6 ms·

And still it has a UI like in the nineties. Thousands of buttons, adding more and more, without thinking about it, making it harder and harder with every versio

And still it has a UI like in the nineties. Thousands of buttons, adding more and more, without thinking about it, making it harder and harder with every version for new users to learn using it. Instead of adding more fonts by default, they should start thinking how they can improve their UI, make it clean, discoverable and easy to use. Microsoft has done it, and while initially it was hard for everyone familiar with the old concept, I know nobody who prefers that now, after familiarizing themselves with ribbons.

bryanlarsen 9y ago
3 new experimental, flexible UI's were the headline features of LibreOffice 5.3. https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-document-foundation-announces-the-muffin-a-new-tasty-user-interface-concept-for-libreoffice/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-docu...
- rwx------ 9y ago
  I have enabled Ribbon UI and it looks like ribbon ui build in nineties. There is no obvious way to revert the change.
  - sympodius 9y ago
    I think you can restore the default from the main menu? View -> Toolbar Layout -> Default
    - rwx------ 9y ago
      It was not obvious as the main menu was hidden. There is a button (top-right corner) to show main menu.
      - mksaunders 9y ago
        This is why it's still an exerimental feature, and the more testing and feedback the design community gets, the better!
alok-g 9y ago
Kudos to Microsoft for Ribbon UI. While I myself was supportive from the beginning (and am so glad to see it coming to LibreOffice as well), they saw a lot of backlash for it in early days. Aside: Only thing I miss from Ribbon UI is being able to make it vertical, putting it on the side of the screen. Monitors are mostly landscape, while documents often portrait, so using space on the sides of the screen should be considered for it. (Putting Windows task bar on the right side was an instant boost to my productivity and ability to focus.)
leni536 9y ago
I prefer my toolbars from the nineties, thank you very much. Now you know one person who prefers that.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chrisseaton 9y ago
Using LibreOffice feels like the software equivalent of visiting a historical re-enactment village where everyone dresses in costume and pretends it’s still the 90s. The project feels like a preservation society for a type of software from the past.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  Have you tried any of the new UI layouts?
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    I don't like to criticise anyone's efforts, but yeah and honestly they look like stage makeup on a corpse. The whole thing's just 'off'. It's like a bad illusion, almost like it's trying to con me! I know that's not very logical but that's the gut reaction I have whenever I try to use it. There's probably some psychology in there it'd be interesting to study.
    - boomboomsubban 9y ago
      The psychology is "it's not identical to what I'm familiar with." That's what kept me on Windows for years, getting past it just takes dealing with it for a bit while you get accustomed to it.
      - chrisseaton 9y ago
        But I don't feel that when I use for example Pages, Apple's word processing app which has a different user interface to Word. That looks very different, but feels solid, authentic and high quality and I don't get the same feeling.
- Paianni 9y ago
  Except that MS Office functionality hasn't changed much since the 2003 suite, they just adopted the questionable Ribbon UI while continually reskinning it to match the design trends of the day.
oblio 9y ago
I don't think they haven't thought about it, but: * what Microsoft did was a major change with many, many thousands of man-hours invested into it; and many of those hours were UI/UX research, usability studies, analysis for the data phoned home by Office; does any of this sound like your typical Open Source project work? :) * the Ribbon concept is patented by Microsoft; so not Open Source friendly, which leads us to... * the LibreOffice developers would have to come up with a novel concept for a GUI, which is superior to the existing menus; and one that doesn't fall into the traps that Microsoft Office already went through (see Harris Jensen's blog series called "The Why of the New UI"); I'm a big fan of Open Source, but unless it comes from academia (Office products are not known to be the main focus of academic research right now) or from startups (good luck taking down Microsoft Office! :) ), most of the user friendly GUI stuff in Open Source-landia is copy-cat stuff Edit: I just saw bryanlarsen's comment. Glad to hear that they're trying. However quite a few of those attempts fit into stuff Microsoft already tried. But they might still prove superior to the current interface, so kudos to the LibreOffice devs for that ;)
- nothis 9y ago
