[HN Gopher] LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
___________________________________________________________________
LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
Author : ingve
Score : 364 points
Date : 2020-07-10 09:28 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| stefankeys wrote:
| Wordstar and Wordperfect were easier to use imo.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I still remember the inconveniently tall keyboard templates
| (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&q=
| wor...) for WordPerfect to tell users where all the function
| were. Give me the ribbon bar anyday.
| bzzzt wrote:
| They also missed a lot of features. And IMO not needing the
| 'reveal codes' screen and having to clean up markup codes
| manually is the reason Word won the wordprocessor 'war'.
| duncanawoods wrote:
| Huh. I just tried Calc (6.0.7.3, Ubuntu 18.04) again this morning
| for the first time in a while and it crashed in seconds after
| right-clicking a few column headers. It's repeatable.
|
| When trying to navigate the very confusing document recovery
| dialogs to restart it, it then launched as Writer not Calc.
|
| I really wish it was an option but JFC. My experience with has
| always been so bad it doesn't even feel worth raising a bug
| report.
| stormdennis wrote:
| I find that calc is very good for migrating data from files
| that other programs, cannnot open. Import from some random file
| type, export as csv for example.
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| I've found that Calc is better for importing things like
| custom format CSV files etc. But has problems opening very
| large files, where Excel is better able to handle working
| with them.
|
| Overall that makes Calc more useful to me, but then again, I
| mostly write scripts when dealing with data files if I can.
| tbran wrote:
| So, I'm on the same version of Ubuntu and LibreOffice and I use
| Calc almost every day without problems.
|
| Also, on the infrequent occasions that I need to do document
| recovery (usually from my unplugged laptop running out of
| battery), it works flawlessly.
|
| Not to pick on you, but I feel like comments like yours are, I
| don't know, unnecessarily negative or nitpicky? Like, people
| will read your comment and think, "Oh geez, LibreOffice is
| crap." But it's used by portions of government on at least
| 754,000 machines [0] and my mom. Being used by many doesn't
| mean it's amazing, I suppose, but it at least means it
| generally works and probably isn't complete crap.
|
| [0] https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/who-uses-libreoffice/
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Could you make a video of that? I am clicking myself silly
| (ubuntu 18.04 / 6.0.7.3) and cannot repeat that behavior. I use
| calc a lot and it rarely crashes (less than excel/windows
| which, on my ms surface tablet, actually quite regularly
| crashes or hangs).
| duncanawoods wrote:
| Sure, here you go:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/PZMaqff
|
| org.gnome.Shell.desktop[4355]: Window manager warning:
| Invalid WM_TRANSIENT_FOR window 0x9000024 specified for
| 0x9000965 (LibreOffic).
|
| You have shamed me into raising a bug ;)
|
| edit: raised, the 6.0 branch is EOL, doesn't happen in
| 6.4.5.2
| asddubs wrote:
| 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
| duncanawoods wrote:
| The sad thing is that it's almost futile raising a bug
| against complex software like this or IDEs. It doesn't
| matter if it's FOSS or commercial, they already have
| backlogs of 10000s of bugs so unless loads of other
| people are reporting the same bug, it almost certainly
| won't be fixed.
|
| I have never had a Visual Studio or Windows bug report
| fixed and only a few JetBrains ones fixed. However, if
| it's a small tool or library then it's a different story,
| much higher response rate.
| gitgud wrote:
| > It doesn't matter if it's FOSS or commercial
|
| It does matter, you can't fix a problem with IntelliJ,
| you need to wait until the company considers it
| economically viable to fix, ie enough people report it or
| its critical.
|
| But if something in an Open-source system pisses you off,
| you can fix it yourself.
|
| It not for everyone, but at least it's possible to fix
| FOSS systems yourself...
| duncanawoods wrote:
| Oh sure, I was just meaning in terms of bug reports
| actually precipitating action. For this type of software
| it's more like software a complexity issue than an
| economic one.
|
| > But if something in an Open-source system pisses you
| off, you can fix it yourself.
|
| I'm literally doing that right now :)
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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 reported years ago with no action taken by
| the developers.
|
| Filing bugs takes time. You're going to want reproducible
| steps, you're going to want logs, you're going to want me
| to try different things. That's fine, and I'm willing to
| do that to get my bug fixed, but only if I think you
| actually give enough of a shit to fix it. I don't enjoy
| wasting my time any more than you do. When I see 5 year
| old open issues your tracker, where several users have
| chimed in, submitted logs, etc. and you've done nothing,
| I assume you don't care so neither do I.
|
| Worse yet, many developers are downright hostile to users
| reporting bugs or, god forbid, making feature
| suggestions. Spend five minutes in GNOME's issue tracker
| to see what I mean.
| throwaway43234 wrote:
| For a sufficiently large project (let's say 100k
| issues+), I think it's totally reasonable for some
| vanishingly small percent (say 0.003%) of issues to be
| really quite hard to reproduce/debug/fix without breaking
| other things. I don't think that in any way implies the
| maintainers don't care, and to not submit reports because
| you fear you'll end up in the 0.003% rather than the
| 99.997% is a bit silly if you ask me.
|
| I maintain such a project, and most bug reports I can fix
| in a few minutes. Others take a few days. Still others
| need to be deferred until some large refactoring is
| completed in coming months. Others still are involved to
| the extent that I'm not sure I'll ever fix them. But I
| value them all, and there are _many_ more in the former
| categories than the latter.
| chronolitus wrote:
| 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
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Ah, I am using i3wm as wm; that might be the difference...
| duncanawoods wrote:
| I am happy to report it doesn't happen with 6.4.5.2.
|
| It's a shame that the snaps installed by default in
| Ubuntu haven't been updated.
| progx wrote:
| Can we expect an Auto-Update within the next 5 years?
| mikece wrote:
| What's wrong with updating via Flatpack or AppImage (or Brew or
| Chocolatey)?
| galacticdessert wrote:
| It might sound stupid, but looking at the marketing plan attached
| to this article (
| https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/jzryGw7XDkJadmo#p... )
| I wonder how they could deliver such an important message in such
| a messy way. There are context slides together with strategy
| slides, together with marketing slides, together with analysis
| slides. the best one is slide 48, which seems to be a leftover of
| the initial storyline?
|
| I really like LibreOffice and I try to push its usage where I
| can, but reading about a potentially risky development strategy
| in such a messy way makes me wonder if it has been thought out so
| well or it is a muddy idea reflected in unclear writing.
| fock wrote:
| so basically iceweasel vs. firefox again. I'm fine with that (and
| still miss the icon)
| teekert wrote:
| 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.
| fock wrote:
| well, if you're paying for the cloud, you can pay for the
| free-as in freedom-software as well I guess ;)
| brundolf wrote:
| > The problem is compounded by companies that sell inexpensive
| "support" for LibreOffice, but which are not involved in its
| development and are not really able to provide that support.
| Those companies "file all their tickets up-stream and hope they
| are fixed for free". Companies working in that mode have no
| problem pricing their offerings below those of the companies
| doing the actual work (and thus winning much of the business that
| does exist). In addition, they simply call their offerings
| "LibreOffice", which actually looks more authentic than services
| from other companies, which are trying to build their own brands
| around LibreOffice support.
|
| Is this not a cut-and-dry case of trademark violation?
| aphroz wrote:
| Is there a hosted service for LibreOffice online ? I wish I could
| find a better replacement for Google Drive.
| leadingthenet wrote:
| Actually read the article...
| aphroz wrote:
| They say they don't host the service.
| npteljes wrote:
| I recommend checking out ONLYOFFICE. They have a personal tier
| with a small online storage for free. And everything is AGPLv3.
|
| https://personal.onlyoffice.com/
| andrewshadura wrote:
| OnlyOffice are not a community-oriented project, with their
| aggressive usage of AGPL+CLA, previous policy of withholding
| parts of code and throwing the rest over the wall once in a
| while, and their compatibility is far from what they claim:
| LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO. Also, feature-
| wise it's crippled in comparison not only with LibreOffice
| proper, but even with LibreOffice Online.
| lbwtaylor wrote:
| > LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO
|
| Why do you say that? I trialed both of them with an array
| of complex Word documents and OnlyOffice far outperformed.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| > > LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO
|
| > Why do you say that? I trialed both of them with an
| array of complex Word documents and OnlyOffice far
| outperformed.
|
| Not in my experience. OnlyOffice often failed to render
| simple documents LibreOffice had no problems with at all.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| OnlyOffice have shot themselves in the foot when made it use
| MSO file format to store data. Should have build on ODT
| phonon wrote:
| https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/
| maxmouchet wrote:
| As much as I love free software, LibreOffice interface feels old
| and ugly (to me, at least). It would be nice if there was more
| focus on the UX/UI design in open source projects. Of course,
| most programmers are not UX/UI designers, and designers don't
| tend to work for free on open source projects.
| Mekantis wrote:
| There's also the question of how open open source programmers
| might be to some UX/UI designer stepping in and trying to force
| their vision on the project.
| pulse7 wrote:
| Beauty/ugliness is subjective. For some it is "old and ugly",
| for some it is "retro".
| maxmouchet wrote:
| I agree, and programmers (at least on HN) seems to prefer
| minimalist and/or retro interfaces.
|
| However I'm pretty confident that if I show such an interface
| to non technical people, they will feel that it doesn't look
| nice, compared to whatever proprietary app they use on their
| phone, Windows/Mac, ...
|
| I personally don't use Word nor LibreOffice (I use mostly
| LaTeX), but if we want free software to become more popular,
| there must be a focus on the design.
| bluGill wrote:
| I don't care how ugly it is. I care about how quickly
| people can get their work done. The ribbon is better for
| this because the things most often used are right there and
| easy to find. Sure rarely used stuff takes longer, but that
| is a good trade off.
| stefankeys wrote:
| Is there some way to move stuff in word so that it is
| more accessible. Just wondering.
| nxc18 wrote:
| Yes, since ages ago the ribbon is customizable. You can
| create a new tab with exactly what you want in it.
|
| There is also a search feature now, so its not like you
| need to know where rarely-used things are.
| phaemon wrote:
| Well, the head of the design team is Heiko Tietze. His PhD
| is in Psychology and he's worked at various companies as UX
| designer/lead.
|
| So, why you'd you contact him and tell him where he's going
| wrong? I'm sure he'd value your insight and guidance.
| mhd wrote:
| On the other hand, professional UX/UI office software designers
| came up with the ribbon.
| unglaublich wrote:
| No... the problem with desktop software is that creating a good
| UI/UX is a hard software problem typically solved by software
| developers instead of designers. Whereas, the accessibility and
| power of web technologies show that making UI/UX an easier
| software problem (HTML, CSS, JS) automatically attracts more
| designers yielding better UX/UI.
| bluGill wrote:
| Your first point is correct, but as a ux designer (not what I
| do, but it is in my background), most web ui is terrible. It
| is done by designers, but they obviously have a background in
| art not user machine interaction and it shows. Once the page
| loads (takes too long Turing off users) it looks nice, but
| try getting anything done.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| >making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS)
| automatically attracts more designers yielding better UX/UI
|
| I find this a bit questionable. What are some examples of
| this good UX and UI? Many HTML-ish UIs I can think of are not
| good. Slack, Discord, modern Windows apps such as the new
| settings app for example. They tend to suffer from poor
| reimplementations of native widget functionality, poor
| implementations of scrollable elements especially infinitely
| scrollable ones, low information density and too much
| whitespace often exacerbated by flat design, janky
| responsiveness often with high latency.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Apart from the remarks about flat design, whitespace and
| information-density, which are very personal imho, I would
| say Google Drive, Google Docs, Microsoft Office Online,
| GitHub source code editor, Visual Studio code, Atom, all do
| a good job.
| jiggunjer wrote:
| Good job? Maybe on a beefy first-world computer. The UX
| goes down the drain if you try to run a few of those apps
| at once.
| catalogia wrote:
| Doubtlessly the programmers who work on those products
| use computers with dozens of gigabytes of ram and half a
| dozen cores or more. They're out of touch with the sort
| of computers a TON of casual computer owners are using
| daily.
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| The products you mention are all hugely successful, often
| against the backdrop of existing OSS with similar features
| (IRC, for example).
|
| Maybe there's some abstract notion of "good UI" that is
| distinct from "people like to use it". Or maybe people are
| stupid.
|
| But on a purely empirical basis there is absolutely no
| evidence for the supremacy of the old UI paradigms you
| champion.
| tester34 wrote:
| Github Desktop I'd say
| andrepd wrote:
| > the accessibility and power of web technologies show that
| making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS)
| automatically attracts more designers yielding better UX/UI
|
| "Modern" UIs are often atrocious, and I'm not the only person
| who thinks so.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| "better UX" is not a thing I [This comment uses cookies to
| enhance the user experience. Click :HERE: to accept] would
| ever say about websites over desktop software.
| mattbee wrote:
| Whoa.
|
| I much prefer finding my way around any "badly designed" UI
| that can respond in 20-100ms a "well designed" UI that
| responds in 500-5000ms.
|
| Most web software providers don't (can't!) deal with server
| latency or the client-side processing of the JS/CSS etc. that
| they use. That's why I use a lot of "well designed" UIs that
| respond slower than equivalent systems from the 1980s.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I find it reasonably straightforward to use. I can find most
| things easily in the submenus.
|
| Though I'm on the side of classic menus in the infamous ribbon
| dispute.
| grandinj wrote:
| (LO Dev) We actually have quite an active ui-design sub-group,
| which tries it's best to refresh the look and feel.
|
| Feel free to join in :-)
| jventura wrote:
| LibreOffice interface feels familiar (to me, at least), and I
| fell productive with it. My only complain is that the
| application itself is quite heavy and takes quite some time to
| start in my Macboook (late 2013)..
| ubercow13 wrote:
| LibreOffice has a ribbon!
