LibreOffice Says Its UI Is Way Better Than Microsoft Office's (neowin.net) 235
darwinmac writes: While many users choose Microsoft Office over LibreOffice because of its support for the proprietary formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), others prefer Office for its "better" ribbon interface. These users often criticize LibreOffice for having a "clunky" UI instead of the "standard" ribbon interface you would find in Word, Excel, and other Office apps.
Now, Neowin reports that LibreOffice is fighting back, arguing that its UI is actually superior because it is customizable, with several modes such as the classic toolbar interface, an Office-inspired ribbon layout, a sidebar-focused design, and more. Furthermore, it argues that there is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability" over other interface modes. LibreOffice says in a blog post: Incidentally, the characterization of ribbon-style interfaces as "modern" or "standard," used by several users, is not based on any objective usability parameter or design principle, but is the result of Microsoft's dominance in the market and the huge investments made when the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 as a new paradigm for productivity software. The idea that "modern" equals "similar to a ribbon" is a normalization effect: the Microsoft interface has become a benchmark because of its ubiquity, not because of its proven advantages in terms of usability. Added to this is the fact that many users evaluate office software through the lens of familiarity with Microsoft Office and consider deviation from it as a problem rather than a design choice. Before this, LibreOffice had also criticized its competitor OnlyOffice, accusing it of being "fake open source" because it believes OnlyOffice is working with Microsoft to lock users into the Office ecosystem by prioritizing the formats mentioned earlier instead of LibreOffice's own OpenDocument Format (ODF).
Now, Neowin reports that LibreOffice is fighting back, arguing that its UI is actually superior because it is customizable, with several modes such as the classic toolbar interface, an Office-inspired ribbon layout, a sidebar-focused design, and more. Furthermore, it argues that there is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability" over other interface modes. LibreOffice says in a blog post: Incidentally, the characterization of ribbon-style interfaces as "modern" or "standard," used by several users, is not based on any objective usability parameter or design principle, but is the result of Microsoft's dominance in the market and the huge investments made when the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 as a new paradigm for productivity software. The idea that "modern" equals "similar to a ribbon" is a normalization effect: the Microsoft interface has become a benchmark because of its ubiquity, not because of its proven advantages in terms of usability. Added to this is the fact that many users evaluate office software through the lens of familiarity with Microsoft Office and consider deviation from it as a problem rather than a design choice. Before this, LibreOffice had also criticized its competitor OnlyOffice, accusing it of being "fake open source" because it believes OnlyOffice is working with Microsoft to lock users into the Office ecosystem by prioritizing the formats mentioned earlier instead of LibreOffice's own OpenDocument Format (ODF).
This just in... (Score:4, Insightful)
Pepsi says their cola is way better than Coke's
(That they prefer their own user interface is newsworthy?)
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Just sayin.
Re:This just in... (Score:4, Funny)
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But from time to time, I wonder why I can't get no satisfaction....
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Pepsi says their cola is way better than Coke's
(That they prefer their own user interface is newsworthy?)
Both are equally shit... I just buy whichever is cheapest on the day (soft drink or office suites).
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pepsi does have studies to back it up, FWIW. As does LibreOffice.
And... on this... LibreOffice is objectively correct. Criticizing it for not using the Ribbon because it's not "newer" ignores the fact that the Ribbon was clearly a step down and there's not been any independent studies suggesting it's easier to use or more productive than a traditional menu/toolbar combination.
And part of this is because it literally isn't. While the latter is, actually, standard - that is, menus have a standard layout, meaning a user of Wordperfect was able to easily switch to Word back when that was a thing, Ribbons do not. There is nothing standard about the Ribbon. Microsoft's entire point with the Ribbon was to break muscle memory and prevent users from being able to switch from one application to another at a time when it was worried about being slapped down again by anti-trust authorities. If LibreOffice had a ribbon it would not help users switch to it.
I'm tired of people who are actually doing it right being criticized by those who want "new and shiny!" and do not care whether the new stuff is actually better than the old stuff.
So right now, very happy LibreOffice is defending itself, and fuck the critics demanding it get a UI downgrade.
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I use both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice regularly, and I find the later extremely ugly.
My main gripe with it is how white space is used. Every dialog screen, and every document window, has what looks, to me, weird white spacing everywhere, either too much, or too little.
My secondary gripe is with font rendering. For some reason a font that looks fine in MS Office (and that looks exactly the same in all other Windows apps I try it), looks subtly wrong in LibreOffice.
