LibreOffice: The Next Five Years • Hacker News Board

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#191

Post by rdiddly » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

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…

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 a mature product that maintains all its older interfaces.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#192

Post by fock » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #11

fock wrote: post #5

so basically iceweasel vs. firefox again. I'm fine with that (and still miss the icon)

Could be that the enterprise will include some cloud sync for auto backup (like O365/OneDrive), of course that will not be free. Best case (call me naive) but it could just be that the personal edition simply does not ask for the syncing, worst case, it will nag you constantly.

well, if you're paying for the cloud, you can pay for the free-as in freedom-software as well I guess ;)

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#193

Post by kristopolous » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

nickcw wrote: post #153

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.

I use LibreOffice because it runs on my machine - MS Office doesn't. If MS made a Linux version I'd probably get that. LibreOffice is at its best if you make the docs and edit them just in LibreOffice. It's great at making structured docs. Calc is pretty good too. The PowerPoint equivalent is the weakest of the bunch, crashing frequently. However in the biz world you end up sharing docs and sheets with MS office user…

I really wouldn't be surprised if this happens soon. Some kind of encrypted flatpak with some licensing scheme built in.

Or making a Linux store of essentially an apt server where everything has a pricetag. It shows up in your repository after you purchase it and then can update it like anything else... This isn't new ground these days

There's lots of ways to do commercial software with the existing infrastructure and I don't think the modern Microsoft cares as much as long as they are selling.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#194

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:08 PM UTC

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 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.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#195

Post by lallysingh » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

edoloughlin wrote: post #134

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…

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…

It sounds like the issue is that the layout isn't spatial. There isn't a 1:1 mapping between place and object. The same place can have multiple objects depending on what tab's selected.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#196

Post by vikramkr » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

craftinator wrote: post #161

XorNot wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface removed customizability, and inflated the size of all the common commands (and also made it impossible to get them back without 3rd party extensions). Pre-Ribbon I could have the menus, file operations, font and paragraph settings, and the reviewing tool bar at the top of my screen. I could have the object and image editing at the bottom. Post-ribbon the exact same amount of space is does a third…

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 powerpoint, but hotkeys and macros are where its at

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#197

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

edoloughlin wrote: post #134

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…

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.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#198

Post by osrec » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:12 PM UTC

signal11 wrote: post #133

osrec wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, the new ribbon interface was much more inconvenient. If I recall correctly, pasting data while removing duplicates in the ribbon interface was Alt+AQORT, but only Alt+XY in the old Excel (I don't remember what X and Y were, but I know it was a 2 key combo!)

Excel kept the old Alt based keyboard shortcuts, e.g. Alt D F F for Data > Filter > AutoFilter still works. If there was an alt-keyboard shortcut for paste removing duplicates, that should still work.

That's the point; the old shortcuts did not always work. Worse still, they did something totally different. For "power users", it was a horrible experience.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#199

Post by subhro » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:14 PM UTC

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…

> It's bad UI if people just learn where to click.

A combat pilot would respectfully disagree. :)

Source: Diving pulling 5Gs canopy side down.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#200

Post by billfor » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 3:14 PM UTC

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 think the old style menus were more functional for technical people and other experts, but the ribbon might be easier for new users. MSFT seems to have understood that trade off. It's interesting that the Metro design, which seems closer to the ribbon, didn't take off the same way.

But from functional perspective I do like the old interface better, and especially that I can pullright to get at things without having to make multiple clicks.