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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#231

Post by puszczyk »

nicoburns wrote: post #211
edoloughlin wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Or, perhaps they are just used to a lower level of productivity? I've had 13 years to adapt, and I still find it frustrating.

On the other hand I found it instantly more productive, even right after it was introduced. No longer did I have to remember which menu an option was in. It was all right there.

Not sure why this got downvoted — a personal anecdote as a reply to personal anecdote.

On the subject — I’ve learned the “classic” office but really like the ribbon. I’m not a power user though — just a doc or a spreadsheet every now and then.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#232

Post by ghaff »

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?

It's just a cutesy way of saying a long time ago when all the lawyers used Wordperfect. (A word processing program that I hated almost as much as Wordstar.)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#233

Post by zucker42 »

mrob wrote: post #46
davidhyde wrote: post #29

It seems like this whole thing could be solved by renaming the tag from "Personal Edition" to "Lite Edition" or something. People want to use and "office" product for work, duh. The document foundation keep arguing that funding is needed and the users keep arguing that they want a free version for commercial use and that naming is important because "the boss won't read the license agreement but look at the name! Pers…

"Lite Edition" isn't much better. The usual name for this kind of thing is "Community Edition", which has no negative connotations. But I don't see why it needs any special name. The LibreOffice brand is already harmed by the continued existence of OpenOffice, which many people still think of as the default free (as in beer) office suite despite its obsolescence. Complicating the LibreOffice name will only make thing…

Someone from TDF responded to a similar comment on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ho0n51/update_on_lib...

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#234

Post by sbuk »

rdiddly wrote: post #191
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…

AutoCAD went along a similar trajectory actually - from menus to toolbars to a ribbon. The difference is, you can still turn each of those modes on and off, including using two or all of them at once. Whereas Microsoft just kind of went "Okay y'all are gonna use a ribbon now." Edit: Forgot the AutoCAD command line. You can still turn that on too, and type commands like it's the 80s. It's actually kind of a paragon of…

Haven't used AutoCAD in anger for a while, but my default rest position on the keyboard is still fingers over Esc, thumb over space. I always preferred using the command line. Not out of some 'power user' power trip, but more for screen space and efficiency. Being able to use AutoLISP was pretty neat too.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#235

Post by MereInterest »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #179
shawxe wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jum…

Not only are they jumbled, but they also change size/shape depending on the width of the window. A large button when full-screened becomes a small button when in a smaller window. A large button in a smaller window gets expanded to show all sub-options when maximized. There is no visual consistency for the same button.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#236

Post by arbitrary_name »

wazoox wrote: post #169
JTon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a republican jobs program.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#237

Post by wwright »

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…

I wonder what people who have spent their adult life studying and implementing UI/UX think about it.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#238

Post by sidlls »

u801e wrote: post #98
ghaff wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. With all due respect, good luck with that. A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon.

> A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon. That's like saying people aren't interested in learning how to use a phonebook or how to call directory assistance. They just want to know who to talk to so they can order what they want from Sears.

How so? I don't understand this analogy at all. UI/UX design changes frequently involves changing the appearance and possibly location and even functionality of familiar things. If we changed the lettering in a phonebook, or even merely on the cover, to be, say, klingon font, we shouldn't expect the typical user to reach for that phonebook, yet essentially what the GP is suggesting is that it's sufficient for a user to understand the "phonebook concept" and users can learn the implementation details trivially based on that.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#239

Post by tw04 »

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 was one of the worst things to ever hit Office. I remember it was met with universal horror when it first came out, but they were fully committed (apparently not having done ANY user testing) and insisted people would get used to it and prefer it because: we paid someone a ton of money who told us it's better.

Like many others, I STILL to this day have to google to figure out where things are with the ribbon interface, probably the least intuitive interface I've ever used.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#240

Post by zucker42 »

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…

This isn't really changing anything. LibreOffice is under the GPL. It's just a marketing attempt to get large organizations to realize that they should contribute back to the ecosystem if they rely on LibreOffice.
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