  >what Microsoft did was a major change with many, many thousands of man-hours invested into it; and many of those hours were UI/UX research, usability studies, analysis for the data phoned home by Office; does any of this sound like your typical Open Source project work? :) No, and that's a problem! Tell me LibreOffice isn't a MASSIVE project with thousands of man-hours invested in developing its under-the-hood features. How about finally recognizing UX design as a vital part of that effort? Or rather, its biggest flaw? It's not as esoteric as copying "ribbons" or "reinventing the GUI". How about having buttons where the text isn't sticking 1 pixel to the left, some proper spacing to group elements belonging together and boxes that are aligned at all angles, so your eyes don't get tired after 5 seconds of reading the captions? How about sending 3 people into a real-life office environment where LibreOffice is used for a week and make detailed notes and interviews on which features are used most, are most annoying to use or most desperately missed and then rearranging the hierarchy accordingly? I see such a massive amount of goodwill and idealism in the open source community but as soon as it's facing mainstream users it fails to recognize UX as an integral part of providing a viable alternative to commercial products. Microsoft absolutely needs competition in the Office space, I swear at them nearly every day for doing the simplest things they manage to make complicated. They can be beat. But it's not via features, it's via interface design.
lovelearning 9y ago
LO comes with a ribbon-like UI called "NoteBook Bar" from atleast an year. It's deployed as an experimental feature in 5.x, but I've found it stable. Perhaps they've made it a mainstream feature now in 6. https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Using_the_notebook_bar https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Using_the_notebook_bar
- kweinber 9y ago
  It would be cool for them to do a study.... have the default set to whichever version of the toolbar people use most in their settings. A real life, long-term usability study. I bet the ribbon loses big-time since it Is such a discoverability nightmare.
- floatboth 9y ago
  Nah, it still requires ticking the "experimental" flag in advanced options. Sad that it's buried so far :(
MagnumOpus 9y ago
Raises hand As a power user of Office before and after that change - the menu bar was massively better. Now you know someone. Seriously, who apart from utter novices would ever want to use a UI where the keyboard shortcuts are non-obvious, the buttons take up half the screen, and discoverability is non-existent (and not even Google can help half the time because things jump around from version to version).
- Nexxxeh 9y ago
  If there was an option to switch back from ribbons, I'd do it every time.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Me too.
  - vetinari 9y ago
    Office for Mac has the original menus _and_ ribbon. Just the old toolbars disappeared. Best of both worlds.
- criddell 9y ago
  If you are a power user, does the graphical UI even matter to you? Aren't you all keyboard, all the time? I didn't like the ribbon interface for a long time. Then I watched a video of Joel Spolsky doing some stuff in Excel and it was the first time I really saw somebody that knew what they were doing using the ribbon. That converted me.
  - Mithaldu 9y ago
    > Aren't you all keyboard, all the time? No. Keyboard for the things i know by heart and use every few seconds, mouse for the things that happen from time to time, and explorability for everything else. Also, link to that video? Edit: I think you mean this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c Very first thing i notice is he rides hard on the "Paste as Values" option being the one you want to use most of the time. However since he has the ribbon on top he has a gigantic paste button and needs to use the drop down every time to call it. With normal toolbars you'd just add a "Paste as Values" button next to the normal paste button and skip the error-prone, slow dropdown process. (I also note he has no keyboard shortcut for it.)
nothis 9y ago
With all open/free software updates I care about one thing and one thing only: UI. Not talking "features" or anything, just reworking what's there based on concrete user studies. Never happens. The only example I know of is Firefox (which actually managed to beat Internet Explorer long before Chrome was a thing, that's how powerful usability is). I want to support free office alternatives so badly, used OpenOffice and Libre Office for years, but recently caved to buy a license of MS Office 2016 because even Microsoft's shitty interface is miles ahead. The free software community needs interface designers badly. I swear it's the one thing holding them back. All the features are there, but using the damn thing is infuriating.
xtanx 9y ago
If it was up to me, I would try to reach 99.999% compatibility with ms word first then do anything else. Both doc and docx formats. If people see that LibreOffice Writer is as good as MS Word, then they would migrate to it. Then funding would come and then they would have all the resources to build awesome UIs.