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Yes, unlike Microsoft they offer you a choice of interface.
| I'm sure if MS had done the same there wouldn't be nearly as
| many complaints.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| It's still pretty ugly and doesn't work as well as the office
| version, though.
| staticvoidmaine wrote:
| Thank you so much for saying this. I had no idea until I read
| your comment and immediately opened the view menu. I am blown
| away I didn't know about this after over 10 years of using
| LO...
| type0 wrote:
| Personal Edition implies it won't have important collaboration
| features needed in organizations. And whether that will be true
| or not isn't the issue, less volunteers and non-profits will end
| up using LibreOffice, instead they could just called it Community
| Edition like every other FOSS project. They will end up with less
| volunteer contributors, but maybe that's what TDF wants, it's a
| pity.
| Jonnax wrote:
| I haven't used Libreoffice in years.
|
| Did they ever update the UI styling?
|
| I remember it had a very "java" look to it.
|
| You know that feeling when you open an app, you know it's going
| to be a bit janky.
| buovjaga wrote:
| GTK3 has the best integration, it now uses native widgets and
| elements thanks to the work of Caolan McNamara (it is hard to
| comprehend the amount of effort required). Example:
| https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2020/06/libreoffice-looks-gorgeou...
| (this is using the tabbed interface from View - User interface)
| pizza234 wrote:
| Do you happen to be on Mac? On Debian-based systems, AFAIK,
| there are specific packages for DE integration, for example,
| for GTK3, which makes LO look native (although, I think that
| the styling is highly customized, because of the functionality
| requirements).
| [deleted]
| npteljes wrote:
| You can configure it to have a ribbon, and other complex
| toolbar layouts too. I use it for work on Linux, and I think
| it's quite well done - and I hate Java also.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| It has visual class libraries that give LO a slightly different
| look depending on what you're running it on.
|
| I'm typing this from a Debian system running KDE Plasma, and my
| LibreOffice reports using the gtk3_kde5 VCL. It uses Qt5
| widgets and looks, for the most part, like a regular KDE Qt5
| application. It no longer looks or feels like a Java
| application. Because it's not - Java is optional except in
| LibreOffice Base. You can disable JRE in the options, and LO
| parts that are not Base will retain nearly all functionality.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| To be completely fair, it never looked like a Java
| application.
| encom wrote:
| >You know that feeling when you open an app, you know it's
| going to be a bit janky.
|
| I've used Electron apps before, yes.
| mikece wrote:
| Maybe I'm seeing what I want but it seems that the plan is for
| the document formats and editing programs to be free while
| generating revenue from infrastructure around delivering
| something "Sharepoint-like" (or a SaaS service to do similar),
| complete with a throat to choke/vendor to blame if things go
| sideways. I don't see this as fundamentally different from the
| choice of running CentOS versus paying for RHEL: the latter is
| the same software but comes with enterprise assurances that allow
| the CIO to sleep at night.
|
| I'm sure there's someone could write a compelling essay along the
| lines of "Free Software isn't free of charge" if someone were
| inclined to pursue it. Even people like RMS have to eat from time
| to time.
| mapgrep wrote:
| 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 system for funding things with widespread benefits to
| society. It's called the government.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Imagine taking enough of that money to support these 40
| LibreOffice developers and maybe say 20 more.
|
| There are infinite ways to spend every dollar, why is
| LibreOffice funding worthy? In other words, why is
| LibreOffice's popularity so low that it cannot find a way to
| fund its operations? Which then raises the question - why do
| you want to fund an unpopular project?
| jm4 wrote:
| It's not really worthy of funding anymore. Certainly not by
| the government. It's just not competitive with other options.
| I used to be a longtime Libre Office user. Back then, MS
| Office was expensive and only available on Windows. Even the
| Mac version wasn't completely compatible.
|
| MS Office is better than it's ever been, with a variety of
| licensing options that are affordable. And if you're a
| student you can get it for peanuts or free. Being able to use
| the same tools on desktop, web and mobile with everything
| accessible in OneDrive is a no brainer and outstanding value
| for the high end price of $99/yr for a family plan. If you're
| on a less expensive individual plan, a student plan or a
| discounted plan through your employer's HUP benefits, it's
| really kind of an easy decision.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Imagine paying a subscription to access my own documents!
| Paying for privacy to be hoovered up to another
| corporation.
|
| Sure, I bet they have some good features that I probably
| wont use.
| pfranz wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I imagine the amount of money the US
| government already spends on MS Office could fund
| development of something as good or better than Office,
| while giving it away free to the rest of society improving
| productivity. Although, I wouldn't bet on the management of
| that project playing out like that.
| aryonoco wrote:
| This is exactly what Sun thought. They looked at their
| licensing bill for using MS Office and thought they could
| develop an Office suite for less than that themselves.
| They bought this little German company which made "Star
| Office" and started developing it for their own use and
| also selling it. Turns out, it didn't work. So they Open
| Sourced it, called it OO.org... it still didn't work. 20
| years, many rebrands and many changes of ownership later,
| that same piece is software is still struggling to find a
| way to exist. Turns out, developing a competitor to MS
| Office is not that easy or cheap.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I imagine the amount of money the US government already
| spends on MS Office could fund development of something
| as good or better than Office
|
| No, it can't. Microsoft lives and breaths Office 365
| because that is a core part of their business. There is
| zero chance that a government will care as much about
| this as Microsoft does, or the 10,000 other companies
| that are trying to supplant incumbents. Add to that the
| fact that funding will be uneven, because if the tool
| achieves a 'good enough' status, why keep funding it when
| you have all those other interest groups vying for money.
| The project will be susceptible to lobby and interest
| groups. Maybe a Senator will see it as a job-works
| program and move development to Alaska to provide Alaskan
| programmers jobs.
|
| Time and time again these massive government-run software
| project collapse on their face.
|
| In the commercial space, government just cannot compete
| with private industry ... at all. And this is not a
| libertarian disparagement of government. Government has a
| proper function, and competing in software with
| commercial offerings is not one of them.
|
| >while giving it away free to the rest of society
| improving productivity
|
| Says who? In fact, this is guaranteed to not be the case,
| because who is to say that funding a word processor is a
| productive application of capital when you're not
| responding to market forces.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| As schools move more and more online they are locking into
| proprietary office programs that suck funds from schools, and
| students can't afford. Sure, as long as they are students
| they can use the school's software for free, but once they
| graduate they can't.
|
| So in effect the government is already funding google docs
| and office 360. I would prefer the government fund opensource
| software that anyone who pays taxes can use for free.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| While not open source, you can definitely use Google docs
| for free student or not.
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| But it is a proprietary, private owned software. That can
| change anytime. Maybe not in the next 10 years, but it
| can and I suspect that it will.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Maybe, but
|
| >So in effect the government is already funding google
| docs
|
| Is just purely incorrect currently.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >So in effect the government is already funding google docs
| and office 360.
|
| Government buying services, or software, or anything, isn't
| really like 'funding', it's paying for services rendered.
|
| >As schools move more and more online they are locking into
| proprietary office programs that suck funds from schools
|
| And who is to say that LibreOffice is a good alternative.
| I'll tell you right now, it's not - which why it isn't
| really being used. It's a pain in the butt to deploy, and
| support at scale (from identity management, to sharing and
| collaborating, to security fixes and patches).
|
| >I would prefer the government fund opensource software
| that anyone who pays taxes can use for free.
|
| Sure. I have a preference for a lot of things too but we
| live in a democracy, so nobody gets to dictate their
| preferences. But feel free to engage with your local school
| board and make your case. Feel free convince your peers to
| make the case with you.
| komali2 wrote:
| I think the idea is that 1% of a b52 bomber might take
| LibreOffice to an unparalleled place for a libre project.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| But why is LibreOffice so special? Surely there are
| thousands of other projects that would also love 1% of the
| b52 bomber budget.
| macspoofing wrote:
| I get the 'idea'. There are more things to fund then there
| are funding dollars available ... by many orders of
| magnitude, so you have to make decisions. One of those
| decisions is whether or not to pay for a certain numbers of
| b52 bombers. Another, completely separate decision, is
| whether to fund a very specific niche open source project.
| Linking those two is disingenuous. If you want funding for
| LibreOffice, make the case to your representative. Make the
| case to others so they make the case to your
| representative.
| ihattendorf wrote:
| Sure, but it could also take other projects to unparalleled
| places. Why does LibreOffice deserve that money over other
| projects?
| jbay808 wrote:
| I think the cost should be compared to whatever they pay
| Microsoft for Office subscriptions for the federal
| government.
| brundolf wrote:
| > But there is an existing system for funding things with
| widespread benefits to society. It's called the government.
|
| Not if you ask the current ruling party. Even a cursory glance
| at the state of the Union should make it obvious there's nobody
| left who cares to fund things with widespread benefits to
| society.
| buzzert wrote:
| A great example of this working for real is Ghidra[0]! Funded
| by the government, a spectacular piece of open source software.
|
| [0] https://ghidra-sre.org/
| einpoklum wrote:
| The funding necessary to support LO development is so tiny
| relative to the US defense (read: offense) budget, that it's
| not even worthwhile to make this reference. The US DOD's
| stationary budget would probably cover this.
| JTon wrote:
| 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.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| Which also begs the question: How many such projects in
| different industries (eg, agriculture, aviation, food,
| healthcare, etc) would need a slice of that defense pie?
|
| ---
|
| _[Note: I 'm not advocating for/against the idea of the
| parent comment, just adding a layer to it]_
| wazoox wrote:
| Ginormous defence spending is how the US do a "social state".
| That's pretty obvious once you see how defence money is
| peppered all across the country.
| zanny wrote:
| It doesn't mean its productive. We could be spending half a
| trillion on civil engineering to rebuild cities, roads,
| high speed rail, canals, etc. That has appreciable and
| visible benefits to society.
|
| Occupying a desert on the other side of the world largely
| to disrupt oil pipelines seems less effective as stimulus.
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| It's a republican jobs program.
| hguant wrote:
| Nah the defense industry is smarter than that - it's a
| bipartisan industry. F-35s have components that are built
| in every state for a reason.
| Animats wrote:
| Summary"
|
| _... There is the Personal Edition, which would be "forever
| free" and only available from the Document Foundation. This
| release would be tagged, according to the plan, "volunteer
| supported, not suggested for production environments or strategic
| documents". The alternative would be "LibreOffice Enterprise",
| which would only be available from "ecosystem members". This
| version would come with commercial support and a corresponding
| price tag. ... "There will be an X month gap between the release
| of the two versions: LibreOffice Online Enterprise and
| LibreOffice Online Personal"._
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I am looking forward to future development of LibreOffice. For me
| it has become better and better. I've never had a new
| installation, or update of LO which made me think "If only I had
| stuck to the old version!"
|
| More and more I am using plain text formats these days, which I
| then convert into other things, but from time to time it is nice
| to have LO at the ready, knowing, that it is free software and as
| such will always be available, in our collective resources.
|
| A friend of mine recently complained about pictures disappearing
| and floating over text area margins in their document and having
| to put them back in in a 200 page document. I've never had such a
| problem. However, there seem to be some rough edges left to
| improve.
|
| I cannot complain about the user interface actually. To me it is
| quite intuitive and I find everything I usually need rather
| quickly.
| Certhas wrote:
| We kind of need a version of CC-BY-NC. Preferably with a
| governance model that then distributes money from commercial
| licenses to contributors... Or government funded Open source.
| There is no reason for society to try to do something as
| intrinsically cooperative as building software through market
| mechanisms.
| blendergeek wrote:
| I have a few questions that don't seem to be fully answered in
| the post.
|
| > This "Personal Edition" tag ... has the purpose of
| differentiating the current, free and community-supported
| LibreOffice from a LibreOffice Enterprise set of products and
| services provided by the members of our ecosystem.
|
| Will this "LibreOffice Enterprise" be Free as in Freedom? Would I
| be able to package it up myself and call it "Community ENTerprise
| Office Suite"?
| buovjaga wrote:
| These enterprise versions are already available since years,
| for example:
|
| https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-office/
|
| https://libreoffice.cib.de/
| zucker42 wrote:
| This isn't really changing anything. LibreOffice is under the
| GPL. It's just a marketing attempt to get large organizations
| to realize that they should contribute back to the ecosystem if
| they rely on LibreOffice.
| blendergeek wrote:
| LibreOffice is currently under the LGPLv3 and the MPLv2, not
| the GPL.
|
| Further, the document refers to 'new products' that could be
| under the 'LibreOffice Enterprise' umbrella. Could any of
| these be proprietary? Do we have any assurances?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pythonwizz wrote:
| They do a great job.
|
| But I use [commercial] Softmaker Office. They offer a free
| version too: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
| kleiba wrote:
| 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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, really good at
| what they do. Word got their more slowly, but once Excel ate
| Lotus 1-2-3, there really never was another competitor there,
| and Excel just kept getting more and more powerful. It's a
| wonderful tool.
|
| (Now, there ARE people who learn Excel but refuse to go further
| -- into a true database, or into a proper business intelligent
| /reporting tool, or whatever -- and end up creating their own
| really janky versions of these things within Excel with macros
| and insane formulas hidden out in AA:5234 or whtaever; that's a
| problem for sure. But it's not so much an Excel problem as it
| is a problem with the lack of an obvious next-step ramp for
| those users.)
| nabilhat wrote:
| > _Now, there ARE people who learn Excel but refuse to go
| further..._
|
| Since Power Query was first included by default in 2016, I've
| introduced tens of regular Excel users. Because there's no
| way to work cell by agonizing cell, there's a mental tension
| for a few minutes then usually the concept of working with
| fields and sets clicks into place so well you can practically
| hear it. Even if they never use PQ again, they often change
| how they use spreadsheets for the better. If you're really
| lucky they don't just start using PQ, they find the advanced
| editor and start doing some basic fiddling around. While it's
| fair to criticize M [0] as a niche language that only exists
| in a tiny corner of one company's data modeling features,
| it's also what finally motivated me to learn functional
| programming. That accessible step by step ramp from
| introduction to functional language data modeling in a common
| office tool is an underrated juggernaut of a feature.
|
| [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/
| ghaff wrote:
| >But it's not so much an Excel problem as it is a problem
| with the lack of an obvious next-step ramp for those users
|
| This is something of a general issue that was essentially
| created by the success of MS Office. With "everyone" using MS
| Office or something quite similar, there really wasn't a huge
| market or interest in a different program that was just an
| incremental step up.
|
| There are exceptions but, for the most part, people tried to
| push MS Office to do things it wasn't really designed to do
| because the next step was jumping to some complex and
| expensive program from Adobe or whoever.
| nickcw wrote:
| 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 users and that is where things start to go
| sideways. Complicated MS docs are not rendered well. Excel
| sheets are generally Ok. PowerPoint docs don't round trip at
| all well so I've given up even trying!
| veddox wrote:
| At our research institute most people use Linux + LaTeX,
| which is great, but interfacing with MS Word is an absolute
| pain when you work with external collaborators. Accordingly,
| one of our professors' key argument for Mac OS is: ,,It's a
| Unix with Word..."