And my third gripe is with its icon pa
Ribbon, No. (Score:5, Insightful)
The ribbon format is just bad. There is no uniformity to the UI. You have to spend time learning the UI, rather than just using it.
This is definitely a situation where simpler is better, and it's very hard to beat the standard drop-down tree'd menu with modal dialogs at the leaves.
Re:Ribbon, No. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Ribbon, No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Ribbon, No. (Score:5, Funny)
Bah. Give me WordPerfect 5 with the card you place over the function keys on the keyboard. Memorize those key combos and you were a GOD.
Re: Ribbon, No. (Score:4, Insightful)
You kids and your fancy toys. DOS EDITOR was fine in my day, it's perfectly fine for you.
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Back in the 1990s when I was unemployed between highschool and University, "centerlink", the australian welfare office put me in a clerical course to learn office shit (It was glorious, I was the only guy in the class, and at 18 that is some magical shit, I dated my way all through that pool of of trainee secretaries lol. Helped I played guitar in a local punk band). Anyway we did a course on Wordperfect and man did I love that thing. Once you learned the key presses it was fast as hell. Word was more intui
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Bah. Give me WordPerfect 5 with the card you place over the function keys on the keyboard. Memorize those key combos and you were a GOD.
I was trying to show my youngling some basic skills on her new (school-mandated) laptop. I constantly had to stop myself from using keyboard combos - my preferred way to do a lot of things - because the poor kiddo was watching the screen and not my quick fingers. Stop, explain, overtly demonstrate, and monologue as I go along: "So now I've selected this text and Ctrl+C to copy, then I move the cursor over here and Ctrl+V to paste. Why is it Ctrl+V? Because 'C' is short for 'copy', and 'X' right next to i
Re: Ribbon, No. (Score:2)
By my lights, Word reached peak usability with v. 3.1 for Mac. It's been downhill ever since.
Re:Ribbon, No. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The ribbon was designed, and UI-tested, on people who had never used Word before and needed training-wheels to help them along. Experienced Word users, in other words most of the actual real users, disliked it because you needed to hunt around a mystery-meat selection of icons spread across different ribbon types to get the functionality you previously had available with a simple hotkey. It's only since the ribbon-interface versions came out that I've had to resort to web searches for doing what should be
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The ribbon was designed, and UI-tested, on people who had never used Word before and needed training-wheels to help them along. Experienced Word users, in other words most of the actual real users, disliked it because you needed to hunt around a mystery-meat selection of icons spread across different ribbon types to get the functionality you previously had available with a simple hotkey. It's only since the ribbon-interface versions came out that I've had to resort to web searches for doing what should be simple things because the ribbon UI hides them so well.
Much fun was had when troublshooting in real time during a meeting. All the ribbon users customized their ribbons, an I was left trying to figure out where what was. I had to make a proclamation that unless they left it stock, they would have to stand with me as I figured out what was screwed up.
Spaking of LibreOffice, is it less, well, buggy than it used to be? I really wanted to like it but every time I tried to use it there'd be glitches, things like graphics elements or text out of position or wrongly-formatted in Impress (to the point where I had to move the presentation across to a Windows box and edit it in PPT to fix up the problems), and don't even get me started on what Writer does once you get away from the more basic formatting and layout options.
Have they gotten the world standard Microslop's product to be identical between Mac and Windows, put out the product for Linux, Open and save in the formats they used to ignore, to not remember the printer the origi
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I much prefer the ribbon to the old style menus. I like having the menus as well, but I find it easier to locate the function I want visually with the ribbon most of the time.
I don't use LibreOffice much, just the occasional spreadsheet or document, so for me not having to remember which menu stuff is on, or read through long lists of menu items, is superior.
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I much prefer the ribbon to the old style menus. I like having the menus as well, but I find it easier to locate the function I want visually with the ribbon most of the time.
I don't use LibreOffice much, just the occasional spreadsheet or document, so for me not having to remember which menu stuff is on, or read through long lists of menu items, is superior.
It might be superior for some people, but what is your analysis of the majority of us who find the menu based superior?
I especially hate the customization of the ribbon. Anyone who had to troubleshoot another person's work in real time will probably agree.
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My guess is that if you use LibreOffice apps a lot, you build up some memory of where things are on the menus, and how they are organized. It may also be that some people prefer to work with text, and others prefer something more visual where the result of each function is shown graphically.