- linopolus 9y ago
  > If people see that LibreOffice Writer is as good as MS Word, then they would migrate to it. as good as won't be enough for migration, as it's work to migrate, learn a new interface, bear all thats different. Without a better UI, even better functionality may not be enough to convince people. UI is the first thing one sees..
  - xtanx 9y ago
    The problem is that if a user opens a word file and it is different in writer than it is in word (where they created it) they will not even take the time to notice the nice UI, they will dismiss writer entirely as unreliable.
roenxi 9y ago
Any user who learned to use office between 1990 and 2007 is well served by having a familiar interface. Now sure, there is a case that these user's comfort should be jettisoned for the future of the project. There is also a case that software projects (commercial and open source) regularly 'fix' things that aren't broken because they get bored. Change is not user friendly; it breaks tutorials, it weakens the support network, it risks good ideas getting lost. Don't get me wrong, if they do change things I'll probably support it, but if they stick to what worked for 20 years then we should support that too.
cabalamat 9y ago
I like the fact that the UI has stayed much the same.
Already__Taken 9y ago
I thought this was the nature of open source, UI seems to require a certain ability to dictate changes that private software is able to lead on. But Audacities latest improvements in UI are very nice which leave hope for foobar and libreOffice etc.
mksaunders 9y ago
> Instead of adding more fonts by default, they should start thinking how they can improve their UI, make it clean, discoverable and easy to use. It's possible to do both! Not everyone in a large open source project works on the same thing. In the FOSS world, people choose what's important for them, so it's hard to say "they should" and make everyone do one specific thing. But anyway, LibreOffice does have a design community with weekly meetings, blueprints and other activities: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design They are working on the "Notebookbar" alternative GUI design, so if you're not happy with the design, why not join them and help out? :-)
dhimes 9y ago
I guess I'm in the minority, but I prefer function over form. On the other hand, for most office suite work (spreadsheets and documents) I'm not doing anything too fancy. There are occasional bouts of "how do I do that again?" But tbh I have that with PowerPoint also. I can learn a UI, don't mind if it's klunky, but I need the thing to do what I need it to do.
buovjaga 9y ago
> And still it has a UI like in the nineties. Want to know what happened, when I suggested folks could join in to drag it out of the nineties? https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u2p7x/tired_of_the_1990s_look_of_libreoffice_heres_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u2p7x/tired_of_the_... Hundreds of people appeared saying "Leave it alone, it's fine!! Don't you dare mess with it!"
sildur 9y ago
No, please. If you want an improved UI, fork the project, do it, and let's see how much people follow you. But don't try to force it down our throats.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  It's not necessary to fork the project. LibreOffice already comes with a way of reskinning/replacing the UI. Let's just say one of my priorities for 2018 is taking this further.
72deluxe 9y ago
The old keyboard shortcuts work in the new Office but how do I learn the shortcuts for the Ribbon? Everything takes me twice as long to a) find it on the ribbon according to the incoherent positioning of items, and b) to navigate the tiny needless dropdown menus. I have to hunt around by picture and unevenly-spaced icons (every button is a different size to its neighbor) and cannot navigate it by keyboard. The ribbon is truly a giant step backwards in usability. I utterly detest it and welcome any opportunity to use an old version of Office 2003.
- collyw 9y ago
  Many of the icons are pretty meaningless so you have to hover to get the text description. Give me menus with text any day.
- jandrese 9y ago
  If you hover over the button it will tell you what the shortcut is. But this is a weakness of the ribbon over the old menu system. In the old menu you were reminded of the shortcut every time you went to select something. In the ribbon you have to hunt them down. I've been using the ribbon for ages now and about the only shortcuts I remember are bold and italic. That said, did you know you can tap Alt and get keyboard navigation of the ribbon?
borplk 9y ago
It seems like the average contributor to open source projects doesn't have enough interest and skill in the visual design aspect of things. They tend to be the stereotypical hardcore old-school C developer who is not aesthetically oriented. Everything from their website, their logo to the UI/UX has an aura of "designed by a C programmer who just wants to code and doesn't really give a shit about how fancy things look as long as it works".