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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.
| danans wrote:
| > If MS made a Linux version I'd probably get that.
|
| What about the web based Office 365? It should run fine on
| Linux, and clearly paid closed-source software isn't an issue
| for you if you would be willing to pay for traditional
| Microsoft Office.
|
| > However in the biz world you end up sharing docs and sheets
| with MS office users and that is where things start to go
| sideways.
|
| Office 365 should work swimmingly for this use case.
| ralls_ebfe wrote:
| Had to use Office356 recently, because libreoffice kept
| putting strange, large, unremovable rectangles in the
| spreadsheet I got handed. I wished, i would not have to
| touch this Microsoft filth, but I had work to do and
| libreoffice kept bugging.
| 1_player wrote:
| Personally PS7.99 a month for a piece of software I use 1
| hour every 6 months is definitely not worth it. Though I'd
| pay PS100 for it no questions asked.
|
| Subscription plans are stupid.
| danans wrote:
| > Though I'd pay PS100 for it no questions asked.
|
| Office 365 is a continually updated and enhanced product.
| They won't provide those updates and enhancements to you
| forever because your PS100 won't pay for them.
|
| What you are asking for is their old downloaded/shrink-
| wrapped Classic Office product offering, which you can
| still get by paying a f themixed sum ($145 I think).
|
| But even in the old days, your PS100 bought you a single
| program with very few updates if any. If you wanted new
| features or even security updates (when this became a
| thing), you needed to purchase a new license, for another
| PS100.
|
| What if you don't want the new features or security
| updates? Well, perhaps it sucks, but the world of
| software is a far more complicated than it used to be and
| both the feature competition and security threats are
| steep, so no software vendor can afford to sit on and
| continually support an old version. Unchanging software
| isn't a product that becomes an antique like a 1959
| Chevy. Rather it loses value over time as the world
| changes around it and it becomes less relevant.
|
| Eventually, they will stop updating your purchased
| software, and if you want to have new features and
| security protections, you will need to pay again. In the
| long run, that cost will converge with that of a
| subscription.
|
| This is why some people like open source software like
| Libreoffice as an alternative model, but as the OP
| highlights, it still needs an economic model to
| incentivize the enhancement of the software, and it would
| appear that the primary motivation of many users of the
| product is to not pay for an office software suite, not
| the higher ideal of a shared community software
| development model.
| 1_player wrote:
| I get what you mean, but people still made a living
| selling software without monthly subscriptions before. If
| I had to use Office more, I'd pay the monthly price, but
| not for 2 hours a year. It being continuously developed
| still doesn't justify the price.
|
| I can afford it, but if I had to pay PS7.99 x 6 = PS47.94
| for every hour of productivity I extract from a piece of
| software, I'd go bankrupt very quickly. That's why I
| called subscription plans stupid: it's unreasonably
| expensive for the amateur (like me) slice of the market.
|
| And being such a small time user, I don't care about the
| super new features of Office $CURRENT_YEAR. If I could
| buy Office for Linux 2020 for 100 pounds, I would, and it
| would be enough for me for the next decade, unless I'll
| move out of software engineering and go work as a lawyer
| or something.
| grandinj wrote:
| The idea is to entice Enterprise and similar customers to pay
| for support, spending a small fraction of the money they save
| from not buying MS, to help keep the LibreOffice eco-system
| going.
|
| So still much cheaper than MS :-)
| pengaru wrote:
| Kind of odd that they don't compare themselves to Blender and its
| successful foundation in the article, not even mentioned once.
| kungato wrote:
| Is there any electron gpl based Word and Excel alternative? I
| always imagined running on top of electron helped you skip a lot
| of work and helped the app not look like shit/LibreOffice
| kuschku wrote:
| If you want to see how moving from Java to Electron destroys an
| application, while making it look "better", try out GeoGebra
| Classic 6 and GeoGebra Classic 5.
|
| The difference is stunning. Geogebra 5, written in Java, is
| just so much more performant, and feels so much more like an
| application, not a broken website.
|
| The same actually applies to pgAdmin 3 vs pgAdmin 4.
| vetinari wrote:
| pgAdmin 4 is not an electron app. It is a real web app,
| written in Python and Flask, and Qt browser engine bundled
| together.
| kuschku wrote:
| Qt's browser engine is the Chromium Embedded Framework,
| Electron is the Chromium Embedded Framework.
|
| Sure, the backend is different, but in a thread about UI
| issues, it's the same.
| vetinari wrote:
| The UI issues in pgadmin4 are caused exactly because it
| opens web pages from relatively slow local web server,
| synchronously.
|
| Electron/CEF can be used to make a decently (i.e. usable)
| performing SQL client app (see Azure Data Studio). But
| not in a way that pgadmin4 did it.
| npteljes wrote:
| There is, actually. ONLYOFFICE offers their AGPL word
| processor, spreadsheet etc programs as Electron apps too. The
| UI is absolutely modern, and one of their other selling point
| is their DOCX/XLSX compatibility.
|
| https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop.aspx
| andrewshadura wrote:
| > selling point is their DOCX/XLSX compatibility.
|
| Which they fail to deliver, given that LibreOffice manages to
| be more compatible with docx than they are.
| anoncake wrote:
| You know what helps skip a lot of work? Not needlessly
| rewriting things.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Libreoffice looks like a native desktop app. How do electron
| apps look better than that?
| bzzzt wrote:
| Depends on which desktop. On macOS it stands out like a sore
| thumb. Icons are almost monochrome and indistinguishable.
| Also, it does not feel as smooth as a native Mac app since it
| uses its own toolkit instead of Mac native scrolling etc.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Plus, it is possible to customise the icons and colour
| scheme. There's light mode, dark mode, blue mode, even
| pink...
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I find it noteworthy that LibreOffice Online is what's bringing
| in cash according to TFA. What it might tell us is that the
| prevalence of cloud and online services today is just a
| consequence and natural market reaction to F/OSS proliferation.
| LO/OO.o themselves have open-sourced their product many years ago
| when it still was owned by Sun (I even know developers in Hamburg
| who worked on it in the 1990's when it still was called Star
| Office).
| munro wrote:
| I just loaded up LibreOffice to give it a try, I would like to
| move off of Google as much as possible. 5 minutes in, I'm like,
| this is not that bad! Then this happened:
|
| > Due to an unexpected error, LibreOffice crashed. All the files
| you were working on will now be saved. The next time LibreOffice
| is launched, your files will be recovered automatically.
|
| I really require tools with multi platform live collaboration--
| I've been looking at Apple's Calc, as a possible switch, as well.
| ghaff wrote:
| There seems to be a very large elephant missing from that
| discussion which is the rise of SaaS office suites. Speaking
| personally, I'm very glad that there is a free software office
| suite (as well as drawing programs etc.) However, I sincerely
| hope that collaborating on documents and presentations by mailing
| them around to people and trying to merge their edits and
| comments is never again the norm for me. Shared documents are
| probably a much overlooked enabler for people to work remotely in
| the current situation.
|
| Added: They do mention LibreOffice Online but that seems like it
| should be a more central point in the discussion.
| hnarn wrote:
| I agree, the main point I would expect from "The next five
| years of LibreOffice" would be a self-hosted competitor to
| Google Docs and Office 365. There's definitely a place for a
| local application editing documents, but I don't think that's
| what's going to matter the most five years from now when
| compared to a solid web based alternative -- and I also don't
| think a "code freeze" for the "normal" LibreOffice (not that
| I'm advocating one) would make the product unusable five years
| down the road.
| nelaboras wrote:
| It's there but with the clear and explicit intention that the
| free version will lag behind the commercial offers.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's definitely a market for self-hosting as in the case
| of Nextcloud, for example. There are lots of reasons
| companies, much less governments, may not feel comfortable
| using Google or Microsoft SaaS offerings.
|
| But, as you say, that's different from running a local
| application. While some heavy-duty multimedia still benefits
| from running an app locally, that ship has mostly sailed with
| office suite software. I still have LibreOffice installed on
| most of my systems, but even if I'm not collaborating on a
| document, it's incredibly useful to have docs that are "just
| there" and I can access from any device--even including my
| phone in a pinch.
| leonidasv wrote:
| They have a self-hosted online suite, it's called Collabora.
| lbwtaylor wrote:
| I find it really odd that they chose server side rendering.
| I only did a very brief demo of it, but I was not
| impressed.
| smnthermes wrote:
| Why not just use a desktop program with online features,
| then?
| leonidasv wrote:
| Yes, unfortunately. Makes impossible to work under
| unstable connections.
|
| I hope Webasm enable porting at least some of the
| rendering code to client-side in the future.
| anoraca wrote:
| It's a spinoff
|
| https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
|
| The former LibreOffice development team from SUSE joined
| Collabora in September 2013 forming the subsidiary
| Collabora Productivity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| It's been a few years but I had a client that needed some
| secure remote file access capability "like DropBox" so I spun
| up an ownCloud VM and it had a surprising amount of
| collaboration tools built-in. It had all the groups,
| permissions, sharing, etc stuff you'd expect, and you could
| open and edit Office documents in the browser (it was a web-
| based Zoho Word/Excel type editor if I remember correctly.) It
| also had automatic versioning so if someone jacked up one of
| the files, they could roll back to whenever.
|
| For anyone looking for that sort of thing, ownCloud might not
| seem like an obvious choice but I was pleasantly surprised.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| > They do mention LibreOffice Online
|
| And it says there is revenue there, correct? Maybe that's why
| it isn't expanded.
| leonidasv wrote:
| Collabora is an open-source, self-hosted, online collaborative
| office suite built on top of LibreOffice. Take a look, you may
| find it useful.
| monk_e_boy wrote:
| Agreed - students have already moved to google docs or MS Word
| with OneDrive. We are used to giving feedback using these
| tools, students making changes and getting those signed off by
| us.
|
| Full history of changes. Full history of lecturer comments.
| Backed up online. Editable on phones, laptops, PCs...
|
| This is the world they are expecting when they enter
| employment, or start their own start up.
| ghaff wrote:
| To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that there's still the
| level of apparent interest in standalone LibreOffice that
| there is. I work somewhere that was almost exclusively a
| LibreOffice shop but we adopted one of the online services.
| Although we didn't really force people to switch, I don't
| know the last time I've seen a LibreOffice document even if I
| imagine some people still use it.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Office suites are a huge piece of the pie so even minority
| use cases get a decent number of users.
| openfuture wrote:
| 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
| fundamental computer knowledge like learning to type.
|
| I still have the same keyboard layout as back then but MS Office
| now has some janky "ribbon interface" which bears no resemblance
| to how it used to be. Although it should be criminal for public
| schools to teach proprietary software, we can forget about that
| for a minute and instead consider how futile it is to teach
| things that are not open standards or at least free software. You
| have absolutely no assurance that this knowledge will still be
| applicable even just a few years later.
|
| My hope is that free software projects will attempt to preserve
| old interfaces (making them accessible via initial configuration)
| when they make updates. Besides, you shouldn't be replacing your
| GUI if your architecture hasn't got a clear separation between
| presentation and core logic.
| INGELRII wrote:
| If there is one thing I would suggest for all large open source
| projects, it's separating the functionality, data model etc.
| from UI as much as possible.
|
| It should be possible to have two separate open source
| projects. One is just extensive framework library with good API
| and the another is user interface. This would allow multiple
| separate UI's, web interface, command line, mobile, tablet,
| etc.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Recently, I installed Office 97 onto Wine just for curiosity.
|
| I could still do much with it. The only feature I really missed
| from Word was academic references. I could create documents
| indistinguishable from modern Word using the old drawing
| features combined with modern fonts.
|
| The drop down menus, combined with the floating toolbars were
| much more intuitive than clicking up and down some "ribbon".