Re: Ribbon, No. (Score:2)
Re: Ribbon, No. (Score:4, Informative)
Learn it? I sitll haven't figured out where anything is, except for the Indent/Unindent buttons, and I still don't remember which is which.
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Re:Ribbon, No. (Score:4, Interesting)
The ribbon format is just bad. There is no uniformity to the UI. You have to spend time learning the UI, rather than just using it.
Lack of uniformity is the point. The UI is context sensitive which reduces the amount of cruft that is on display. You may not like it. Other people do. As the first post points out Pepsi tastes like shit even though Pepsi drinkers will insist it is superior.
The everything and the kitchen sink in your face approach is not good UI design either, yes it is uniform and static, but it fills the UI with greyed out unavailable options that really have no business being displayed at the time.
There is no right or wrong answer here, only a fuckton of personal preferences.
Re:Ribbon, No. (Score:5, Insightful)
The traditional menu *could* be made context sensitive. So that's missing the point. The point (for me, and I think for a lot of other ribbon-haters) is that icons are mostly indecipherable, you have to look at the text label (or worse, mouse-over) to know what they do. Whereas we all understand words. (If we didn't, we wouldn't be using *Word*.)
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The 'best of both worlds' approach, which is the standard interface, is to have a context sensitive icon bar, and the menu structure with everything. And everything is available with alt-*n* *y* keystrikes.
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The traditional menu *could* be made context sensitive. So that's missing the point.
They did make the traditional menu context sensitive. You ended up at the ribbon. The only difference is that the ribbon has bigger icons.
The point (for me, and I think for a lot of other ribbon-haters) is that icons are mostly indecipherable
They look perfectly fine to me. But iconography is a difficult industry. Attempting to please everyone is a challenge. Take for example the save icon. There's whole generations who don't know what that save icon represents other than they have been told that that icon represents save. Every attempt to modernise it for more inherent understanding has resulted in pissing of
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Microsoft's Ribbon is also better than LO's tabbed interface (ribbon clone) which just lets space go to waste. Even when there's lots of available screen real estate, lots of controls go unlabeled. Much of the point of the ribbon is that it's got those labels. When the ribbon shrinks, labels disappear first, then controls disappear, and so on in some sort of priority order which at least mostly makes sense.
LO has a contextual classic interface which is pretty good, if one doesn't like labels, as it doesn't
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The ribbon format is just bad. There is no uniformity to the UI. You have to spend time learning the UI, rather than just using it.
This is definitely a situation where simpler is better, and it's very hard to beat the standard drop-down tree'd menu with modal dialogs at the leaves.
I tend to agree. It seems as if they took the menu options, which were all in a logical tree arrangement, shuffled them briefly, and scattered them on the top of the page.
That may be unfair - There may be fans of the ribbon interface who find it more useable. My perspective is that of a user who only occasionally uses the software and needs to look for functionality that I remember being there.
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The Ribbon is *exactly* why I switched from MsOffice to LibreOffice as soon as I retired. (I had to use Ms for my employer.)
Agreed (Score:2)
Menus are fine. Words are good.
Some stupid nondismissable palette that replaces menus in order to take up 20x the vertical screen space and makes you solve pictogram puzzles for functionality... well, it makes me use other software. Like Libreoffice.
May be stuck with Microsoft's shitware at work, but can use decent software at home.
Re: Ribbon, No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even worse. You learn something, and the ribbon changes with the the next update because Microsoft knows better.
This is especially destructive to older people, who didn't grow up with computers, and for whom a button in w different place can mean a difference between feeling independent and completing a job themselves, or going into a complete breakdown of self-confidence.
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Even worse. You learn something, and the ribbon changes with the the next update because Microsoft knows better.
This isn't unique to the ribbon, so it's not a problem with the ribbon, but with UI in general. Stuff in menus or traditional toolbars can get rearranged or renamed too.
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Unfortunately, the implementation was not. The implementation of the function points in VBA was a mess, and the context sensitivity of the ribbon (which should have been strongly event driven) was botched.
And now, 40 years into the game, Microsoft still can't make a settings/configur
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As someone who uses LibreOffice regularly I'm not sure I agree entirely: The ribbon makes discoverability and use of (default) keyboard shortcuts much easier, and I find myself having to dig deep in documentation to find a lot of shortcuts on LibreOffice. The sequential ALT, key, key, key shortcut system the ribbon allows is quite useful and something I miss on LO.
