srsly though it’s astonishing just how much global geopolitics hinges on whether this is successful. MS Office is the main blocker to the EU migrating off US tech.
Thrilled. I recently started trying LibreOffice thanks to a friend of mine and I admit that as someone used to Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, I feel like a total idiot always searching up “how to [do something] libreoffice”.
That doesn’t make you an idiot, instead it indicates how bad the UI of LibreOffice is.
And they hired someone with a focus on the MacOS-Version, so don’t hold your breath for any improvements in the foreseeable future on other platforms.
Do you really think it’s that bad? Is it modern? No. But is it necessarily bad? At least I don’t think so.
I think it focuses on consitency with other FOSS Software. And the consensus currently seems to be a focus on sidebars, which I personally like.
But also: I know nothing about UX/I design or design in genreal D
It is such a powerfull software and capable of so much, at least LibreOffice Calc, which I use a lot. But the UI doesn’t keep up with it, a lot feels hidden. And that is a shame, because it prevents new users to see that it is a great alternative.
Please fix horizontal scrolling in Calc first 😩 it’s a PITA to work with sheets that have wide columns.
It is so for anything having tables, from what I see.
Dev has to consider whether snapping is a better idea or smooth scrolling is and toolkits seem to have snapping as the default.
he’s seem some shit, and he’s gonna see more!
Thank god
I wouldn’t expect the UI/UX to magically improve, in the same way that e.g. Audacity’s is, or Blender’s did back in the day.
LibreOffice is ancient and enormous. It would take a decent sized team several years to overhaul its UX.
For what? A better UI for MacOS?
But the Mac isn’t the only platform so I’ll be driving user interface improvements and fixing annoying bugs everywhere else too, regardless of platform or visual backend. I also look forward to working with the LibreOffice Design community to try out new ideas and see what sticks.
Welcome to the team, Dan! Can’t wait to see where you take things. :)
Liquid glass coming soon.
Liquid glass? Sounds hot. 🤡
Meanwhile the state of the UI/UX on Linux: I dare you to rotate your paper in LibreOffice Writer to
portraitlandscape in under a minute, if you haven’t recently used the function.<15 seconds.
Including starting LibreOffice Writer. This is on a 5400RPM HDD and Writer was definitely not cached, since I haven’t opened it in days.Now how long did it take to start MS Word on my laptop again?
I think you and many of the downvoters are missing my point:
If the default setting leads me to an UI, where I, an average user, needs so long to find such a basic function, then the UI is bad. And I am very patient, but if you want to convince the average MS Office user, that Linux + LibreOffice is an alternative, then it needs to be better then this.
And I am obviously disappointet that they hired someone with a focus on MacOS and not Linux, where a big UI/UX overhaul would be needed. It sais in the article, that the new hire will also look at overall improvements beside MacOS, but that won’t be enough to polish the UX to the point where people would prefer LibreOffice over MS Office.
where I, an average user, needs so long to find such a basic function
I am not sure about that.
The default UI is similar to the old MS Office Word and the new alternative (which from what I remember, LibreOffice actually asks you to choose from in a dialogue on first start, so you don’t need to look through menus to set your preference) uses the newer tabbed paradigm.And while I do prefer the new one, I didn’t find the old one any harder than MS Office Word 2003 or the older version that came around Win 98.
The only thing that made me different from the average user back then, was that I actually read and understood user prompts before clicking “Next” or whatever.
42.07 seconds. Have never used the function before. I just used the “search commands” function.
24 seconds.
Layout > Orientation > Landscape(I presume you meant that since the default orientation is Portrait)Took me about 3 seconds.
For me it was under Format - Page Style, burried in some long dropdown menu. It is absolutly not user friendly, if you are new to the software or don’t use it very often.
I needed one minute to find it and I kind of knew what I was searching for (a window with all the settings for the page). The UI should be made in a way where the slowest user (apparently me) will find such essential functions fast, like in every other writing software (MS Office, OnlyOffice, Google shit, …).
So for me the UI of LibreOffice is a bad one.
To be fair, you seem to be using the original UI that mirrored Word 2003’s UI (which, when I first switched over to Linux back in 2012, I was positively thrilled about Writer having as it was basically a drop-in replacement for Word, then).
I dunno if I just occasionally used Word too many times since then but I find the old UI impenetrable now, as well; but LibreOffice has support for the Ribbon UI (and 2–3 similar ones, I think), as well. Maybe you might find it easier?
I almost never switch the orientation of Writer so I genuinely was pretty much finding how to do it for the first time.
Maybe that’s a point that Dan Williams can address: The default presets are important. With your UI I would have found it much faster, because it is where I would expect it to be.
Tantacrul/Martin Keary has some nice videos about how he redesigned Audacity and Muse Score. The point about how important sane presets are comes up quite often.
When you install LibreOffice now, the set-up guide encourages you gently to use the newer, friendlier tabbed interface. I don’t know if the same is true for in-place updates.
