If LibreOffice is offering a paid version for extra features / services, considering what they are already offering, I would certainly paid, or at least have a strong interest.
LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
371–380 of 433 posts
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 magazin…
> So much bull crap stuff. The fastest way to find something is to search for it. Faster to search for "save" or press Ctrl+S? Faster to search for "save" or click the save icon at the top of the screen? Searching is slower, clearly. Even if searching was always faster, it doesn't refute "bull crap stuff" because there was no claim that the Ribbon is the fastest full stop, it's a balance of discoverable and usable; s…
You search the first couple times you need something, then you memorize where it is in the menu. If you keep using it repeatedly, you'll learn the shortcut, since it's displayed prominently every time the menu drops down.
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#373Earlier 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.
I remember back when Visual Studio 2012 shipped with black & white toolbar icons, and main menu in ALL CAPS. This was all backed by studies that supposedly showed how most users prefer it that way, according to the lengthy blog post about it.
Let's just say the community's reaction was not in line with those studies...
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really worthy of funding anymore. Certainly not by the government. It's just not competitive with other options. I used to be a longtime Libre Office user. Back then, MS Office was expensive and only available on Windows. Even the Mac version wasn't completely compatible. MS Office is better than it's ever been, with a variety of licensing options that are affordable. And if you're a student you can get it f…
As a counterpoint, I imagine the amount of money the US government already spends on MS Office could fund development of something as good or better than Office, while giving it away free to the rest of society improving productivity. Although, I wouldn't bet on the management of that project playing out like that.
Do you think it would be right for the government to fund a competitor to an American business? Wouldn't it make sense for the government to just use or license Libre Office if it was good enough to meet their needs?
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#375Earlier 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…
Interesting, maybe old menus had some trivial adequate nature for most users and ribbon, even with all its worth doesn't tap into that. Personally I'm still incapable of deciding.. because I hated nested menus (too deep, too adhoc) but the ribbon is a bit less easy to remember than I'd hope. That said it's a good step toward keyboard shortcut memorizing.
One thing about the old menus is that they were extremely configurable. Like, you could not just hide or reorder items, but reorganize the hierarchy if you wanted. People mostly used that for toolbars, but Office menus are technically a kind of toolbar.
Some of that still lives on in Visual Studio, where it is even extended to context menus: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-cus...
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#376Earlier 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…
As an ex trader, I can confirm that the new ribbon interface, when it first came out, caused me and my colleagues a world of pain. We knew all the shortcuts keys in the old version. The ribbon UI meant that a big chunk of the previous shortcuts didn't work anymore. Killed our productivity for a good few months.
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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are still law firms that require all their attorneys to use WordPerfect.
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
With teaching UI you breed the class of people who will shout the loudest when something changes. Teaching your parents that "the internet" is the blue icon in the taskbar will teach them to call you when microsoft decides to install chromium-edge on their machine because "the internet is gone". Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. And with that anyone…
>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.
The older UIs had those concepts, but it wasn't stuff like "how DNS operates". It was stuff like, "every app that works with documents has a File menu with New, Open, and Save in it". Or, say, "if you want to see all available actions for something that's represented by an icon, right-click for context menu". I taught my mom like that, and she was amazingly productive at learning new apps. She didn't always find the most efficient way to do something, but she always found a way to do whatever she needed to do.
Modern UI ditched all that. Just about the only consistent element is the hamburger menu, and how it looks once you open it varies drastically from app to app. In many cases, it's hard to even tell which elements are active and which aren't (because everything is flat!), and if they're active, what exactly they will do if you try to interact with them. When I got her an iPad - the very first one - she really struggled figuring it out, because not only all the existing concepts didn't apply, but there was no rhyme or reason to it in general.
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#379Earlier 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.
It's not just slow, but just the subtle things in how it behaves. For instance, try navigating a spreadsheet in LO with only the keyboard. It's super annoying. Then try the same thing in, say, Google Sheets, and it does exactly what you think it should do. And that is a huge difference in terms of UX and productivity.
yes, UX is stuck in 90s way but not the best part of it.
I wonder what's the state of the codebase and if it could handle a significant UX redesign.
Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
#380It'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 still have the same keyboard layout as back then but MS Office now has some janky "ribbon interface" which bears no resemblance to how it used to be. This is a general pattern for GUIs as of late. It changes every so often until the point where if you haven't used the software in a while, you no longer know how to access a particular function via the GUI interface. For example, web browsers used to have the stand…
Speaking of which, if you want a browser that still provides (opt-in) a classic menu bar with all the usual categories you'd expect, check out Vivaldi. Made by the guys who did the original Opera (before it went down the drain), so of course everything is configurable, stuff like vertical tabs is there out of the box etc.