If I were purely a mouse user I might be inclined to agree with you...
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Alt-key, key works in Libreoffice, and any app with a menu.
The letters you use are underlined whenever you hold down the alt key, and the shortcuts are there in the menu too, on the right hand side.
The only difference is that Word's ribbons overlay the key's letter over the button, and libreoffice (and any other menu-driven program) underlines them. Programs used to always display the underlining, which made things more discoverable, but I guess it did look slightly messy.
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Yes, Base doesn't get a lot of love. The main audience for Libreoffice, and certainly its developers, would prefer to implement a database directly on their choice of SQL server and use whatever scripting languages and graphics libraries they are familiar with for an interface, instead of learning things like Access or Base.
True (Score:5, Insightful)
I hated the ribbon when it came out, and still do. It's a stupid interface. Not having it is a definite advantage of LibreOffice.
The ribbon UI wasn't "better"; it just justified somebody's (or some team of somebodies's) job.
Re:True (Score:4, Insightful)
Better is completely subjective. The problem with the ribbon UI is that it is different. As you said you hated it when it came out, so for you it was a change. People who started on it from the onset probably think quite different and think the ribbon is "better" than the icon dump / context insensitive menu that is Libre Office.
The reality is "better" is always what *YOU* used first. It's what you adapted to, what you learned and what you know. Everything else regardless of any metrics used to describe it is worse because it requires unlearning / retraining.
A good UI example of this is the save icon. In 2016 when LibreOffice changed the save icon people acted as if the world had ended. The darling of UI design for old school techies and neckbeards got crucified on the alter of no-change as a result. Their saving grace was that they didn't change the location of the icon so motor memory still allowed people to figure out how to save their files.
UI design is hard. There is no perfect answer. There is no universally "better" option, there is just "better" in specific situations for specific people. It's an emotional field. In some cases the objectively better option is hated. Take for example cars dashboards. Displaying speed as a number instead of a dial is universally better. This is the result of decades of HMI research that shows when you need to calculate an absolute (what is my speed, how does it compare to the speed limit) reading a number is better than looking at a dial (which is better at presenting rate of change information). Yet people seem to hate the idea of not having a dial to the point where new all digital UIs attempt to replicate the dials of your granddaddy on your dashboard, even if it makes you drive objectively worse by distracting you for longer.
UI is hard, because people are irrational and emotional.
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Foobar2000 manages UI needs by letting people extend it as far as they need or want to. All software could be similiar but large corprations are generally incapable of producing small and effective software.
The difference is night and day (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft Office is a nightmare of broken design concepts, clutter, confusion, disorganization, and latency that takes you back to 1200 baud dial up. I don't think it's possible to intentionally carry out work in MS Office, its confetti cannons approach to structure leaves any user confused, annoying, angered, and feeling like they had sudden onset dementia. No user can seriously claim the interface approaches usability, it's not just a dumper, or dumper fire, it's a dumper fire, being constantly fed fresh grease, on wheels, rolling down hill on train tracks, into an orphanage.
To contrast MS Office with LibreOffice, is contrasting a 4-year-old playing T-ball, with a major league MPV who just broke the Home Run record in the world series. LibreOffice doesn't have to hit back, they won, their interface, well, not a shinning example of excellent, is at least usable.
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I hate that I can't run MS Office on my cluster of headless Linux servers.
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You could if you were running Wine on a virtual desktop!
(I know you were being sarcastic)
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Re: The difference is night and day (Score:2)
This is hilarious
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Let's ignore the fact MS Office can't run on the vast majority of computers, since it only has Windows and Mac support.
I didn't realize that 15% is the "vast majority." Guess I must have flunked out of 5th grade.
Or are you running word processors and spreadsheets on servers for some, undoubtedly deranged reasons? Because I'm pretty sure that people who do that are an even smaller percentage of the overall market.
Didn't bother to read the rest, since your first sentence conclusively proved you shouldn't post to /. while mainlining heroin.
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Microsoft is known as a company who can't make a usable UI / UX, it's their entire identity:
"Bad software, bad design, incompetence
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Context Matters (Score:5, Interesting)
So, back in 2008, Microsoft UX designers did a whole presentation [youtube.com] regarding how they came up with the Ribbon UI.