| The drop down menus map directly to the logical path of a task
| in my mind, eg "Insert -> Image -> From File". Having a small
| toolbar at the bottom with basic graphical tools is much more
| convenient than clicking back and forth from tab to tab.
|
| It's a shame MS couldn't accept that what they had until Office
| 07 was a workflow polished near to perfection, perfected after
| years of refinement and familiarity.
| Answerawake wrote:
| I went through a recent experiment like this as well. Instead
| I installed Office 2003(The last of the old toolbar offices)
| on a clean Windows 10 system. I was looking to validate my
| theory about the speed and bloat of the new versions of
| Office. I just had this nagging feeling that the software
| wasn't as fast as old versions. It was confirmed. Using the
| old Office just felt so pleasant with how fast it loaded and
| simple it is in terms of cognitive load.
| angus-prune wrote:
| > eg "Insert -> Image -> From File".
|
| In the latest version of word the progression is:
|
| "Insert > Pictures > From This device"
| einpoklum wrote:
| So, it's catering to tablet and smartphone users rather
| than desktop users, who have many "devices" on their
| system. :-(
| ghaff wrote:
| >perfected after years of refinement and familiarity
|
| That can be a problem though. One person's familiar tool with
| its well-known quirks and peculiarities is a newcomer's
| inscrutable and illogical interface.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| You're thinking like an SV webdev who's largest concern is
| to onboard as many new users as possible so you can flip
| your startup.
|
| Office is a professional productivity tool that's been
| around for decades and is used by millions of people for
| their entire workday, every day.
|
| Learning to use a new tool takes a tiny fraction of the
| time you're going to be using that tool. One should make
| the tool best at actually doing what it's going to be used
| to do.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm neither in SV nor a webdev. I just remember how many
| ordinary users _hated_ the ribbon when it first came out.
| Presumably they adapted over time; I can 't really speak
| to whether Microsoft would have been better evolving the
| existing menu system. Personally, I could take it or
| leave it--and at least intellectually the arguments for
| the ribbon made sense to me.
| _jal wrote:
| Ordinary users hate change. They always do, regardless of
| how successful (or not) the changes are later judged to
| be.
|
| This doesn't argue against change so much as argue that
| the costs need to be worth the disruption - you don't
| move houses over a carpet stain, and you don't rebuild
| your UI lightly, either.
| fsloth wrote:
| Generally, though, you shouldn't optimize GUI:s for new
| users but for _intermediate_ users.
|
| [0] Cooper, "About Face: The Essentials of User Interface
| Design"
| HeckFeck wrote:
| That should be a tenant of UI design, especially for any
| kind of productivity software.
|
| Think of the Blender, GIMP or Sony Vegas GUIs. Daunting
| the first time you open them, but after you've
| successfully finished a few creations you'll begin to
| appreciate their power.
|
| For any serious work, overly-simplified GUIs are quickly
| exhausted. They may get a pass for IM or social media
| apps, but I can't think of many other useful
| applications.
| Jonnax wrote:
| 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" and be able to do
| that as quick as possible.
|
| Of course with specialised tools that's a different story.
| AutoCAD hasn't really changed its interface but it got
| superceded in areas by new applications that break people's
| workflows in a lot of cases.
|
| It's just a word processor. The knowledge you should have
| gained when being taught was the concepts of what you can do
| with one.
|
| That should allow you to adapt to different software. Once
| you've used a word processor you don't need to read the help
| page for Google Docs.
|
| It's not like switching from Maya to Blender.
|
| I don't agree on the free software projects point. Often
| they're made by volunteers. And anything too "daring" would be
| shouted down by the community.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| At the risk of starting a fire here, I'd say a much better
| approach to that was unity's HUD. You could simply fuzzy-
| search through all the menu items. It made using GIMP
| delightful. :)
| veddox wrote:
| That is the one thing I miss most about Unity! It was such
| a sweet feature. (Also, Unity minimised on the vertical
| space it used, which was great for small laptop screens.)
| The new GNOME versions are much improved compared to a few
| years ago, but I do wish Canonical had stuck with Unity...
| rdiddly wrote:
| 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.
| sbuk wrote:
| Haven't used AutoCAD in anger for a while, but my default
| rest position on the keyboard is still fingers over Esc,
| thumb over space. I always preferred using the command
| line. Not out of some 'power user' power trip, but more for
| screen space and efficiency. Being able to use AutoLISP was
| pretty neat too.
| _jal wrote:
| I haven't used Word much at all since the ribbon interface.
| Like others, for whatever reason the ribbon makes doesn't
| work for me, neither cognitively or via muscle-memory. The
| categorization doesn't help me predict where to find
| something (fails "new user" ease of use), nor does repeated
| use make it easier or faster. And of course I don't use it
| (or windows) much, so I don't think in Microsoft(tm) English,
| adding a minor layer of translation for some jargon.
|
| I have to use Excel enough that I've finally rote-memorized
| where frequently used things are. But when I have to find
| some tool I don't know where is, it is faster to google for
| instructions than hunt around the application itself, so I do
| that first.
|
| I'm sure it is fine if you live in MS-land. I don't, and it
| fails for this casual user both for discoverability and
| streamlined use.
| Angostura wrote:
| > What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons
| instead of menus and sub menus.
|
| That keep changing and moving about.
|
| I use Word on Mac. It has the ribbon. 90% of the time I use
| the old style menu bar at the top of the screen.
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| Word for Mac is almost the perfect evolution of the UI.
|
| It has the menu bar, which every Mac app has since it's a
| fixed and global UI element. It has the ribbon which is
| good for many users and makes many tasks easily accessible.
|
| I'm not sure how you'd make this compromise on Windows
| without making a mess of things, but on the Mac it works
| very well.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I've used office daily for 20 years but rarely have to use
| the ribbon menu at all and, if I do, it's rarely off whatever
| is up there by default. But every time it is, it's way more
| painful to explore compared to a plain text menu and after I
| find what I'm looking for, it's hard to get back to the
| default.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The most common operations are descriptive buttons.
|
| The most common operation is trying to decide which ribbon
| something is supposed to be on. And it's difficult to get
| straight even after more than a decade, if you're just an
| occasional MS-Office user.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I don't think anybody is bemoaning the loss of the old Office
| buttons. The buttons were always kinda bad.
|
| The problem is that the ribbon also killed the menu bar. Menu
| bars are a standard, known quantity across every application,
| which clean easy semantics for keyboard access. On some OSes
| they even augment the menus with searchability, celebrating
| the power of plain text.
| henrikeh wrote:
| Alt-key shortcuts work on the ribbon and search is build in
| as alt+Q (at least in Excel and Word). I use both daily.
| red_admiral wrote:
| 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 doesn't
| matter so much to him whether it takes a bit longer to learn
| the command (after about the 150th time he'll have got used
| to it), but it matters a lot how fast he can do it once he's
| learnt it. Bob literally becomes more productive by having an
| interface which he can operate by muscle memory, in a way
| that more than pays off the initial training costs.
|
| Think of keyboard shortcuts for example: they're completely
| unintuitive to a newcomer, but with experience, Control+Z and
| Control+C, Control+V and the like save time, and time is
| money. My favourite word trick in this category,
| incidentally, is Control+Space "remove formatting" for text
| you've pasted in from elsewhere; it doesn't work all of the
| time though. You used to be able to do Control+Shift+V for
| "paste as plain text", I don't know which version removed
| that again but I consider it a great loss. Paste -> Keep Text
| Only takes just longer enough to be annoying.
| jtmarl1n wrote:
| I have better luck pressing shift as the first button in
| the sequence for the "paste as plain text" but I agree it
| does not always work.
|
| Shift+Control+V
| jakamau wrote:
| Speaking only for myself, but the ribbon interface helped
| me learn the majority of keyboard shortcuts I use today.
|
| Once I leveled up past basic Ctrl+C/V/X, hitting Alt and
| having the Ribbon UI guide me through the shortcut
| combinations was helpful. I concede Control+Shift+V is
| easier, but having a visual guide until I finally memorize
| all the different paste options with ALT H V has it's
| merits as well.
| Const-me wrote:
| > 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.
| rubber_duck wrote:
| Your argument supports his - Ribbon is better for
| discovery, keyboard shortcuts are there for routine
| performance.
|
| It's not just begginers who value feature discovery.
| dethos wrote:
| indeed. Focusing only on the newcomer and more precisely
| the person using it for the first time is just a fraction
| of the "problem".
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| So what's kept Bob from committing the ribbon interface to
| memory in the past 17 years?
| mook wrote:
| I believe it's because the ribbon is context-sensitive.
| What shows up depends on what has focus, and that makes
| it harder for retention, similar to how Office 2000 has
| automatically hidden menu items that ended up being
| confusing.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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 as much. Reviewing for some reason is now on a
| separate tab. The menus are less commonly used functions
| are non-existent, stuck somewhere under "File" which now
| takes over the whole screen when I open it.
|
| It is not just "different" it's worse. It removes the
| basic ability to prioritize my interface to the types of
| tasks I'm doing, in favor of some vaguely defined every-
| user who is not actually a real user.
| sp332 wrote:
| Just to be clear, the ability to customize existing tabs,
| and make new ones with whatever commands you want on
| them, is insufficient? Or is this only a complaint about
| the defaults?
| Someone wrote:
| For those who don't know:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-
| rib...:
|
| _"What you can customize: You can personalize your
| ribbon to arrange tabs and commands in the order you want
| them, hide or unhide your ribbon, and hide those commands
| you use less often. Also, you can export or import a
| customized ribbon."_
| craftinator wrote:
| 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.
| vikramkr wrote:
| 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
| airstrike wrote:
| I'm a "Power User" and I've memorized every single hotkey
| on the Excel ribbon interface to the point that I don't
| care where they are.
|
| Wrap text? Alt H A W
|
| Open settings? Alt T F T
|
| Change to page break view? Alt W I. Go back to normal
| view with Alt W L
|
| Take the border I currently have on the top edge of a
| cell and swap it to the bottom? Alt H B M Alt+T Alt+B
|
| Paste values transposing? Alt H V S V E. Want to follow
| the old accelerator? Alt E S V E also works
|
| Power users don't need to care what the ribbon / menu
| looks like. They learn hotkeys.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| I'm an emacs user. You have made me feel warm inside.
| smabie wrote:
| Emacs is a lot like Excel in many ways: they both make
| you feel like wizards. I suck at excel, but I've seen
| some analysts who are crazy good at it. You watch them
| use it and numbers and shit just start appearing out of
| nowhere. It's pure magic!
| Forge36 wrote:
| The ribbon changed again in office 365.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| In looks only. Functionally and layout-wise, it's pretty
| much identical.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There is a population of people who just hate the ribbon. In
| my experience, they are usually attorneys talking about word.
| It's the same argument that their attorney ancestors made
| about Wordperfect 5.1 keystroke commands.
|
| Personally, I don't see the big ribbon issue. It's easy to
| search for arcane features in the help menu.
|
| IMO, they really need a Mac where you get the top menu bar
| and a ribbon-like thing. Or some sort of gnarly keyboard mode
| that would become emacs for lawyers.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Attorney ancestors?
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Attorney ancestors?_
|
| GP probably meant something like "forerunners" or
| "predecessors"; some form of "those who came before" that
| doesn't necessarily imply a familial relationship.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's just a cutesy way of saying a long time ago when all
| the lawyers used Wordperfect. (A word processing program
| that I hated almost as much as Wordstar.)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| In some places, not so long ago :)
| ghaff wrote:
| I imagine a lot of big law offices still have computers
| with WordPerfect on them so they can read old files if
| necessary.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years
| ago.
|
| Came here for this. The first version of Office for windows
| (which is what most people are familiar with in terms of UI)
| is from 1998, so the non-ribbon interface has been around for
| 9 years, vs 13 for the ribbon interface.
| Macha wrote:
| Office 95 doesn't look that functionally different from
| Office 2003:
|
| Office 95: https://i0.wp.com/isoriver.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/01/06...
|
| Office 2003: https://imag.malavida.com/mvimgbig/download-
| fs/office-2003-s...
|
| Honestly even Excel 3.0 (1990) doesn't look that disimilar
| (https://goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/about-
| excel....)
|
| So that's 17 years for toolbars vs 13 for ribbon
| Someone wrote:
| Still, I guess more MS Office users will have used the
| new interface for longer than the old one than vice versa
| (I googled for data, but couldn't find numbers)
|
| It even wouldn't fully surprise me if, a few years from
| now, there were more MS Office users who never used the
| pre-ribbon interface than who had used it.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| > The first version of Office for windows [...] is from
| 1998. [...] 9 years, vs 13 for the ribbon interface.
|
| You are not even close to right. Excel for Windows is from
| 1987 (20 years with non-ribbon menus), Word for Windows is
| from 1989 (18 years with non-ribbon menus). And of course
| the menu bar paradigm itself is older still.
| jellicle wrote:
| > It's bad UI if people just learn where to click.
|
| That is literally the entire and sole purpose of a user
| interface.
| subhro wrote:
| > It's bad UI if people just learn where to click.
|
| A combat pilot would respectfully disagree. :)
|
| Source: Diving pulling 5Gs canopy side down.
| billfor wrote:
| 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.
| domador wrote:
| Yes, the ribbon interface was initially pushed on the world
| in 2007, and it's still as bad as ever.
| tw04 wrote:
| The ribbon was one of the worst things to ever hit Office. I
| remember it was met with universal horror when it first came
| out, but they were fully committed (apparently not having
| done ANY user testing) and insisted people would get used to
| it and prefer it because: we paid someone a ton of money who
| told us it's better.