bryanlarsen 9y ago

3 new experimental, flexible UI's were the headline features of LibreOffice 5.3. https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-document-foundation-announces-the-muffin-a-new-tasty-user-interface-concept-for-libreoffice/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-docu...

rwx------ 9y ago
I have enabled Ribbon UI and it looks like ribbon ui build in nineties. There is no obvious way to revert the change.
- sympodius 9y ago
  I think you can restore the default from the main menu? View -> Toolbar Layout -> Default
  - rwx------ 9y ago
    It was not obvious as the main menu was hidden. There is a button (top-right corner) to show main menu.
    - mksaunders 9y ago
      This is why it's still an exerimental feature, and the more testing and feedback the design community gets, the better!

alok-g 9y ago

Kudos to Microsoft for Ribbon UI. While I myself was supportive from the beginning (and am so glad to see it coming to LibreOffice as well), they saw a lot of backlash for it in early days. Aside: Only thing I miss from Ribbon UI is being able to make it vertical, putting it on the side of the screen. Monitors are mostly landscape, while documents often portrait, so using space on the sides of the screen should be considered for it. (Putting Windows task bar on the right side was an instant boost to my productivity and ability to focus.)

leni536 9y ago

I prefer my toolbars from the nineties, thank you very much. Now you know one person who prefers that.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

chrisseaton 9y ago

Using LibreOffice feels like the software equivalent of visiting a historical re-enactment village where everyone dresses in costume and pretends it’s still the 90s. The project feels like a preservation society for a type of software from the past.

AsyncAwait 9y ago
Have you tried any of the new UI layouts?
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  I don't like to criticise anyone's efforts, but yeah and honestly they look like stage makeup on a corpse. The whole thing's just 'off'. It's like a bad illusion, almost like it's trying to con me! I know that's not very logical but that's the gut reaction I have whenever I try to use it. There's probably some psychology in there it'd be interesting to study.
  - boomboomsubban 9y ago
    The psychology is "it's not identical to what I'm familiar with." That's what kept me on Windows for years, getting past it just takes dealing with it for a bit while you get accustomed to it.
    - chrisseaton 9y ago
      But I don't feel that when I use for example Pages, Apple's word processing app which has a different user interface to Word. That looks very different, but feels solid, authentic and high quality and I don't get the same feeling.
Paianni 9y ago
Except that MS Office functionality hasn't changed much since the 2003 suite, they just adopted the questionable Ribbon UI while continually reskinning it to match the design trends of the day.

oblio 9y ago

I don't think they haven't thought about it, but: * what Microsoft did was a major change with many, many thousands of man-hours invested into it; and many of those hours were UI/UX research, usability studies, analysis for the data phoned home by Office; does any of this sound like your typical Open Source project work? :) * the Ribbon concept is patented by Microsoft; so not Open Source friendly, which leads us to... * the LibreOffice developers would have to come up with a novel concept for a GUI, which is superior to the existing menus; and one that doesn't fall into the traps that Microsoft Office already went through (see Harris Jensen's blog series called "The Why of the New UI"); I'm a big fan of Open Source, but unless it comes from academia (Office products are not known to be the main focus of academic research right now) or from startups (good luck taking down Microsoft Office! :) ), most of the user friendly GUI stuff in Open Source-landia is copy-cat stuff Edit: I just saw bryanlarsen's comment. Glad to hear that they're trying. However quite a few of those attempts fit into stuff Microsoft already tried. But they might still prove superior to the current interface, so kudos to the LibreOffice devs for that ;)