It's a really interesting watch, even if you don't agree with their conclusions - some of the early prototypes look awesome, even if they failed the functionality test. The relatively short summary is that most of the features end users were asking for, were already in the products, and there was a discovery problem. Menus had grown from 5-or-fewer entries to nearly two dozen per menu, including the "tools" menu that was pretty much a catch-all for everything else. Toolbars had gotten so numerous that having all of them present left very little space for the actual document. A number of iterations were tried, and after a whole lot of iteration, the Ribbon UI was the outcome.
Now, in fairness, my biggest argument was that they should have had both options AND search as day-one features. The Mac version of Office 2007 had both menus and ribbons. Peter Schmidt made the "Ribbon Customizer" utility that added the menus back into the PC version. Custom ribbon tabs wouldn't be added until Office 2010. Search wasn't added in until Office 2016, ten years after the Ribbon came out. There was most definitely room for improvement in the jump between the menus/toolbars and the ribbon, and I'll wholeheartedly agree that the forced transition was one of the biggest sources of pushback at the time, and justifiably so.
That being said, between search and customizable ribbon tabs, I'm not convinced that the current iteration of the ribbon is *bad*, though I do think the 2007 look was a bit nicer than the 'flat white' look of 2013 and later iterations. In terms of "that's how we've always done it"...I'm not sure I buy that, either. Office as a suite was released in 1995, giving the menus-and-toolbars 12 years of active use. Even if you want to stretch it back to Word for Windows 1.0 in 1990, that's still 16 years, while the Ribbon UI has been the mainstay for 19 years. The ribbon has been the Word interface for longer than menus-and-toolbars, so while that doesn't make the Ribbon UI "good", either objectively or subjectively, it *does* reflect a service life long enough that many current Office users would consider Word 2003 to be the more foreign and unfamiliar UI.
In terms of LibreOffice, I love that it exists, I think it's super functional, and really could replace MS Office for most people in practice. However, I do think that the UX design team is great at creating a very *functional* UI, but not necessarily a very *pretty* UI. Now, this is inherently subjective, and the cries of "but Office 2024 is ugly!" aren't something I'd necessarily argue. However, I *would* say that LibreOffice would probably do itself a solid if it were to give itself some sort of theming engine, reminiscent of Winamp / Sonique / Windows Media Player in the days of old. If it were possible to leave it up to the users and community to make UI iterations, everyone could win - and that's something that's possible with LibreOffice that MS Office can never do.
^^^ Mod Parent UP (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an extremely insightful, accurate, and level headed comment.
The most important problem that you pointed out with MS Office is
there was a discovery problem. Menus had grown from 5-or-fewer entries to nearly two dozen per menu, including the "tools" menu that was pretty much a catch-all for everything else. Toolbars had gotten so numerous that having all of them present left very little space for the actual document.
LibreOffice is at this same point right now. So many options that discoverability is like an Everest expedition.
I'll just add that LO does have theming. Extensive theming. Lots more menues and appearance options. You just have to dig.
View -> User Interface
Tools -> Options -> LibreOffice -> View
Tools -> Options -> LibreOffice -> Appearance
and perhaps more.
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This is one of the things that's really good about InDesign, and has been ever since it was Aldus Pagemaker. There is a lot of complex functionality in it, but it's grouped well.
The fact you not only have to dig for the interface options in LO but also need them is the problem.
Re:Context Matters (Score:5, Insightful)
Egypt gave up hieroglyphics after the mostly alphabetic Hieratic (and later Demotic) writing system came into use. Two millennia later, it took the Rosetta stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
We grew up with an alphabetic writing system, why on earth would Microsoft want to replace that with indecipherable icons?
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thank you.
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Because a significant percentage of Americans are illiterate, and MS thinks America is the whole world.
Hint for MS: Illiterates probably are not using a word processor.
(Unless preparing word salads for Trump to eat).
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I remember the massive push in the 90's to move to text-less icons. In the early days, developers figured that standard icons would save on having to make a zillion language translations. That, and it would help to show off all those fancy new graphic color display modes.
These days... I dunno. Tradition and habit?
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We grew up with an alphabetic writing system
We also grew up with symbols. I just barely come from a time when interfaces were commonly pure text, and in fact my first PC was a 5150 with a text-only card which literally could not display graphics at all. But macs and Amigas and other systems with real GUIs existed and software on such platforms was often easier to use.