|
| Like many others, I _STILL_ to this day have to google to
| figure out where things are with the ribbon interface,
| probably the least intuitive interface I 've ever used.
| henrikeh wrote:
| > 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.
| tw04 wrote:
| 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/oh-the-horror-why-is-
| microsoft...
|
| https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/msoffice/forum/all/turn-...
|
| https://www.infoworld.com/article/2651076/microsoft-s-
| ribbon...
| sbuk wrote:
| AutoCAD went ribbon around 2010...
| conception wrote:
| Oh it's bad to learn where just to click, I recently learned
| that's how most people do it.
|
| You might find this interesting -
| https://www.truity.com/blog/intuitives-guide-getting-
| along-s...
|
| There was a discussion on HN about this a while back but most
| people learn computers by "if I want x I do y." And guards
| just how they learn. Changing UI for them is catastrophic
| because they literally have to relearn -everything-. Op is
| probably a sensor and finds that stability tremendously
| useful.
|
| This really helped me be less frustrated in seeing how people
| can't just figure out technology on their own and how I can
| just mess with it until I figure out the "language" the app
| is using to have users interact with it. Most people can't do
| that.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _There was a discussion on HN about this a while back
| but most people learn computers by "if I want x I do y."
| And guards just how they learn. Changing UI for them is
| catastrophic because they literally have to relearn
| -everything-._ "
|
| Yes, but it's surprising to see a large contingent of them
| on HN and other technical forums. The rapid change of
| software technologies all but mandates adaptability and
| willingness to learn.
| osrec wrote:
| As an ex trader, I can confirm that the new ribbon interface,
| when it first came out, caused me and my colleagues a world
| of pain.
|
| We knew all the shortcuts keys in the old version. The ribbon
| UI meant that a big chunk of the previous shortcuts didn't
| work anymore.
|
| Killed our productivity for a good few months.
| rakoo wrote:
| Your experience reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/
| osrec wrote:
| 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!)
| signal11 wrote:
| 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.
| osrec wrote:
| 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.
| senorjazz wrote:
| Good old Microsoft changing the shortscuts every major
| release, because. Because? Because fucking why? Why do they
| do this.
| sxg wrote:
| Had the ribbon interface been the original UI and the
| traditional menu-based interface the new UI, it sounds like
| you and your colleagues would have still faced the same
| frustrations. To me, it sounds like your issue is with
| change rather than the effectiveness of either type of UI.
| EL_Loco wrote:
| Of course there's an issue with change. That's the whole
| point. If you were a pro Emacs/Vi user that used
| shortcuts to do pretty much everything and it made you
| fast and productive, what do you think would happen if
| suddenly you _had_ to use new shortcuts for all the ones
| you had already commited to memory?
| osrec wrote:
| No, not really. Some 1 or 2 key shortcuts became 5 key
| shortcuts with the new ribbon UI.
|
| It was a real nightmare! Especially when the old
| shortcuts were also remapped to a completely different
| function, and your moving s so fast you don't realise
| where your data has gone!
| ModernMech wrote:
| The ribbon allows you to add your most common used
| commands to a quick shortcut list that are only 2 keys.
| danShumway wrote:
| For me, that's the point.
|
| For a program as ubiquitous as Word (and as complicated
| as Word), unless there were clear benefits from the new
| interface, it shouldn't have been changed. The change
| itself was the problem.
|
| Your comment is getting at an important, fundamental UX
| principle: all conceptual change is inherently painful,
| and every time you ask a user to re-learn something you
| are _always_ wasting their time, even if the new design
| is better.
|
| Sometimes a UX designer looks at two interfaces as
| completely separate, and thinks their job is just to pick
| the best one. The reality is that usually UX decisions
| can't be separated from the current state of the app. UX
| design is more like surgery, and the invasiveness of the
| operation has to be a consideration.
|
| Having said that, I'm mildly skeptical that the interface
| didn't need to be changed. The old interface for Word was
| extremely user-unfriendly. If you go through a few of the
| interviews about Ribbon[0], there was some really
| interesting thought put into the new approach around
| discoverability, and while I'm not sure I agree with all
| of the theory they used to justify it[1], the changes did
| seem to be addressing a real problem.
|
| But I think it's debatable whether or not the
| discoverability benefits were worth the pain, and I think
| there may have been better ways to roll out the changes.
|
| [0]: sorry, too lazy to hunt them down and link them
|
| [1]: I am mildly skeptical of contextual menus/toolbars.
| They're not _wrong_ , they just have drawbacks that
| people don't always consider. Sometimes it's useful to
| tell people what is disabled, and to give them grounded,
| unchanging "landmarks" in the UX that they can use orient
| themselves while using a program.
| craftinator wrote:
| I think that choices like this come from a weird
| symbiotic relationship between UI designers and product
| managers. The UI people need to justify their jobs; if
| they sit on their hands all day because the UI works
| well, they can't make that justification. Managers don't
| want to "see a product stagnate" and to fix that they
| want a "fresh new look". The users don't enter into this
| relationship.
| edoloughlin wrote:
| _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 switch to the
| other ribbons (tabs?) I find myself hunting, wondering if
| I've got the right tab.
|
| There's something about the spatial layout that seems to
| impose an extra cognitive load. I know menus are spatial too,
| but it seemed easier to remember them. Perhaps, because each
| menu occupied its own area of the window when expanded. With
| the ribbons, the same area is reused when you switch tabs.
|
| With Word and Outlook, I've got slightly better retention.
| However, with Excel, where I seem to have a wide distribution
| of seldom-used functionality, it's an exercise in
| frustration. I know something exists, but it takes ages to
| find it because the last time I used it was probably a few
| weeks ago.
| rbg246 wrote:
| I am also the same, I have a complete block on how to find
| things, they just aren't where I remember even though as
| others have pointed out its 12 years since the ribbon
| appeared.
| nxc18 wrote:
| In 2020 there is a search feature (similar to VS Code) so
| there's really no need to have to find anything anyway.
| ako wrote:
| The key question is: would somebody who learned to use
| office after 2007 with the ribbon interface appreciate
| moving back to the pre-2007 interface?
|
| My guess is that more people learned to use office after
| 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no
| problems using the ribbon.
|
| I still yearn for ms-word on dos, and oracle forms on
| terminal interfaces, once you learned the keyboard
| shortcuts, nothing was faster. Kind of like knowing vi(m).
| coliveira wrote:
| > My guess is that more people learned to use office
| after 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no
| problems using the ribbon.
|
| Or maybe they didn't have other options...
| edoloughlin wrote:
| _My guess is that more people learned to use office after
| 2007 than before, so the majority of people have no
| problems using the ribbon._
|
| Or, perhaps they are just used to a lower level of
| productivity? I've had 13 years to adapt, and I still
| find it frustrating.
| nicoburns wrote:
| On the other hand I found it instantly more productive,
| even right after it was introduced. No longer did I have
| to remember which menu an option was in. It was all right
| there.
| ptx wrote:
| It's not _all_ right there - some things are under
| another ribbon tab, which doesn 't seem all that
| different from putting things in a collection of menus.
| (Except that visually it's now a jumbled mess instead of
| a clean and easy-to-scan linear list.)
| puszczyk wrote:
| Not sure why this got downvoted -- a personal anecdote as
| a reply to personal anecdote.
|
| On the subject -- I've learned the "classic" office but
| really like the ribbon. I'm not a power user though --
| just a doc or a spreadsheet every now and then.
| pstuart wrote:
| MS Word 4.x on the Mac was pretty sweet.
| lallysingh wrote:
| 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.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Adding to this is the ribbon content is just too busy. It
| fused icons with labels and stuffed it in some uneven
| grid. The regular toolbar was more or less even grid,
| well, a row. The usual menu is also structured on quite
| uniform grid. It's mentally easier to follow straight
| lines, we read in straight lines, scroll in straight
| lines, well, typing too. Yet when it comes to ribbon, the
| adjustable grid layout makes one adopt an adjustable scan
| pattern.
|
| I find this pattern quite distracting. Always feels like
| I'm staring at the old-time toolbar customization dialog,
| as if someone spilled buttons out of a toolbox onto the
| screen, and to make it more fun, also mixed them with
| labels...
|
| Anyone remembers the initial requirement for the ribbon
| to use the specific font, as it was used for positioning
| and could not be customized? Not sure if it's still the
| case.
|
| I wish MS promoted a style-based workflow/mindset more
| than the free-hand formatting. Perhaps, this would by
| itself eliminate the need for the busy toolbars, if only
| during style design.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| shawxe wrote:
| I agree with this completely. It's a lot easier for me to
| read through a list of things in some category than it is
| for me to scan through a bunch of irregularly sized tiles
| for the icon and description of the configuration I need.
| For me, all of the pictures just lower the density of the
| information and cause it to take longer to parse every
| single time.
|
| I also question the basic premise that the tabbed interface
| is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like many UI
| related assertions, absolutely no concrete evidence is
| being provided to support this point. I would think that it
| would be easiest for new users (as it is easiest for
| myself) to have options sorted into neat menus with
| uniformly sized elements where information is laid out in a
| vertical list (which is how lists are written in basically
| all left-to-right and right-to-left languages) so that it
| is easier to parse quickly.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Vertical lists can also work better with the wider aspect
| ratios of modern monitors. There's tons of empty space on
| the left and right in a typical Word document, but MS
| decided to suck up limited vertical space instead
| oblio wrote:
| > Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete
| evidence is being provided to support this point.
|
| Microsoft did massive amounts of user testing, just
| because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not
| there. This is a good starting point if you have about 20
| spare hours: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ They also backed their tests
| with a ton of data and metrics.
| cat199 wrote:
| > It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of
| things in some category
|
| this also creates a fixed 'path' cognitively since you
| are reading/naming the intermediate nodes on the way to
| any given task, and the intermediate nodes are
| consistently located in the same place spatially and in
| terms of the path. This is not the same as 'funky star
| button 2/3 of the way to the right and 1/3 down of the
| sub-scrolling subpanel of the customizable ribbon'
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > It's a lot easier for me to read through a list of
| things in some category than it is for me to scan through
| a bunch of irregularly sized tiles for the icon and
| description of the configuration I need.
|
| I think you hit on something here with the irregular size
| of the buttons, probably moreso than the icons. The
| arrangement makes it difficult to just read through all
| the options left to right, because they're all jumbled.
|
| A common/recommended design pattern for older Mac apps is
| to have a top toolbar of large icons, which is actually
| quite similar to the Ribbon in some ways. But there, the
| options appear in a single horizontal row.
| https://i.ibb.co/wd6MR9c/Screen-
| Shot-2020-07-10-at-11-58-37-...
| MereInterest wrote:
| Not only are they jumbled, but they also change
| size/shape depending on the width of the window. A large
| button when full-screened becomes a small button when in
| a smaller window. A large button in a smaller window gets
| expanded to show all sub-options when maximized. There is
| no visual consistency for the same button.
| ModernMech wrote:
| That was a feature designed to fit more options on
| smaller screens. I personally like it and find it
| helpful.
| gmueckl wrote:
| 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _I also question the basic premise that the tabbed
| interface is somehow more intuitive for new users. Like
| many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete
| evidence is being provided to support this point._ "
|
| Uh, yeah there was? Go dig through the wayback machine
| for Jensen Harris's blogpost series about the design of
| the ribbon, or watch his MIX08 talk on it; he was the
| design team lead for the change, and the reason they did
| it was because the old UI was failing their users. There
| were usability studies done during the ribbon design
| which fedback into, and changed, how it worked to adjust
| to ordinary people's expectations and needs.
|
| > " _I would think that it would be easiest for new users
| to have options sorted into neat menus_ "
|
| Like many UI related assertions, absolutely no concrete
| evidence is being provided to support this point.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| "There's absolutely no evidence for this" "yes there was,
| here's what to look for" "downvote". HN.txt.
|
| Top level menus full by Word 95. Office 97 added command
| bars. Nested menus and toolbars full by Office 2000.
| Office XP added Task panes, full of features by Office
| 2003. " _the Task Pane was the last attempt to find a way
| to scale old-style UI to programs as full-featured as
| Office. Although it was a successful stop-gap measure, it
| ran its course in only two versions._ " -
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/archive/blogs/jensenh/new-r...
|
| > " _The downside [of nested dropdown menus], however,
| was clear and eventually terminal: increased complexity.
| It 's much more difficult for people to form a scanning
| strategy with hierarchical menus: you have to keep track
| at each moment which levels you've visited and which
| you've haven't. What was once a simple structure to
| visualize was now a more complicated, branching
| structure._"
|
| - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ye-ol...
|
| > " _As we watched more people use the prototypes, we
| started to understand more the scanning process that was
| taking place. Later on, we did eye-tracking studies to
| watch how people scanned the Ribbon_ "
|
| > " _I was reading a blog entry of someone who was kind
| of critical and dismissive about what we 're doing and
| our designs. One of his criticisms was "how bad the
| usability of the Ribbon would be because it's got icons
| scattered all over of various sizes." What we've learned
| is actually the opposite. People can scan disparate
| patterns more easily than homogenous patterns. When we
| use more toolbar-like layouts--a bunch of equally-spaced,
| equally-sized buttons, people scan them less quickly than
| when each chunk has a memorable layout. So we actually
| try explicitly to vary the layouts between chunks--it
| helps people find the thing they're looking for more
| quickly. That's something we wouldn't have known if we
| didn't have a commitment to watch people work._"
|
| - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/archive/blogs/jensenh/be-wi...