nothis 9y ago
>what Microsoft did was a major change with many, many thousands of man-hours invested into it; and many of those hours were UI/UX research, usability studies, analysis for the data phoned home by Office; does any of this sound like your typical Open Source project work? :) No, and that's a problem! Tell me LibreOffice isn't a MASSIVE project with thousands of man-hours invested in developing its under-the-hood features. How about finally recognizing UX design as a vital part of that effort? Or rather, its biggest flaw? It's not as esoteric as copying "ribbons" or "reinventing the GUI". How about having buttons where the text isn't sticking 1 pixel to the left, some proper spacing to group elements belonging together and boxes that are aligned at all angles, so your eyes don't get tired after 5 seconds of reading the captions? How about sending 3 people into a real-life office environment where LibreOffice is used for a week and make detailed notes and interviews on which features are used most, are most annoying to use or most desperately missed and then rearranging the hierarchy accordingly? I see such a massive amount of goodwill and idealism in the open source community but as soon as it's facing mainstream users it fails to recognize UX as an integral part of providing a viable alternative to commercial products. Microsoft absolutely needs competition in the Office space, I swear at them nearly every day for doing the simplest things they manage to make complicated. They can be beat. But it's not via features, it's via interface design.

lovelearning 9y ago

LO comes with a ribbon-like UI called "NoteBook Bar" from atleast an year. It's deployed as an experimental feature in 5.x, but I've found it stable. Perhaps they've made it a mainstream feature now in 6. https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Using_the_notebook_bar https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Using_the_notebook_bar

kweinber 9y ago
It would be cool for them to do a study.... have the default set to whichever version of the toolbar people use most in their settings. A real life, long-term usability study. I bet the ribbon loses big-time since it Is such a discoverability nightmare.
floatboth 9y ago
Nah, it still requires ticking the "experimental" flag in advanced options. Sad that it's buried so far :(

MagnumOpus 9y ago

Raises hand As a power user of Office before and after that change - the menu bar was massively better. Now you know someone. Seriously, who apart from utter novices would ever want to use a UI where the keyboard shortcuts are non-obvious, the buttons take up half the screen, and discoverability is non-existent (and not even Google can help half the time because things jump around from version to version).

Nexxxeh 9y ago
If there was an option to switch back from ribbons, I'd do it every time.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Me too.
- vetinari 9y ago
  Office for Mac has the original menus _and_ ribbon. Just the old toolbars disappeared. Best of both worlds.
criddell 9y ago
If you are a power user, does the graphical UI even matter to you? Aren't you all keyboard, all the time? I didn't like the ribbon interface for a long time. Then I watched a video of Joel Spolsky doing some stuff in Excel and it was the first time I really saw somebody that knew what they were doing using the ribbon. That converted me.
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  > Aren't you all keyboard, all the time? No. Keyboard for the things i know by heart and use every few seconds, mouse for the things that happen from time to time, and explorability for everything else. Also, link to that video? Edit: I think you mean this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c Very first thing i notice is he rides hard on the "Paste as Values" option being the one you want to use most of the time. However since he has the ribbon on top he has a gigantic paste button and needs to use the drop down every time to call it. With normal toolbars you'd just add a "Paste as Values" button next to the normal paste button and skip the error-prone, slow dropdown process. (I also note he has no keyboard shortcut for it.)

nothis 9y ago

With all open/free software updates I care about one thing and one thing only: UI. Not talking "features" or anything, just reworking what's there based on concrete user studies. Never happens. The only example I know of is Firefox (which actually managed to beat Internet Explorer long before Chrome was a thing, that's how powerful usability is). I want to support free office alternatives so badly, used OpenOffice and Libre Office for years, but recently caved to buy a license of MS Office 2016 because even Microsoft's shitty interface is miles ahead. The free software community needs interface designers badly. I swear it's the one thing holding them back. All the features are there, but using the damn thing is infuriating.

xtanx 9y ago

If it was up to me, I would try to reach 99.999% compatibility with ms word first then do anything else. Both doc and docx formats. If people see that LibreOffice Writer is as good as MS Word, then they would migrate to it. Then funding would come and then they would have all the resources to build awesome UIs.