Even putting computing aside, we're all familiar with certain symbols. Statistically nobody has to be told what a red octagon means. By the logic which says that alphabetic writing is al
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What's bad about the ribbon is that at some scales, some things disappear. I've got a dinky laptop 1080p display and two 22" 1080p displays (this is not a hypothetical) and so I've got scaling on the laptop display and when I have to drag something there in office, I lose stuff from the ribbon. This is especially problematic in Excel where important stuff like the word wrap button vanishes. At home (where I thankfully work four days) I use one big (42.5") 4k TV and this gives me the best of all worlds
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The ribbon only goes past the right edge if you pack it full...
I've changed nothing.
I don't know what the obsession is over the UI... the biggest majority of the stuff you need has keyboard shortcuts
I use most features only rarely, why would I remember their shortcuts? I already have 3495340992342349 other things to remember, all of which should be more important.
UI Design is an Art (Score:2)
I'm not sure what triggered the development of the "ribbon" interface, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was an example of that phenomenon you get in large companies, where you have to keep changing things (Let's charitably call it "innovation") in order to demonstrate your worth. When an important new manager assumes a new post, they will never say "Things are going well as they are now". They will need to make drastic changes. This "need" has precious little relation to the current quality of product, or
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I heard a rumor many years ago from someone supposedly involved that the reason was that a non-expert focus group had found dropdown menus scary and intimidating.
No idea of the amount of actual truth in that, but it does seem like microsoft's methods would lend to their making the mistake of reducing top end complexity in the vain pursuit of making things 'intuitive', as if there's some innate way that humans should just know how to use computers without any education or intent to learn.
I Agree (Score:2)
LibreOffice toolbar is superior. It is customizable 6 ways to Sunday. It can even have themes. I wasn't even aware of some of the customization options until this article made me go and look at it.
But instead of fighting the tide, why not give people what they want? Apparently enough people want it and have complained enough for LibreOffice to blog it and for it to appear in the news.
So give the people what they want. Give them a Ribbon bar theme and allow them to choose their theme at first start. You can
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> I guarantee that 99% of LibreOffice users rely on the default drab, "looks like Office 95" appearance, simply because they have no idea that the customizations are available.
For me, I leave it as it is so that I can google for answers when I can't find something or can't work out how to do it. FWIW, that's mostly successful when I need to do it. Differentiating between the wordprocessor and spreadsheet (etc) can be annoyingly hard though.
I don't really use Word, but somehow I can find what I want most
Calc needs a lot of work. (Score:2)
Re: Calc needs a lot of work. (Score:2)
Pretty much all those big solutions you are talking about are being replaced with SaaS solutions as the boomers who made these spreadsheet monstrosities age out of the workforce. While I do not like the cloud-everything part of this, at least the data is in a database, where it belongs.
Re: Calc needs a lot of work. (Score:2)
Agreed. Like it or not, Excel is THE standard for spreadsheets. Not supporting every part of excel (aside from vba) is like building train tracks of a different width. It's never going anywhere.
Every time I try to use Calc, the first thing that gets me is the shortcuts. I have decades of muscle memory with excel shortcuts, and so many people do that Microsoft still supports them for 20 years after the ribbon eliminated menus. Alt-e d r = delete row. Now and forever, there is no changing it. If you don't hav
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The ribbon is an abomination. I've seen regular users navigate by SEARCHING the menu system!
Keyboard shortcuts on any professional software need to be configurable and export/importable or otherwise it is not seriously professional (but perhaps it's just toxic vendor lock in and should be a deal breaker.)
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I use calc a lot, after 20 years of Excel. I agree it needs some work - it crashes from time to time, and engages in some unexpected behaviours (random font changes??). OTOH, many shortcuts are the same as Excel, and it hasn't been too burdensome to learn a few new ones. Meanwhile, Excel has reduced shortcut functionality, by effectively introducing speedbumps. Hit Alt+E+S+V at the rate you did in the 2010s, and you will often be left with a floating "Office Access Key" info box.
Task-based Education (Score:3)
The idea that "modern" equals "similar to a ribbon" is a normalization effect: the Microsoft interface has become a benchmark because of its ubiquity, not because of its proven advantages in terms of usability. Added to this is the fact that many users evaluate office software through the lens of familiarity with Microsoft Office and consider deviation from it as a problem rather than a design choice.