|
| > " _One of the concepts behind the Ribbon is that it 's
| the one and only place to look for functionality in the
| product. If you want to look through Word 2003 to find an
| unfamiliar command, you need to look through 3 levels of
| hierarchical menus, open up 31 toolbars and peruse about
| 20 Task Panes. It's hard to formulate a "hunting"
| strategy to find the thing you're looking for because
| there's no logical path through all of the UI.
|
| > Office "12" consolidates all of the entry points into
| one place: the Ribbon. So if you're trying to find a
| feature and don't know where it is, the scope of your
| search is drastically reduced. Click on the leftmost tab,
| and click across the tabs until you reach the end. That
| it. It's either there or it's not--there are no other
| "rocks" to look under, no other places we've hidden
| functionality. We've found in early tests that people
| find it easier to discover how to do new things in the
| Ribbon, and they're more apt to explore the UI looking
| for better ways to get things done._"
|
| Testing showed that people found the Ribbon easier, found
| more things, and were more willing to explore it. -
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/archive/blogs/jensenh/enter...
|
| > "* Back in the olden days of designing software at
| Microsoft (say, pre-2003), design decisions were mostly
| supported by guesswork. [...] How much data have we
| collected? [in the Customer Experience opt-in program]
| About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003
| (each session contains all the data points over a certain
| fixed time period.) [...] one of the biggest reasons that
| we decided to do the new user interface for Office 12 is
| simply that, for the first time, we have the data we need
| to make intelligent decisions.*"
|
| - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/archive/blogs/jensenh/insid...
|
| And that's not even from the design blog, which appears
| to be offline and not in the wayback machine.
|
| Totally wrong about people finding menus easier, totally
| wrong about there being no evidence based design behind
| the ribbon.
| strbean wrote:
| > It's either there or it's not--there are no other
| "rocks" to look under
|
| Nit pick on this quote: every time I've used the ribbon,
| I need features that have been collapsed into a "more"
| list (hamburger menu?) for that section of the ribbon.
|
| Also:
|
| > you need to look through 3 levels of hierarchical
| menus, open up 31 toolbars and peruse about 20 Task
| Panes.
|
| I'm really dubious that the ribbon is better in this
| regard. Those menus still exist, and I end up falling
| back to them with some regularity after searching the
| ribbons and not finding what I want (perhaps it is hidden
| in a hamburger menu). Furthermore, each option in the
| ribbon takes up far more screen real estate than an item
| in the drop down menu, and there are sub-dialogs still
| abound.
| 6510 wrote:
| I really love good UI design and I'm convinced I don't
| have what it takes but I do keep seeing arguments and
| interfaces that seem quite weird to me. I would do it
| like this:
|
| The desire to keep the document (or whatever it is)
| worked at on the screen during the "hunt" I consider a
| mistake. When mixing paint on a pallet the eyes are
| focused on what you are doing. You might want to look up
| to the canvas and back down again several times but there
| is never a need to do both.
|
| I also feel drop down menus are a mistake. There (imho)
| should be a key on the keyboard to bring up the "hunting"
| screen (perhaps one that can be panned to the left right
| top and bottom with the arrow keys) and every "button" on
| that screen should be visually mapped to a key
| combination. F keys are great for this. First F key for
| the "button" group, second F key to pick one or a 3rd for
| 12 x 12 x 12 options.
|
| When folder trees stop working because you have to much
| in them you should do tags (in addition) that can hold
| duplicates of the functionality. Then when tags also fail
| to scale you need a search feature. Each interface
| "button" or group should have a lot of hidden text by
| which it can be found. Typing cursive should highlight
| the italics "button".
|
| It would definitely become a big mess but my gut says it
| can be sorted out and be equally accessible to people
| using it every day and first time or rarely users.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I'm an artist who works mostly digitally. When I am
| mixing colors I have the color dialog right there on the
| screen next to the art, with my changes being reflected
| live. How does this color work with the rest of the work?
| That's what's important.
|
| The only reason traditional artists use a palette far
| away from their art for their paint is because that works
| in the physical world. Mixing my colors right next to my
| virtual canvas is a huge speed-up compared to painting a
| ton of thumbnails with different colors.
| woah wrote:
| There's never any shortage of cranky commenters on HN
| with eloquently written 4 paragraph posts about how some
| complicated interface from 1993 is the pinnacle of
| computing productivity, demanding peer reviewed studies
| to the contrary.
| fgonzag wrote:
| I mean, you could argue that some complicated interfaces
| like VIM's modal editing are the pinnacle of productivity
| for power users.
|
| But power users and ordinary user's needs are world's
| apart, and the office suites have to cater to both of
| them. Thus the deep divide.
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, the ribbon is a futile exercise. I'm pretty sure 90%
| of the people don't know how to use it, and the ones who
| know don't remember where things are. In this sense, menus
| are much more successful interface, at least you know where
| things might be. And in fact, when I use MS Word I first
| try to find things in the menu, and only reach for the
| ribbon for items I already know from previous experience.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I don't understand this criticism. The layout seems
| logical to me. If you want to insert something, go to the
| "Insert" tab. If you want page design options, go to the
| "Design" tab. What's so inscrutable?
| coliveira wrote:
| There are plenty of problems. In the Mac, for example,
| menus are discoverable because you can go to
| "help->seach" and type what you're looking for. This
| cannot be easily done with the ribbon. Moreover, once you
| have a clue that you're looking for an "insert" option,
| you still need to search around in the ribbon, since
| there is no logic for where the option might be hiding. A
| menu you can read from top to bottom, but a ribbon you
| need to scan from left to right and top to bottom, making
| it much harder to use.
| syberspace wrote:
| With teaching UI you breed the class of people who will shout
| the loudest when something changes. Teaching your parents that
| "the internet" is the blue icon in the taskbar will teach them
| to call you when microsoft decides to install chromium-edge on
| their machine because "the internet is gone". Don't teach
| anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made
| the UI look the way it does. And with that anyone will be able
| to transfer that knowledge to a slightly different looking UI
| without much of a problem.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the
| concepts that made the UI look the way it does.
|
| With all due respect, good luck with that. A lot of people
| aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS
| operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon.
| u801e wrote:
| > A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file
| systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button
| to order from Amazon.
|
| That's like saying people aren't interested in learning how
| to use a phonebook or how to call directory assistance.
| They just want to know who to talk to so they can order
| what they want from Sears.
| ghaff wrote:
| And by and large people learn the bare minimum needed in
| order to do those things. Certainly most of us have a
| pretty vague notion of what all exactly happens behind
| the scenes when we dial a phone. If the call doesn't go
| through as planned we might have some idea that the cell
| reception is bad or something like that. But we're
| probably not in a position to debug what's wrong in any
| significant way.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That's exactly true. People don't care about the means,
| only the ends.
| sidlls wrote:
| How so? I don't understand this analogy at all. UI/UX
| design changes frequently involves changing the
| appearance and possibly location and even functionality
| of familiar things. If we changed the lettering in a
| phonebook, or even merely on the cover, to be, say,
| klingon font, we shouldn't expect the typical user to
| reach for that phonebook, yet essentially what the GP is
| suggesting is that it's sufficient for a user to
| understand the "phonebook concept" and users can learn
| the implementation details trivially based on that.
| u801e wrote:
| > I don't understand this analogy at all. UI/UX design
| changes frequently involves changing the appearance and
| possibly location and even functionality of familiar
| things.
|
| And that's the fundamental problem because that doesn't
| take into account people who are familiar with how a
| particular application works. For example, if you compare
| a tape recorder, VCR, a DVD player, and a streaming
| service where you can play, pause, forward or rewind,
| it's essentially the same interface and that has been the
| case since the '70s.
|
| It's similar to dialing a phone with a touch-tone system
| versus dialing a number on a smartphone (other than
| having to press a call button). The only major change in
| the UI was when the transition between rotary dial to
| touch-tone took place. Automobiles are another example
| (placement of the brake, accelerator, shifter, turn
| signal stalk, headlamp controls, etc (though things do
| differ from model to model to some extent).
|
| So why do we keep changing the interface of computer
| applications every so often such that proficient users
| have to relearn how to do things? The reason appears to
| be that we're chasing a goal of making the UI more
| intuitive so that someone who hasn't used it before can
| figure it out, but that never seems to happen.
|
| But, if people just learn how to use the existing UI,
| then they can use the application and other applications
| like it because of a standard interface.
|
| > If we changed the lettering in a phonebook, or even
| merely on the cover, to be, say, klingon font, we
| shouldn't expect the typical user to reach for that
| phonebook, yet essentially what the GP is suggesting is
| that it's sufficient for a user to understand the
| "phonebook concept" and users can learn the
| implementation details trivially based on that.
|
| A more accurate analogy would be to change the order of
| the listings in the phonebook to start from most common
| names and end in least common ones instead of being in
| alphabetical order because of the belief it would help
| new users find the information they're looking for faster
| compared to the traditional interface.
| setzer22 wrote:
| Sometimes the views you see here are extremely biased. It's
| normal, we use computers all day, we are experts. We learn
| and adapt.
|
| For some people, a computer is just another tool they've been
| recently forced to use in order to live in society (in many
| countries, you cannot longer reallistically do your taxes
| without a computer for instance).
|
| As programmers, and especially those who work in UI/UX
| design, we owe some respect to those people, because those
| who take the extra effort to learn a radically new technology
| at an elderly age, are completely, utterly confused when
| companies decide to move stuff around just for the sake of it
| (or as a result of A/B testing?).
|
| And yes, sometimes the only way I've been able to teach
| people how to operate a computer is by literally describing
| the UI and the icons. In my experience, finding a good way to
| teach via fundamentals to someome who doesn't care is
| extremely difficult. And believe me that I've tried it many
| times.
|
| OTOH, note that none of my points apply to early education
| (school). In that case, I completely agree we need to teach
| the fundamentals, not UI.
| bane wrote:
| Next thing you know they'll start insist on adding lowercase
| characters to the character set and forcing us to use color
| displays and Arabic numerals instead of good old fashioned
| Roman ones!
| spystath wrote:
| It's common occurrence having software dismissed as second rate
| because it's "ugly" or non-conforming to current design trends.
| Although form and function should enhance each other we've now
| reached a point where changes to form actively harm function.
| Toolbars are gone, menus are gone, icons are abstract outlines
| of what they represent, discoverability in GUI applications is
| hampered. I can find quite a few examples of applications both
| mobile and desktop that have become increasingly frustrating to
| use for no benefit whatsoever. "Where has this button gone? I'm
| sure it was here before"; "Oh I need to click the nondescript
| three-bullet button, then tap actions and there it is!"; "But
| the colours are now nice". Especially in a productivity tool
| I'd rather not have the interface change every other release
| because it's "ugly" by some abstract metric. Although I believe
| the ribbon turned out to be a decent design I'm fairly certain
| that wouldn't have been the case if Microsoft had changed again
| to something completely different within a release.
|
| So, yeah... Please give me ugly but predictable interfaces.
| whytaka wrote:
| > Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing.
|
| Consider consistency across applications though. People like
| conformity.
| helixhelix wrote:
| That wasn't to make you memorise a GUI but to make you
| understand the connections between visual indication and
| concealed action.
|
| Without "fad chasing" (which is a sunk cost, a week every few
| years of pro graphics design), without even copying microsoft
| office's layout, you are losing out on new users. Why would
| anyone use libre office because it's open source rather than
| being a better functioning product that is more pleasurable to
| use (and look at)?
| solarkraft wrote:
| While I somewhat get what you mean (and hate ribbbons), the
| Office UI is just way less crappy than LibreOffice's. It has
| smooth scrolling, some animated state, and they're at least
| trying to get rid of some visual and semantic cruft, so it's a
| lot less of a pain to use than LibreOffice.
|
| Of course progress sometimes means breaking changes, software
| in general and especially LibreOffice is nowhere near a point
| at which we can afford to stop improving. It's not about
| changing things for the sake of changing things, it's about
| making things less painful (and hopefully ultimately
| delightful) to use.
| baddox wrote:
| What's so undesirable about teaching some technology in school
| and that technology changing over the years? Heck, I took
| computer hardware vocational classes in high school, and we
| learned about ISA, ATA, and PCMCIA. I would never bemoan
| _either_ learning those things _or_ those things changing. It's
| not like that learning was made useless when the technology
| changed.
| [deleted]
| maple3142 wrote:
| I think it is simply whether you are used to them only. My
| first time using Office is Offline 2007, the first Office with
| ribbons. When I want to use "old" UI in Office 2003 or
| LibreOffice(turning off ribbon), I also have problem finding
| the feature I want.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| The ribbon interface is one of the best things to happen to
| office.
|
| It was horrible to use before that.
|
| For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the
| ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands.
|
| Not to mention context specific menu tabs.
|
| Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased
| tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to the
| last tab to format it.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The ribbon interface is one of the best things to happen to
| office. It was horrible to use before that.
|
| Says who? Do you have any UI/UX study to back up that claim?
| Most of us on this page seem to believe the opposite is true.
|
| > For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel,
| the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands.
|
| Exactly the opposite. That is, a ribbon _may_ be relevant to
| a feature-poor application, but much less so to a feature-
| rich application.
|
| > my productivity has increased tremendously. I just create a
| table and automatically go to the last tab to format it.
|
| You're conflating context-sensitive UI changes with the use
| of ribbons. That's a different argument. Also remember that
| if a Table toolbar or sidebar appears, you can have the same
| effect - better perhaps - without ribbons.