linopolus 9y ago
> If people see that LibreOffice Writer is as good as MS Word, then they would migrate to it. as good as won't be enough for migration, as it's work to migrate, learn a new interface, bear all thats different. Without a better UI, even better functionality may not be enough to convince people. UI is the first thing one sees..
- xtanx 9y ago
  The problem is that if a user opens a word file and it is different in writer than it is in word (where they created it) they will not even take the time to notice the nice UI, they will dismiss writer entirely as unreliable.

roenxi 9y ago

Any user who learned to use office between 1990 and 2007 is well served by having a familiar interface. Now sure, there is a case that these user's comfort should be jettisoned for the future of the project. There is also a case that software projects (commercial and open source) regularly 'fix' things that aren't broken because they get bored. Change is not user friendly; it breaks tutorials, it weakens the support network, it risks good ideas getting lost. Don't get me wrong, if they do change things I'll probably support it, but if they stick to what worked for 20 years then we should support that too.

cabalamat 9y ago

I like the fact that the UI has stayed much the same.

Already__Taken 9y ago

I thought this was the nature of open source, UI seems to require a certain ability to dictate changes that private software is able to lead on. But Audacities latest improvements in UI are very nice which leave hope for foobar and libreOffice etc.

mksaunders 9y ago

> Instead of adding more fonts by default, they should start thinking how they can improve their UI, make it clean, discoverable and easy to use. It's possible to do both! Not everyone in a large open source project works on the same thing. In the FOSS world, people choose what's important for them, so it's hard to say "they should" and make everyone do one specific thing. But anyway, LibreOffice does have a design community with weekly meetings, blueprints and other activities: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design They are working on the "Notebookbar" alternative GUI design, so if you're not happy with the design, why not join them and help out? :-)

dhimes 9y ago

I guess I'm in the minority, but I prefer function over form. On the other hand, for most office suite work (spreadsheets and documents) I'm not doing anything too fancy. There are occasional bouts of "how do I do that again?" But tbh I have that with PowerPoint also. I can learn a UI, don't mind if it's klunky, but I need the thing to do what I need it to do.

buovjaga 9y ago

> And still it has a UI like in the nineties. Want to know what happened, when I suggested folks could join in to drag it out of the nineties? https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u2p7x/tired_of_the_1990s_look_of_libreoffice_heres_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u2p7x/tired_of_the_... Hundreds of people appeared saying "Leave it alone, it's fine!! Don't you dare mess with it!"

sildur 9y ago

No, please. If you want an improved UI, fork the project, do it, and let's see how much people follow you. But don't try to force it down our throats.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
It's not necessary to fork the project. LibreOffice already comes with a way of reskinning/replacing the UI. Let's just say one of my priorities for 2018 is taking this further.

72deluxe 9y ago

The old keyboard shortcuts work in the new Office but how do I learn the shortcuts for the Ribbon? Everything takes me twice as long to a) find it on the ribbon according to the incoherent positioning of items, and b) to navigate the tiny needless dropdown menus. I have to hunt around by picture and unevenly-spaced icons (every button is a different size to its neighbor) and cannot navigate it by keyboard. The ribbon is truly a giant step backwards in usability. I utterly detest it and welcome any opportunity to use an old version of Office 2003.

collyw 9y ago
Many of the icons are pretty meaningless so you have to hover to get the text description. Give me menus with text any day.
jandrese 9y ago
If you hover over the button it will tell you what the shortcut is. But this is a weakness of the ribbon over the old menu system. In the old menu you were reminded of the shortcut every time you went to select something. In the ribbon you have to hunt them down. I've been using the ribbon for ages now and about the only shortcuts I remember are bold and italic. That said, did you know you can tap Alt and get keyboard navigation of the ribbon?

borplk 9y ago

It seems like the average contributor to open source projects doesn't have enough interest and skill in the visual design aspect of things. They tend to be the stereotypical hardcore old-school C developer who is not aesthetically oriented. Everything from their website, their logo to the UI/UX has an aura of "designed by a C programmer who just wants to code and doesn't really give a shit about how fancy things look as long as it works".