Possibly highlighting a difference in how users learned to use the software. I have long held a belief the methods to teach tech can be divided into two classes. One we'll call the "theory-oriented". You learn about how the software functions and what features do, but less about specific procedures.You would learn about spreadsheet application, but not necessarily Microsoft Excel. It's the method you're more likely to learn in traditional education settings. The other I call the "task-oriented approach". It teaches the software via learning how to do common tasks in it step-by-step method. It's what you're likely to encounter in "boot camps" and on-the-job training. You're using X app, here's how you do Y in the app.
The former method will give you a more rounded understanding of the technology that you can apply other places, but it takes longer as there is more material to cover and it requires the student to use critical thinking to apply what they learned to specific situations (I need to do this with this data -- how can I accomplish that understanding how these types of programs work?)
The latter method gives you direct instruction in how to accomplish what you need. It's faster and more focused. But you're left with less understanding of how the technology functions verses the Theory approach. Companies prefer this method for their own training because it gets their employees up and running doing the tasks they need faster. They learn idiosyncrasies of the company's tools and following the organization's internal procedures too. But it conveniently also gives them fewer transferable skills they can take to a new job when they're just following a memorized or documented procedure to do a task, with little understanding of what is happening.
People bemoaning LibreOffice not miming Microsoft Office are more likely people who have a Task-Oriented understanding of the software. They know to go to A menu and choose B command and then enter values in blanks C,D,E, formatted in __ way, to get F result. They can do what they most commonly need quickly. But when the interface changes they now struggle with how to adapt and accomplish the same task as easily since they are only familiar with how the other thing worked. With a Theory-based understanding you know what you are trying to do and can infer the method through the discoverability of the software's interface. You don't need to be told where a specific feature is because you know how it's categorized in that class of the software and likely places to find it. There's just a learning curve to figure out and remember so you can access it quicker day-to-day.
When I was in high school I took a computer applications class (this was a beginner class necessary if you wanted to take higher-level classes). The class was taught in a lab using Microsoft Works for DOS. Keep in mind this is the late 1990s. The GUI, Macintosh, Windows 95 have all been a thing for awhile, and we're learning computer apps on DOS. No one is going to be using this software in the real world now. The result was the instruction was theory-based. You learned the functions of word processing software, so when you sat down to Office 6.0 (or whatever the current version was then) you went to the menu/dialog that dealt with the same type of feature to find the command you wanted. You didn't go "Oh noes! There's no [foo] button on the ribbon! What do I do?"
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People bemoaning LibreOffice not miming Microsoft Office are more likely people who have a Task-Oriented understanding of the software
My first thought reading the article was to snicker at the mental image of people saying "This office productivity suite that isn't Microsoft Office is worse than Microsoft Office because it doesn't look/work exactly like Microsoft Office" and wondering how they managed to get themselves so deeply grafted into the look and feel of Office that they're unable to cope with the concept that a different program will almost certainly have functions in different places.
Fuck the ribbon (Score:2)
It's not JUST the Ribbon that's wrong (Score:2)
There are a lot of people here posting that the Ribbon is a bad design, and I agree with them 110%. But that's not the only thing that's wrong with Word: it also distributes controls all around the edges, and unless you use it day in and day out, and use those distributed controls, it's a pain finding them.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice has copied this bad UI from Microsoft. I'm looking at LO Writer now, and in addition to the menu at the top, there's a sidebar on the right with eight or ten indecipherable ic
Ribbon is less cluttered (Score:2)
Always hated that stupid ribbon (Score:2)
Turned it off from day one.
What a stupid cop-out (Score:2)
"You can fix it" is not a good response to "it sucks."
Write is better than Word. EXCEPT THE MENU. The ribbon is just better. Deal with it.
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besides, you can customize the goddamn ribbon
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But if you work on five different computers over the course of a day, customizing will get you beaten up by five different people every day.
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But if you work on five different computers over the course of a day, customizing will get you beaten up by five different people every day.
My profile follows me from computer to computer. Office settings like custom toolbars are stored in the user profile. If you're logging in as five other users during the course of your work day, your workplace was set up by abject incompetents.
I really miss (Score:2)
WordPerfect 5.1 and 5.2
There, I said it. It had too many keyboard shortcuts, but at least it did what I needed.
Same with Lotus 123.
Proprietary formats (Score:3)
Is this still a common issue? I migrated from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice a few months ago, and I haven't had a problem with any of my existing .docx and .xlsx files. (Same with .pptx, but I rarely do anything in PowerPoint.)
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I regularly have problems with .pptx but it's because it doesn't embed the fonts so layout frequently breaks when you move between computers.