|
| For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel, the
| ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands.
|
| Not to mention context specific menu tabs.
|
| Especially in Powerpoint, my productivity has increased
| tremendously. I just create a table and automatically go to
| the last tab to format it.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > For an app as complex and feature rich as word or excel,
| the ribbon interface is a great way to organise commands.
|
| With some reluctance, I agree with you. But it does bother me
| that I rarely use much of that complexity, while still being
| required to engage with a UI that seems mostly designed
| around hiding things that I don't need anyway. I wish there
| was a way to use the Office apps with a simplified feature
| set. Of course, I understand why not: everyone's essential
| features are different. So I carry on poking at ribbons
| looking for things.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| That is a by-product, and a testament, to the complexity of
| the software.
|
| Take Word. It has millions of users around the world. And
| everyone of them uses at most a _different_ 20% set of the
| full features 80% of the time.
|
| But, it's only one software. It has to satisfy everyone.
|
| So you end up with a reasonably complex UI that everyone
| has to bear.
|
| However, you can customize it, and I wish there was more
| documentation and more effort put into customization of the
| menus.
|
| I mean, let there be a menu customization system that is
| fully drag and drop, rather than the clunky stuff presently
| there. It would be a game changer.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| The only thing I want LibreOffice's UI to do is get the fuck
| out of my way.
| CivBase wrote:
| I believe schools are mostly wrong in their computer education
| approach. The purpose and functions of MS Word (and most word
| processors for that matter) have not changed significantly in
| the last couple decades, despite the change of paint. Schools
| should be focused on teaching people what common applications
| are for and what they are capable of - not which buttons to
| press to perform specific tasks.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| this_user wrote:
| It's not just slow, but just the subtle things in how it
| behaves. For instance, try navigating a spreadsheet in LO
| with only the keyboard. It's super annoying. Then try the
| same thing in, say, Google Sheets, and it does exactly what
| you think it should do. And that is a huge difference in
| terms of UX and productivity.
| zucker42 wrote:
| Isn't Blender 2.7 to 2.8 widely considered a successful
| redesign? Blender is experiencing continuing and dramatic
| industry support. I've heard Blender is comparable to the
| proprietary alternatives.
|
| I've not used Blender much though.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Oh sorry, bad phrasing, I meant right now LO is stuck at
| blender 2.7 and needs a 2.8-like push.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I also took a pre-ribbon exam for Word in high school, and I've
| had no trouble applying those concepts to successive versions,
| even though I've never been a heavy user. I dare say most
| software doesn't change quickly enough for intensive early use
| to become totally irrelevant.
| [deleted]
| signal11 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Almost anything could be described as a fad. Interactive
| computers were seen as a fad once. Punched cards were good
| enough! The command line was good enough!
|
| For complex applications (roughly defined as, lots of nested
| menus), the ribbon UI is an improvement as it surfaces more
| features. In itself it's an evolution of the customized toolbar
| approach - there's plenty of UX research that showed that most
| people only had the standard toolbars. (Office still does offer
| a context sensitive "toolbar").
|
| > we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to
| reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundamental
| computer knowledge like learning to type.
|
| I'm hoping this didn't mandate a particular program, but even
| assuming it did -- Microsoft Word's basic shortcuts all still
| work exactly like in 1995. The common toolbar buttons (bold,
| italic, lists, etc) are in the same place. Even the original
| keyboard shortcuts for deeply nested menus (e.g. Alt D F F, in
| Excel, for showing the filter UI, i.e., the old 'autofilter'
| command) still work.
|
| So where is the problem exactly?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Almost anything could be described as a fad. //
|
| I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features
| most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?).
|
| There's stuff you want to do that punch cards don't allow, eg
| duplicate a program virtually; but there's not stuff people
| wanted to do that menu based wordprocessor UI prevented.
|
| Ribbons fine, but no advance for me over menus, on balance I
| prefer menus but that might just be familiarity and age.
| signal11 wrote:
| > I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the
| features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly
| earlier?).
|
| That's a very narrow view of what people need. Children at
| home these days "type" essays into Word by dictating _as a
| first-party feature_. This is a pretty recent step forward
| -- in the past it used to be a very expensive third-party
| add-on with much less accuracy.
|
| Good, scalable multi-user document editing has changed the
| way students and even workers take notes in classrooms and
| workshops. Again, a fairly recent phenomenon (although Word
| still isn't as good as Google Docs here -- c'mon Microsoft,
| keep up).
| rsa25519 wrote:
| > Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to
| trust that it won't change underneath you.
|
| I think there is something even deeper than this. The usability
| of UI is directly proportional to quality of users' mental
| model of what the application's doing.
|
| Minimalism can be helpful for removing the "magic." I like the
| way Google Docs has evolved their UI. They started matching the
| feature set of desktop applications. Slowly, they have removed
| and simplified features, leading to a beautifully minimal yet
| powerful interface for typesetting and writing documents.
| u801e wrote:
| > I still have the same keyboard layout as back then but MS
| Office now has some janky "ribbon interface" which bears no
| resemblance to how it used to be.
|
| This is a general pattern for GUIs as of late. It changes every
| so often until the point where if you haven't used the software
| in a while, you no longer know how to access a particular
| function via the GUI interface.
|
| For example, web browsers used to have the standard drop down
| menus (file, edit, etc). If I want to view page source, the
| option would probably be under the view option and titled
| appropriately. These days, I have no idea where to find it, but
| at least I still know the keyboard shortcut to do the same
| thing and that hasn't changed at least.
| criddell wrote:
| > It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly"
| interfaces.
|
| You might be interested in checking out the work of Donald
| Norman. He makes a great case that attractive things work
| better. _Old_ isn 't necessarily a problem, but _ugly_ is.
|
| https://jnd.org/emotion_design_attractive_things_work_better...
| Andrex wrote:
| This seems intuitive enough to me but years on HN have let me
| know it's a rare opinion, at least among developers.
| analog31 wrote:
| My kids are recent high school graduates. When they were in
| grade school, they learned MS Office. They easily picked up the
| newer stuff as it has come along, and at the same time, the
| schools have gotten a lot more flexible. It just wasn't a
| problem. Today they use Google Docs or whatever.
|
| At my workplace, I see gradually declining use of any kind of
| word processing. Folks just edit in the e-mail or chat editor.
| One colleague makes video blogs.
|
| Word processing seems to remain, largely for documents that
| will never be read, such as HR announcements and dissertations.
| ;-)
|
| I've written lengthy documents in the chat editor, and have
| discovered to my great surprise and pleasure, that people
| actually read them. One thing that seems to be important is for
| people to be able to read things easily on their phones.
| setzer22 wrote:
| I think this problem is not at all exclusive to propietary
| software. Take blender, for example. I spent quite a bit of
| time learning all the bits of the interface 5+ years ago. When
| I tried to go back, the software UI had changed so much that
| basically most of my knowledge and muscle memory is now
| worthless, having to google how to do every tiny operation. And
| this is not yhe first "huge overhaul" of the UI and keybindings
| they've made.
|
| And it's not like you can easily get an old version of blender
| and make it work just because it's free software. Leaving aside
| the fact that I'd be missing out on newer features, system
| libraries get updated and at some point the old version stops
| working with a random crash. Then you need to start compiling
| from source and basically maintaining your own fork.
|
| IMO this is what happens with large enough pieces of software
| where the devs care more about increasing adoption in spite of
| any happy existing users.
|
| Sorry for the blender micro-rant, they are doing a great job.
| But still I felt it was the perfect example of microsoft-y
| behaviour in free software land
| baddox wrote:
| I just don't think the specific way to do each operation in
| the UI is an essential part of Blender. Anyone using it
| professionally or even as a serious hobby will pick up on UI
| changes quickly. The real work you do on Blender is the
| actual art, not just manipulating menus and buttons.
| setzer22 wrote:
| No offense intended, but isn't the real work you do in MS
| Office creating documents? Software is never about
| manipulating menus and buttons _per-se_.
| cycloptic wrote:
| It seems unrealistic to want new features but also be against
| any kind of refactoring or efforts to bring in new users. As
| you have found, it's time-consuming to backport things and
| the people who actually want that are not usually willing to
| do it. Probably because it doesn't bring in new users and
| therefore makes no money. Free software really doesn't change
| anything abut this, projects that want to become popular
| still need to prioritize growth.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Meanwhile, I'm a prospective Blender user, and I hear it's
| _waaaaay_ better from 2.80, so that for various things where
| I might have used another program or given up and used
| nothing I would now be very likely to use Blender. It's
| always a balancing act: satisfying existing users, against
| genuine improvement that will make it better for new users
| and existing users that put in the effort to learn the new
| way.
| dpwm wrote:
| Blender is way better since 2.80 imho. I have been an a
| blender user since about 2005. I find 2.80 improved the UI
| considerably. For me it was well worth the little effort I
| had to put in.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| While Microsoft has changed a lot of stuff, the keyboard
| commands in Windows and MS Office have remained mostly
| consistent in my experience, so when trying to work on someone
| else's computer, some things I could still figure out easily
| enough even though the system seems different. This could be
| done just as well in free software projects too (some of which
| already do, I think).
|
| (However, for my own stuff, and on my own computer, I use
| neither MS Office nor LibreOffice nor other similar software,
| since I do not need them; I can use plain text, I can use TeX,
| I can use PostScript code (with Ghostscript), and whatever.)
| wwright wrote:
| I wonder what people who have spent their adult life studying
| and implementing UI/UX think about it.
| stefankeys wrote:
| Just use LaTex with Vim for documents if the org you work at
| allows it.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| I find Emacs with AUCTeX to be the ideal TeX environment, but
| at least Vim is a sane environment. Word processors in
| general I find a very user-hostile environment for creation.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| MSFT had reason to believe that the Ribbon was more accessible
| and discoverable to users than the old menu structure. I was
| dubious at the time, but since the shift I have come to believe
| that they are correct. I think the Ribbon is better for the
| vast majority of users.
|
| Interfaces shouldn't be changed for no good reason -- and MSFT
| is certainly guilty of chasing fads or tweaks without a clear
| benefit, too, in other areas -- but neither should an interface
| be frozen in amber if a better idea comes along.
|
| (Also remember that mass market software isn't designed for
| people who post on HN.)
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > MSFT had reason to believe that the Ribbon was more
| accessible and discoverable to users than the old menu
| structure. I was dubious at the time, but since the shift I
| have come to believe that they are correct. I think the
| Ribbon is better for the vast majority of users.
|
| Microsoft also removed the start menu on Windows once and
| everybody hated it. Sometimes, MSFT is wrong.
| goto11 wrote:
| The ribbon interface it not just a "fad", it is a clear UI
| improvement since it removes a level of indirection.
|
| If you wanted to see how a font looked in the classic Word UI,
| you highlighted a text and selected a font from the dropdown.
| When the dropdown was changed to show the actual font, it was
| the first step towards the ribbon, where the UI generally shows
| the actual effect of the options.
|
| Programmers does not understand this difference, since they are
| used to work on abstraction levels removed from the actual
| output. So the ribbon seem like a fad just like the mouse and
| icons was seen as a fad by many developers back in the day.
| ("Why don't people just learn LaTeX?")
| TheChaplain wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| The number of times I had to use "Tell me what you want to
| do"-field is on a stupid level compared to the rich toolbar
| and extensive menus that existed pre-2007.
| XorNot wrote:
| I mean ironically that's actually a much better solution -
| I love Jetbrains "search everywhere" field in Idea to find
| specific commands quickly.
|
| So why in the heck the ribbon even needs to exist is
| baffling - just make a command search/command line input,
| and then if it's literally on a toolbar on screen,
| highlight it for me (configurably) so I as a new user know
| what to click on next time.
|
| The ribbon is just somehow, always exactly wrong.
| red_admiral wrote:
| I don't think the ribbon itself is a bad idea, but I
| absolutely hate the following two things:
|
| 1. Latency. When you click a dropdown, the whole interface
| can freeze for several seconds while Word presumably renders
| the menu or something. I can just about understand that for
| the fonts menu, but for the "bullets and enumerations"
| dropdown it's just plain bad.
|
| 2. Things moving around in the ribbon because Microsoft
| decided to push an auto-update to include some new search
| with bing or "data insights" feature.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I think they've improved it a lot since then, but I
| remember the Fonts menu getting incrementally slower as you
| piled more fonts into your system. At one time I think it
| actually held up Word loading entirely.
| pwthornton wrote:
| A good interface should not need to be learned. Everyday new
| people are born that have never used a bad interface before.
| There is no justification for keeping bad interfaces around
| just because you can learn them.
|
| Interfaces that are hard to learn are also hard to recall.
| These lead to mistakes.
| bluGill wrote:
| Your school was wrong to teach any program. Ui follows fads and
| always will. Thus you need to learn how to use any ui that
| might come.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I agree with this, but it was far less clear in the 90s. I
| think a lot of people (myself included) were expecting/hoping
| that UIs in productivity software were converging on some
| sort of finished design or standard that there wouldn't be
| much reason to monkey around with.
|
| MS Office programs - and many other proprietary software
| titles - were taught not only in many schools, but also in
| various vocational programs. You could get 'certified' in
| having 'mastered' a particular UI, and you expected that
| knowledge to continue to be useful for years. Seems quaint
| now, but there were some nice things about it. A carpenter
| doesn't expect their saws & hammers to radically morph every
| product cycle.
| bluGill wrote:
| In the 90s word was still trying to take the crown from
| word perfect. Everyone knew guis were the future, but the F
| Keys in word perfect were important to know.
