throwing the rest over the wall once in a while, and their compatibility is far from what they claim: LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO. Also, feature-wise it's crippled in comparison not only with LibreOffice proper, but even with LibreOffice Online.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#228

Post by HideousKojima »

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…

Vertical lists can also work better with the wider aspect ratios of modern monitors. There's tons of empty space on the left and right in a typical Word document, but MS decided to suck up limited vertical space instead

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#229

Post by Const-me »

red_admiral wrote: post #76
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…

I'm going to disagree here. Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and 2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the new one. Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it doe…

> used to be able to do Control+Shift+V for "paste as plain text", I don't know which version removed that again

Try Control+Alt+V. I have Office professional plus 2016, works here, however it opens a popup. Plain text is at the end of the list, making the complete sequence Control+Alt+V, End, Enter.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#230

Post by webmaven »

pseingatl wrote: post #208
Spooky23 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Attorney ancestors?

GP probably meant something like "forerunners" or "predecessors"; some form of "those who came before" that doesn't necessarily imply a familial relationship.

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