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LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#71

Post by chris_wot »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #2

While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it displeases me that the FOSS community is so hostile to the ribbon-style UI MS uses in its office product. Its such a great concept that using LO is like stepping back into the Office 97 days. Frankly, I'd rather just pay every few years for a home edition of Office than do all the mental gymnastic needed to properly switch to LO.

What's wrong with the sidebar? If you think about it, most of your available unused screen real estate is on the side of the window, not the top... The sidebar, IMO, is rather more versatile than the ribbon anyway. (Thanks IBM!)

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#72

Post by esfandia »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #2

While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it displeases me that the FOSS community is so hostile to the ribbon-style UI MS uses in its office product. Its such a great concept that using LO is like stepping back into the Office 97 days. Frankly, I'd rather just pay every few years for a home edition of Office than do all the mental gymnastic needed to properly switch to LO.

I have stayed on Office 2004 for Mac (running on Rosetta, and with the free docx compatibility plugin: I'm pathetic, I know) for the longest time on my laptop just to avoid having to use the ribbon (which I "experience" daily on my Windows machine unfortunately). Since my next Mac laptop won't have Rosetta I'll have to move on, and that means switching to LO, not upgrading Office.

And if LO ends up also using a ribbon, I'll move on to something else.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#73

Post by chris_wot »

cheald wrote: post #64
chris_wot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you file a bug report and send over the file you are using?

Where should I file it?

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi

So that's a UTF-8 file? Funny it's coming up with UTF-16...

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#74

Post by bnegreve »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #46
shRaj9fEc8Vith wrote: post #38

Don't OSS project has professional designer? I mean like Apple-quality designers?

Have you ever tried contributing to a popular FOSS product? I have. Expect to be downvoted, yelled at, etc for suggesting change, especially change that's an emotional issue for geeks (implementing a ribbon-like interface, you know the one started by the 'evil' microsoft). Linus's childish attitude is pretty much the poster boy for this attitude. Namecalling is the norm. There are so many cultural and management issu…

I think your comment is a bit unfair. All the problems you mentioned also exist outside of the FOSS world. People feel the same frustration, but they typically won't say it because of some kind of hierarchy. Is that a good thing? I'm not sure.

The other thing is that FOSS projects typically involve contributors from all around the world and cultural differences are always very sneaky, it looks like everybody is a hacker, but in fact most share completely different cultural codes. For example I've noticed that people from the US are used to cheer a lot, that definitely not the case everywhere. So for US contributors, I'm guessing working with people with a different mindset with respect to criticism can be quite a shock.

So the beauty of FOSS is that it kinda works despite the extreme work conditions (distributed / remote / every body is allowed to say whatever / people work when and if they want / etc.)

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#75

Post by reitanqild »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #46
shRaj9fEc8Vith wrote: post #38

Don't OSS project has professional designer? I mean like Apple-quality designers?

Have you ever tried contributing to a popular FOSS product? I have. Expect to be downvoted, yelled at, etc for suggesting change, especially change that's an emotional issue for geeks (implementing a ribbon-like interface, you know the one started by the 'evil' microsoft). Linus's childish attitude is pretty much the poster boy for this attitude. Namecalling is the norm. There are so many cultural and management issu…

Hmmm. Then again, look to gnome and unity to see what happens when designers and ux experts can do what they want: they copy Apple, features and bugs ;-)

For us who use Linux not because of the price but because of the usability it offers this is of course not what we want however cool it looks.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#76

Post by chops »

ForHackernews wrote: post #69
chops wrote: post #50

While I appreciate effort put into making the interface prettier, one of the things that really detracts from LibreOffice and why I almost invariably end up installing MS Word for clients is the confusing way which the mail merge system is designed in LibreOffice. I've done it enough times now to know mostly how to get it working for myself, but there's no way in hell I'll try teaching a client how to do a mail merge…

Huh. This is an interesting example of a feature that's very important to some people, and utterly irrelevant to others. I had never even heard of "mail merge" in the context of word processing software, only mass-emailers, and it would never have occurred to me that anyone was using desktop word processing software to run their paper-mailing campaigns.

It's pretty common in the small business world, or even printing envelopes/labels for christmas cards, wedding invitations, etc. Most recently, I'm using it for rapid prototyping of cards for a board game I'm making, but I do also use it for small direct mailing campaigns (under 200 destinations) for my business.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#78

Post by cheald »

chris_wot wrote: post #73
cheald wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where should I file it?

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi So that's a UTF-8 file? Funny it's coming up with UTF-16...

Filed. https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88909

It should just be a US-ASCII file, so yeah, UTF-8 works, while UTF-16 obviously wouldn't.

Re: LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

#80

Post by chris_wot »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #46
shRaj9fEc8Vith wrote: post #38

Don't OSS project has professional designer? I mean like Apple-quality designers?

Have you ever tried contributing to a popular FOSS product? I have. Expect to be downvoted, yelled at, etc for suggesting change, especially change that's an emotional issue for geeks (implementing a ribbon-like interface, you know the one started by the 'evil' microsoft). Linus's childish attitude is pretty much the poster boy for this attitude. Namecalling is the norm. There are so many cultural and management issu…

There is a LibreOffice design team. I think one of the issues do far was we have had to do a lot of re plumbing which users don't really see - heck even the build system was overhauled to allow easier builds!

There's a lot more to go, but we're making progress and I think you'll start to see better UI improvements this year. I recall the first versions of Mozilla - I couldn't even type into edit boxes when I first started, but look at it now :-)

These things take time, but we have commitment and an enthusiastic community - and actually our developers are pretty responsive. well... most of us :-)

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