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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#401

Post by gmueckl »

ModernMech wrote: post #395
gmueckl wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It messes up any attempt to recollect of the locations of certain features in the bar. Some iterations of the ribbon even fold groups into menus under single buttons, so the exact path to feature then depends on the width of the window. This turns the ribbon into a pretty inconsistent user experience.

I don't recollect the location of features by their spacial location, I recollect them by their place in a hierarchical ordering. The exact path to a function is always preserved, as the keyboard shortcut for that item is defined by that path.

Ribbons (in Office, at least) change that very hierarchy depending on window width. For example, take the Home bar in Word: the "Editing" and "Style" groups collapse to buttons with submenus before the width of the window is reduced to half screen width on my computer. This affects keyboard navigation in the ribbon bar, too, of course.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#402

Post by Pewtas »

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…

This "once you learn the complicated non intuitive user interface it becomes good" mentality is the reason why a lot of people don't like Linux (in my opinion). The whole Linux world just has such a poor UI/UX design that you don't want to interact with it in the first place - not all but most of it anyways.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#403

Post by red_admiral »

Const-me wrote: post #229
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…

> 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.

Thanks!

I remember in years gone by, there was a (Sun?) keyboard with extra keys down the left with names like cut, copy, paste, insert, close and so on. I'm half tempted to buy one of those gaming keyboards with programmable macro keys and map one of them to this "paste as plain text" sequence.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#404

Post by red_admiral »

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?

At least for this Bob here:

1. The ribbon interface has more levels of depth, which equals more clicks. If most of your commands are in the same toolbar, you can have a lot of commands that are only one click away, even if you don't customise. For example, to "insert symbol" in word to get an em dash or non-breaking space or similar, you have to select the insert tab, click the symbol dropdown and then "more symbols ...". Used to be one click on the "omega" button, or two via the menu (insert / symbol). The fact that I have to move the mouse from one end of the screen to the other and then half the way back again also doesn't help.

2. Maybe this is just me but Alt+N, U, M for "insert symbol" is a lot harder for me to memorise than "the button with an omega up there to the right". It feels less intuitive somehow - I really like working with visual muscle memory (if that's a thing) where I remember the place and shape of a button.

3. Customisability. Yes you can do this to some extent with the ribbon, but in Excel you can't just swap out "merge and center" with "merge across (but do not center)", you'd have to replace the whole "section" - I've tried.

4. Speaking of visual muscle memory - the number of times I've come in to work and found that my ribbon has changed in an update overnight. Some of these are work installing new plugins, but most of it is microsoft adding new "features". No thanks, I don't want my documents "integrated with LinkedIn" when I'm working to a deadline.

5. There have been several major changes to how the ribbon looks and works as Word has gone through new versions since it was introduced - in a lot less than 17 years. Of course that happened with toolbars too (I think around 2000 everything went "flat style", but you could at least turn it off), but I found it easier to adapt back then. Maybe I'm just getting old but each new version that comes out feels like learning half the things I need for work all over again.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#405

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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,…

>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. //

How long is that career? Over my working life StarOffice/OpenOffice/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice have been far more compatible (for relatively basic documents) with other versions of MSWord than MSWord has, I don't really have experience of cross-compatibility from the last 5 years or so though.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#406

Post by Biganon »

tw04 wrote: post #250
henrikeh wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they were fully committed (apparently having done ANY user testing) It is a little hard to parse what you mean, but Microsoft did a quite substantial amount of research leading up to the ribbon. A quick search on the net will lead you to summaries of it.

Sorry, I left out a *not. I vehemently disagree, in 2007 NOBODY liked the ribbon. My wife's company refused to upgrade until absolutely forced to because it was such an atrocity. The most glowing reviews I ever saw were "I guess I'll get used to it eventually" and/or someone who used office once a year and found navigation easier when the extent of their workflow was changing font sizes. https://www.zdnet.com/article…

People hate change, that's not a reliable indicator. You could increase the quality immensely, most users would still feel attacked because they have to spend an extra effort to adapt.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#407

Post by uxcolumbo »

pythonwizz wrote: post #49

They do a great job. But I use [commercial] Softmaker Office. They offer a free version too: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/

Thanks for posting this.

I'm looking for a MS Office replacement, not heard of Softmaker Office before. I'm still using an old version of Office, but it doesn't work well on a high DPI screen.

What's your experience with Softmaker Office - anything you're missing from MS Office (if you've used it before Softmaker Office)?

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#408

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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.

> "It begs an interesting question: does defense spending have a positive ROI?"

It's analogous to the question: Does homeowner's fire insurance have a positive ROI? The answer is no only if the homeowner's house doesn't burn down and it's enlightening to look up how many house fires occur daily.

If that's not compelling then perhaps contemplate what would people have said the ROI for national readiness for a pandemic was a decade ago and what they would say today.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#409

Post by sergeykish »

chronolitus wrote: post #151
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who frequently encounters bugs, let me explain why I don't usually bother to file bug reports: No one cares. Choose any large long-lived open source project at random and search their issue tracker and I guarantee you can find at least 3 open bugs that are 5 years old or more. I know, because I've run into these bugs, as have dozens of others, and went to report them only to find they had already been repo…

For example, I encounter this bug every day when I open Firefox (latest version) on i3wm. "Opened 9 years ago." https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686747

Bug is open, "firefox57 - wontfix" means "would not be fixed in Firefox 57"

* Create New Account

* Edit Bug

* Tracking Flags: $version => affected

* Save Changes

Do it for every version. It is extremely hard to know is issue resolved or not. I've tried to reproduce session restore on Developers Edition - nope, I can't. There is no minimal xmonad config attached. Is it solved by ewmh (helps at least with fullscreen)? If bug "is simple to fix" try to fix yourself.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#410

Post by sergeykish »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #93
asddubs wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yup, that's the thing, people love to complain on random social media platforms, but most people can't be bothered to report bugs. been guilty of it myself as well of course

As someone who frequently encounters bugs, let me explain why I don't usually bother to file bug reports: No one cares. Choose any large long-lived open source project at random and search their issue tracker and I guarantee you can find at least 3 open bugs that are 5 years old or more. I know, because I've run into these bugs, as have dozens of others, and went to report them only to find they had already been repo…

Yes, there are hostile developers. Yep, even pool requests with unwelcome features may be rejected (we prize them as focus in proprietary software).

Other... I can turn your rhetoric around: "Fixing bugs takes time. There is source code, yet in 5 years no one fixed. Looks like niche issue. You do not care about it so neither do developers."

Hey, it is not bad, at least you've confirmed you are not the only one. One can't even browse Opera issue tracker.

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