| tester34 wrote:
| I don't think so, but I also don't think that it's going to
| be popular opinion around foss/computer people
|
| MS Office software is used around shittton of workplaces and
| from time to time in day-to-day life, so making people
| somewhat proficent at it is good for everybody except MS
| competitors.
|
| I'm not sure what do you mean by teaching "UI" - they teach
| how to get things done with given software.
| acomjean wrote:
| It's hard. I learned a lot of programs (some that don't
| exist) autocad and lotus 123. Some of the principals of
| spreadsheets and vector programs I remember to this day. But
| having hands on with the software certainly helped learn it.
| jl6 wrote:
| I used to feel that way about the ribbon, but I quickly got
| used to it and now consider it an improvement.
|
| What I've never got used to is the flattening of the UI in
| versions 2013+.
| ghaff wrote:
| I never loved the ribbon and I suspect that Microsoft
| underestimated how disruptive the change was for a lot of
| people. However, I saw a presentation by one of the lead
| designers around the time that it was introduced and he
| certainly made a good case for how the older interface had
| accumulated way too much cruft.
|
| ADDED: Ah, this is probably it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4
|
| (That said, MS Office in general had been loaded with so many
| functions that 1% of users used but that were absolutely
| essential to some 1% that it's something of a mess anyway.
| It's one reason I prefer the relative simplicity of GSuite
| these days.)
| zeveb wrote:
| > I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around
| the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a
| good case for how the older interface had accumulated way
| too much cruft.
|
| I have also seen well-intentioned arguments for why Clippy
| was a good idea ... but he wasn't.
|
| To this day I miss the Word 5.1 on Macintosh System 7. That
| was more-or-less the Platonic ideal of a word processor;
| it's been all downhill since.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Clippy was literally the precursor of things like Alexa
| and Siri today. The technology wasn't there to back it,
| but the idea of an anthropomorphic assistant has
| literally come around to the mainstream today.
| jaxr wrote:
| I don't mind LibreOffice's interface in general. Only a sublime
| style Ctrl+p find would make a huge difference. That alone would
| put it's interface on top of MS office in my opinion.
| beezle wrote:
| So much talk about UI this and that - how about leaving UI and
| feature set alone and instead focus on speed and memory foot
| print?
|
| Though recent versions are better, it still feels slow compared
| to Office.
| einpoklum wrote:
| The Document Foundation should - IMHO - employ a more nuanced,
| and "deeper", community funding effort. Even though, when
| downloading it, we see a payment link - there is almost no
| motivation to press it:
|
| 1. We are in a hurry to go on with the download.
|
| 2. It's called a "donation" - which it isn't. It's support for
| the project, financing further development and bug removal, and
| should be presented that way.
|
| 3. We have zero information about the situation The Document
| Foundation is in, what it needs money for, what its income stream
| look like and why, etc. I think Thunderbird
| (https://www.thunderbird.net/) has been doing a better job in
| that respect.
|
| 4. There doesn't seem to be an effort to encourage or even make-
| it-easy-for users (corporate or individual) to engage in
| community activity, of the kind that increases commitment to the
| project and also awareness to the importance of supporting the
| project financially.
|
| ------------------------
|
| Also - please consider actually supporting both projects I
| mentioned, financially:
|
| * LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
|
| * Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/
|
| and consider doing some volunteer QA work on LibreOffice by
| reporting bugs or even getting into the code. I, particularly, am
| very involved with Right-to-Left, Hebrew and some Arabic language
| issues.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| I hate to rant, but there is a weird sense of entitlement in many
| comments. An assumption that software should "just work", be
| completely bug free, have the best design, have developers
| quickly responding to bug reports, etc, while giving away the
| product for free.
|
| I might not use an office suite very often, but when I do, I'm
| grateful it exists and is free/libre. Some orgs (gov, companies,
| service providers/resellers) do rely on LibreOffice, and they
| should really make sure that core developers can keep on going.
|
| (I work for a free software service provider/reseller and core
| developer, this comes up regularly)
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| In the early days, one of the things that was heavily hyped by
| FOSS advocates to drive adoption was the "free as in beer"
| aspect. It worked but, unsurprisingly, it resulted in a large
| userbase that only cared that the free beer kept flowing and
| nothing else about the FOSS philosophy nor contributing.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| On the other hand, the idea of FOSS is to put effort of a few
| for the benefit of them and many more others, a positive sum
| game.
|
| In some cases this idea is able to deliver, in others it isn't.
| But the expectations of having a working, maintained and free
| product are justified to a degree.
| lbwtaylor wrote:
| I think there is a quasi-unique problem with Libreoffice.
| People love Word and Excel, in ways they don't Windows and
| other pieces of software that compete with FOSS.
|
| Those two programs are so well polished, user-friendly and
| powerful, and are what so many people are trained on, that it
| can be rough transition to LibreOffice.
| genidoi wrote:
| This is the de facto complaint of open source software, and
| initially I thought the entitlement can really only be
| explained by laziness, after all why don't people just bother
| to read the source code and contribute the feature they want?
|
| But then I realized its way way more rudimentary than that. A
| substantial amount of software developers struggle w/
| interpersonal communication skills, and so often what may have
| been intended as a polite feature suggestion came across as
| entitlement, if not bewilderment that a feature doesn't exist
| through a poor choice of words combined with a lack of empathy
| that we see everywhere throughout the internet anyway.
| danans wrote:
| > why don't people just bother to read the source code and
| contribute the feature they want?
|
| It is a bit far fetched to expect non programmer users to
| read the source code, much less contribute the feature (i.e.
| from requirements gathering to feasibility analysis, to
| design, implementation, testing, and release) isn't it?
|
| That is the kind of work that only a compensated team would
| do, especially and something as complex as an office
| productivity suite. In other nonprofit areas, your
| organizations doing work rely on charitable contributions
| from donors who share the same interests. Until such a time
| that such donors exist, it's hard to see how the development
| model is funded.
|
| > A substantial amount of software developers struggle w/
| interpersonal communication skills, and so often what may
| have been intended as a polite feature suggestion came across
| as entitlement
|
| They might have interpersonal issues, but it seems like the
| deeper issue here is more with the incentive model, not with
| the developers' personality traits.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Well, I believe that FOSS software should "just work", but also
| that we should "just support it" if we use it - with decent bug
| reporting always, with QA work if we can spare a bit of time,
| with coding if we know how and can spare more time, and with
| some money if we're not poor.
|
| So, I guess I believe in "mutual entitlement".
| stefankeys wrote:
| To be fair there is simple free open source software that just
| works, like vim. It is just that people should understand that
| with complicated and necessarily bloated software which does a
| lot of things major bugs are inevitable basically fate.
| simion314 wrote:
| About people hating change, in my IDE an update renamed a menu
| from "revert" to "Rollback" , for a while I had issues finding
| this menu because my brain was searching for the old text and
| just skipping over the new one.
|
| Is it my fault that change causes productivity loss? Should we
| take a pause and train ourselves after each software/webpage does
| a change?
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Every time I open LibreOffice and see the loading logo... I'm
| amazed it's free software.
|
| I'm thankful to everyone that has contributed to it.
| eeereerews wrote:
| > Another pathology is that there are companies who ship
| LibreOffice, often claiming support, but then file all their
| tickets up-stream and hope they are fixed for free.
|
| Lmao... but thinking again, given the average user's bug-filing
| abilities, a professional bug-filer might actually be useful.
| buovjaga wrote:
| Indeed. I created this initiative some time ago, but sadly have
| not been able to get folks responsible for deployments
| involved:
| https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Guidelines_for_public...
|
| I guess it's just another reflection of the passivity we
| witness everywhere.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Have any of the support companies tried paying bounties for
| tickets? Seems like it would get revenue pointed at the
| bugs/enhancements that customers wanted worked on.
|
| Do they have a subscription to pay LO directly?
| stefankeys wrote:
| GUI was a mistake.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > so nobody thinks in terms of buying support for any office
| suite[.]
|
| In my experience working in a repair shop, people only think in
| these terms when buying an office suite, regardless of if they'll
| actually use the official support. This only applies to
| individuals though, not corps.
| davidhyde wrote:
| It seems like this whole thing could be solved by renaming the
| tag from "Personal Edition" to "Lite Edition" or something.
| People want to use and "office" product for work, duh. The
| document foundation keep arguing that funding is needed and the
| users keep arguing that they want a free version for commercial
| use and that naming is important because "the boss won't read the
| license agreement but look at the name! Personal Edition"
|
| Why are people on the defensive always so blinded by the obvious?
| If you understand what people are getting upset about then, on
| the first line of the letter, they should state, unambiguously,
| exactly what people are having an issue with. Instead, the
| introduction is about the success of LibraOffice which is not
| contended and actually somewhat irrelevant. Then this:
|
| > So it is a bit surprising to see the project's core developers
| in a sort of crisis mode while users worry about a tag that
| showed up in the project's repository
|
| This sentence just tells the reader that you still don't
| understand what the fuss is about because you are referring to
| past good will and not the simple fact that the name is wrong.
| Readers want to know that you understand their point of view
| before they are willing to read about your point of view.
| mrob wrote:
| "Lite Edition" isn't much better. The usual name for this kind
| of thing is "Community Edition", which has no negative
| connotations. But I don't see why it needs any special name.
| The LibreOffice brand is already harmed by the continued
| existence of OpenOffice, which many people still think of as
| the default free (as in beer) office suite despite its
| obsolescence. Complicating the LibreOffice name will only make
| things worse. IMO it should remain plain "LibreOffice", and the
| paid support version can be "LibreOffice Enterprise Edition".
| zucker42 wrote:
| Someone from TDF responded to a similar comment on Reddit:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ho0n51/update_on_lib.
| ..
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| Why so much talk about the ribbon? This article has nothing to
| say about that. This is about a Personal Edition and an
| Enterprise edition and how little revenue its actually coming in.
|
| Basically, libre office won't be libre anymore. Looks like
| Enterprise is gonna have a commercial license.
|
| By the way, I think the ribbon is far better than the ugly
| dropdown menus. It's also been over a decade since it was
| introduced. Some of yall are so resistant to change is bordering
| on zealotry. I hate to remind everyone about dropbox but dropbox.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Basically, libre office won 't be libre anymore_
|
| The personal version still will be, right?
|
| Now this would be something to worry about if all new feature
| development were put into enterprise, and the personal version
| stagnated.
|
| But from my experience in enterprise software, enterprise
| features are generally not even applicable to consumer users at
| all. They're things like single sign-on, approval workflow
| integration, private cloud integration and whatnot.
|
| It's not as if a bugfix for page margins will make it to the
| enterprise version and not the personal one.
|
| So this doesn't feel like something to worry about. If it
| provides the necessary financial resources to keep the personal
| edition alive, then I'm all for it.
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| Yeah I'm cool with it too, it's just not quote unquote true
| free software anymore. Which should be big news, but
| basically the whole first page of comments is all about the
| MS word ribbon
|
| Madness of crowds for sure
| mikece wrote:
| Is there a manifesto or document anywhere which lays out the
| economic case for (US) Federal grants to develop free software?
| How many developers and how many projects could be staffed full-
| time with a billion dollars set aside annually for an Office of
| Open Source Software?
|
| (Of course such an office would descend into a cluster-[bleep] of
| political warfare over topics that have nothing to do with
| developing software so spending nothing probably gets as much
| done in this area than creating a government office which costs
| money and doesn't get anything accomplished.)
| x87678r wrote:
| A better deal would be Fed paying MS, then MS charging other
| countries all over the world and MS collects big $$$ in profits
| and US tax paid. Much of SV started like this too.
| xvilka wrote:
| Instead of delivering the dead and long stalled project Apache
| should admit the failure of OpenOffice (with their commit rate vs
| LibreOffice's one it's obvious) and redirect to LibreOffice
| instead. They should officially deprecate it. Right now they are
| stealing potential users of LO with their substandard product.
| jandrese wrote:
| Personally I find LibreOffice Writer to be fine for my regular
| reports until something goes wrong and then it's like old
| versions of Word.
|
| For example, occasionally when I'm making a numbered list the
| tenth item and beyond will be bounced over a full tabstop which
| looks horrible. Then I'm trying to work around the problem by
| messing with the tab stops which causes problems for the rest of
| the document.
|
| It's really hard to fix when something goes wrong as a casual
| user. Inserting images/figures is fraught with peril too. I
| sometimes find myself hacking the doc until it looks presentable
| and then not touching it. It's like those old "smart" systems
| that weren't quite smart enough to get it right, but would fight
| you tooth and nail when you tried to undo what they did.
|
| For what its worth I prefer the consistency of its interface over
| the ever changing ribbon of Word. Word also tries to guess what
| you want and when it guesses wrong it's really annoying.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I was hoping to find an actual plan towards making the software
| better, more usable, and desirable. Instead it's just a
| "marketing plan" about splitting apart something that lags
| behind.
|
| Where's the vision?!
| rspoerri wrote:
| I'd like to use a open source text editor. But libreoffice text
| rendering is so bad, i cant use it. At least thats the case for
| me on osx, but i think this applies to all plattforms.
|
| Just compare text rendered in libreoffice and to the one in
| pages. It hurts my eyes.
| grandinj wrote:
| (LO Dev) Unfortunately, mac has the least interested
| programmers available to debug issues, and there is some weird
| interaction going on with our rendering on macOS that we can't
| track down.
| phonon wrote:
| The upcoming version is moving from Cairo to Skia for text
| rendering. It might help.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-07-10 23:00 UTC)