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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#351

Post by oblio »

airstrike wrote: post #177
craftinator wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On top of that, old shortcuts still work. For menus that disappeared more than a decade ago!!

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#352

Post by mucholove »

jodrellblank wrote: post #260
jodrellblank wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “ 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 r…

"There's absolutely no evidence for this" "yes there was, here's what to look for" "downvote". HN.txt. Top level menus full by Word 95. Office 97 added command bars. Nested menus and toolbars full by Office 2000. Office XP added Task panes, full of features by Office 2003. " the Task Pane was the last attempt to find a way to scale old-style UI to programs as full-featured as Office. Although it was a successful stop…

So much bull crap stuff. The fastest way to find something is to search for it.

And...search for a menu item is a 2nd class feature on the OS. I wish I could click a text field on the menu bar and find stuff. I wish the actions were indexed with the documentation. Oh—and I wish that the keyboard shortcut for that was standard. Not on my Mac, but I’m pretty sure that I had to type it in from a Mac productivity magazine.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#353

Post by quadrifoliate »

ghaff wrote: post #51

There seems to be a very large elephant missing from that discussion which is the rise of SaaS office suites. Speaking personally, I'm very glad that there is a free software office suite (as well as drawing programs etc.) However, I sincerely hope that collaborating on documents and presentations by mailing them around to people and trying to merge their edits and comments is never again the norm for me. Shared docu…

IMO if LibreOffice really want to be in it for the money, they need to move away from trying to catch up to Office (not possible) and target some other niche which actually differentiates themselves. The fact that Airtable and Notion are around and pretty successful means that people can and are spending money on document management solutions that are not Office.

A better API is one such point. Microsoft APIs always suck, and LibreOffice could be the thing that has a rich interface that allows you to build XLSX and DOCX files via an API. For a product that has been around for more than 20 years (if you count StarOffice), I expect the API story to be much better than https://api.libreoffice.org/examples/examples.html

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#354

Post by XorNot »

vikramkr wrote: post #196
craftinator wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

power users have macros and hotkeys. I've met plenty of excel power users, and I haven't met many excel power users that click on anything in the ribbon all that often. Maybe it's different since they're bankers and the amount of time they're spending on spreadsheets is an order of magnitude more than other people that could still be called power users but maybe don't have their lives revolve around excel and powerpo…

Except this is where the intermediate user point becomes valuable: if you spend close to all your time in spreadsheets, then yeah, sure, you're probably in hot key land.

Of course that's discounting the idea that a power user would still want to customize their UI to get less frequently used but still common functions into view and keep them there.

Which is what I, an intermediate user, definitely want: at the time the ribbon happened I was in chemistry research. Excel and Word are important parts of that process! And having them work the way I want was valuable to me. Just not so valuable that I needed to learn a huge number of hotkeys. And yet somehow, the ribbon manages to still be in the way rather then letting me keep a productive, dense UI in view for when I am in those tools - which I'm definitely not in all the time since most of the actual job is being in the lab.

The Formatting/Reviewing split was one of the most irritating possible things as a result of the ribbon: I can't keep the formatting tools in view alongside the Reviewing tools? Like, what?

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#355

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

XorNot wrote: post #126
TheChaplain wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The number of times I had to use "Tell me what you want to do"-field is on a stupid level compared to the rich toolbar and extensive menus that existed pre-2007.

I mean ironically that's actually a much better solution - I love Jetbrains "search everywhere" field in Idea to find specific commands quickly. So why in the heck the ribbon even needs to exist is baffling - just make a command search/command line input, and then if it's literally on a toolbar on screen, highlight it for me (configurably) so I as a new user know what to click on next time. The ribbon is just somehow…

Great news. Now we have a search bar slapped into the middle of the title bar like an albatross. Nicely wedged in between all the other nonstandard title bar chrome.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#356

Post by danans »

1_player wrote: post #330
danans wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Though I'd pay £100 for it no questions asked. Office 365 is a continually updated and enhanced product. They won't provide those updates and enhancements to you forever because your £100 won't pay for them. What you are asking for is their old downloaded/shrink-wrapped Classic Office product offering, which you can still get by paying a f themixed sum ($145 I think). But even in the old days, your £100 bought you…

I get what you mean, but people still made a living selling software without monthly subscriptions before. If I had to use Office more, I'd pay the monthly price, but not for 2 hours a year. It being continuously developed still doesn't justify the price. I can afford it, but if I had to pay £7.99 x 6 = £47.94 for every hour of productivity I extract from a piece of software, I'd go bankrupt very quickly. That's why…

> I can afford it, but if I had to pay £7.99 x 6 = £47.94 for every hour of productivity I extract from a piece of software

Why would you pay for 6 months of subscription for every hour you use it? If it's just an hour of use, you just pay for 1 month, so 7.99. Is there a 6 month minimum?

> If I could buy Office for Linux 2020 for 100 pounds, I would, and it would be enough for me for the next decade,

I get that that would be a great deal for you, but why would MS want to support your £100 Office for Linux purchase with security and feature updates for 10 years? Why even develop and release that product? It's not like they lack for people who will pay their Office 365 subscription fee. It would make as little sense for them to do that as it would for you to sign up for that subscription.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#357

Post by ByteJockey »

maxmouchet wrote: post #18
pulse7 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beauty/ugliness is subjective. For some it is "old and ugly", for some it is "retro".

I agree, and programmers (at least on HN) seems to prefer minimalist and/or retro interfaces. However I'm pretty confident that if I show such an interface to non technical people, they will feel that it doesn't look nice, compared to whatever proprietary app they use on their phone, Windows/Mac, ... I personally don't use Word nor LibreOffice (I use mostly LaTeX), but if we want free software to become more popular,…

I don't personally mind people putting in a fancy ui, put whatever ui you want on it.

Just also give me keybindings and let me hide whatever ui you make.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#358

Post by wolco »

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…

I curse the ribbon. I still haven't found all of the 2003 features.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#359

Post by wolco »

oblio wrote: post #350
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…

> Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is being provided to support this point. Microsoft did massive amounts of user testing, just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not there. This is a good starting point if you have about 20 spare hours: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ They also backed their tests with a ton of data and metrics.

Testing and metrics can be wrong like in this case. A ton of data can be too much where we find patterns to reenforce what we want.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#360

Post by tjalfi »

ghaff wrote: post #232
pseingatl wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

They are still out there.

Last year we recruited an attorney from a firm that still uses WordPerfect for all their documents.

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