They are obviously right, but (Score:2)
hacks doing hacks (Score:3)
it argues that there is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability" over other interface modes.
They are so tame.
The "ribbon UI" is dogshit. It is the product of office politics. One section within MS kept tacking on features to Word, Excel, etc. - many of whom less than 1% of users actually use. Any other company would have seperated the UI into a "normal" and an "expert" mode, where ordinary users would get the 99% of features they use in a simplified UI and be happy, and for the once-per-year advanced feature they'd have to jump a couple layers deep into menus. But you can't have that once office politics enters the room, because nobody can stand being less important. So the UI team was tasked with coming up with an interface that offers everything, despite it being impossible to fit on screen. The result: Ribbon shit.
The fact that absolutely nobody outside the MS Office world has copied it speaks volumes about how bad it is. Good ideas get copied before they had time to dry.
Ribbon - yes (Score:2)
The ribbon in MS applications is fine by me. What irks me is the new style of windows that have search boxes, icons and notifications in the title bar.
Sometimes I don't know where to click to drag a window without finding some icon that someone thought needed to be prominently shown where maximise, minimise and close should be.
The loss of the top left corner menu is a smaller issue, but I often miss the Windows 3.x consistency in window controls.
M$ Office is way too bloated (Score:2)
It is easy to have a better UI than M$ Office, it is way too bloated.
Ribbon got me to switch away from MS Office (Score:2)
Micr$soft being evil, is it even a contest? (Score:3)
M$ is an evil corproration run by evil people for evil people, why would anyone want to support that?
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Hello and welcome to 2026. i don't blame you, nobody could have foreseen this, but apparently Microsoft is no longer evil. ... I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop,
WSL2, github, VS Code
Sorry, no. If you think that microsoft does anything that not calculated to increase thier wealth and decrease thier responsibility, we are not seeing the same classist transnatioanl corporation which corrupted our technologies, economies and governments just so they could wallow in it.
All these upper class people are exactly what evil is and they and their corruption and economic hoarding are exactly why our biosphere and our societies are in such decline.
If people say your UI is clunky, it is (Score:2)
Hopefully, it is not an official statement from the LibreOffice UI designers, because it would be extremely arrogant.
"But it is customizable" is the worst argument ever. Sure, customization can be a good thing, but if users didn't notice it was, that's a UI fail, and customization doesn't replace sensible defaults.
And about "the Microsoft interface has become a benchmark because of its ubiquity, not because of its proven advantages in terms of usability". Ubiquity by itself has a proven advantage in terms o
Ribbons suck balls (Score:2)
I use a macro set that restores my damned menus the way I've been using them since I was forced to use the hot pile of dog vomit known as MS word.
Ribbons are for kids who aren't capable remembering keyboard shortcuts. Ask any professional writer how useful the ribbon is when they need to stop typing and then use a mouse to access a command a couple hundred times a day. Literally.
MS keeps dumbing down the Office interfaces and stuffing more functions onto the ribbon or removing the keyboard shortcuts to forc
No it's not (Score:2)
"LibreOffice Says Its UI Is Way Better Than Microsoft Office's"
Get the fuck outta here with that shit. LibreOffice has a crap UI and frankly it's just gotten worse in the last decade. It's barely usable IMHO.
In closing, I'd like some of what Neowin is smoking, but in a smaller dose.
Re: all of their UIs suck (Score:2)
Re: Goodbye LibreOffice (Score:5, Informative)
Collabora office is LibreOffice. The UI you want is two clicks away in regular LibreOffice, it just is not the default.
I hate the ribbon interface. It is extremely inefficient. Things are hidden, it requires multiple clicks to get to basic functions, and it takes up too much room.
The best word processor interface is to put the LibreOffice toolbars vertically to the side like how Adobe interfaces work (or ClarisWorks back in the day). It frees up the most vertical space, which is what you always need more of in a word processor, and you can quickly get to everything you need.
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The best word processor interface is to put the LibreOffice toolbars vertically to the side like how Adobe interfaces work (or ClarisWorks back in the day). It frees up the most vertical space, which is what you always need more of in a word processor,
No, I don't. I have a 4k display, none of that stuff is a problem for me. I leave the interface elements at the top and when I need the window to be taller, I drag it to the left or right edge and I get a double height window. Keeping the interface at the top means that I have room for another one of those next to it.
Big displays are cheap now. What year is it?