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LibreOffice 4.0 releasedLibreOffice 4.0 releasedPosted Feb 8, 2013 11:22 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753)In reply to: LibreOffice 4.0 released by aryonoco Parent article: LibreOffice 4.0 released The trouble with those toolbars is you can fit only so many choices in them, and if what you want is not the software designer's idea of a common operation, you have to hunt around in some other way, which at least in Microsoft's ribbon implementation gets frustrating. I much prefer well-designed dropdown menues. There can be a toolbar, but it must be easy to configure so the user can put there just what he considers frequent operations. (In fact, this pretty much describes the current OOo interface, except the placement of items to menues is not always so logical).
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LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 15:14 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Just a point of fact, it's not developer whim which determined the order and size of buttons in the MS Ribbon but massive user data collection to show which operations are the most used.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 20:45 UTC (Fri) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
This. And you can also add things to the ribbon. The ribbon is inexpressibly better than than the old system.
(Tangentially, I'm pretty sure I'm the only reader of LWN who gets paid to use Word all day, so if you're going to respond to this comment telling me I'm wrong, you better bring the data. ;)
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 5:53 UTC (Sun) by rgmoore (subscriber, #75) [Link] I think the ribbon is a genuine, major improvement, but that a lot of experienced users took a long time to warm up to it because it's such a big change. Once you get used to it, though, it's clearly better, especially if you're doing a whole series of operations that use the same class of commands (e.g. a whole bunch of formatting).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 12:12 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>I think the ribbon is a genuine, major improvement, but that a lot of experienced users took a long time to warm up to it because it's such a big change.
I agree, but I think a large part of the problem is that it was released half-baked. In Office 2007 the ribbon was barely customisable, so you ended up with the worst of both worlds; in 2010 I think it's a great example of good UI design which is both relatively user-friendly and relatively powerful. It's not outstanding in either regard, but I think it *is* outstanding in how well it's made the trade-off.
Office 2010 is the first Microsoft product that to me feels like a real professional tool, despite its remaining flaws.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 16:38 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
Not sure about data, but whether I like it or not my days also contains a substantial amount of time with both Microsoft Office and LO/OO. At the beginning (this was some years ago) I forced myself to use OO over time to get over the initial hurdles. My employer jumped on the ribbon bandwagon quickly, so I have had daily exposure to it for years now. I hate them, I really hate them. They occupy way to much space vertically, a show-stopper in itself. More annoyingly, I find them hard to navigate. Even very frequent operations are spread across different ribbons, forcing me to navigate them. I can place about three rows of LO icons (haven't measured, but I am surprised if I am far off here) with the same space occupied by one ribbon, but two rows are sufficient to cover all of my the most common operations. Again without checking, I would guess you need about three ribbons to cover two rows of LO icons.
With respect to menus, just about any other software in the universe uses them. Hence, the data is overwhelming, we all know how to maneuver them. We all know how the shortcuts go.
As for most people MS Office is but a tool, my day is filled with other stuff too, so there is a limit to how much time I want to spend learning how to use ribbons effectively. After years with ribbons, I still prefer the traditional ui, and I am pretty sure I am more productive with it. On my laptop I avoid MS Office totally, it takes too much screen to be useful at all (I know I can hide all the functionality, but kind of defeats the purpose).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 20:16 UTC (Sun) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
Ribbons are about easy discoverability, and fundability (for things you already know about). You have a series of labeled tabs, and in those tabs are a series of grouped controls. The most common ones, with very recognizable icons (such as bold/italics/underline) aren't labeled and just have an icon... the more obscure ones, with less descriptive icons (such as "Insert Citation") are given a label as well.
Having used Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and KOffice a decent chunk over the 2000s, of the three I preferred using KOffice the most (OO had an absurdly slow start time). And then I had to use Office 2007, which introduced the Ribbon. In no time at all, I already preferred the new interface, and was using features I didn't even know existed (such as managing citations). The Ribbon creates tiered, logical 2D groupings of controls. With a toolbar, you sort of have 1D groupings of icons... which is fine with a half dozen icons, but becomes worse and worse the more icons you introduce.
When I've talked to various technical people, they'll often bash the ribbon... but then they tend to always opt to use ribbon-based interfaces instead of non-ribbon. Based off the non-technical users I know... they tend to be able to do more with post-Ribbon versions of Office than pre-Ribbon versions (they'll use a wider feature set, instead of just basic font editing, like would happen before).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 21:13 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
> Ribbons are about easy discoverability, and fundability (for things you already know about).
Maybe it is just me, but I find myself lost in the ribbons searching for basic functionality. Hence, my experience differ from yours here. When I ask my colleagues where to find said stuff, they more often than not do not know either.
> I preferred using KOffice the most
Nice to hear. Generally I love the KDE stack, so I am kind of waiting for Calligra to mature. I am planning on giving it a serious try when the developers claim it is ready.
> The Ribbon creates tiered, logical 2D groupings of controls. With a toolbar, you sort of have 1D groupings of icons... which is fine with a half dozen icons, but becomes worse and worse the more icons you introduce.
I think this is where we differ. I really want to keep it simple. 1D is simple. I hate when people start going overboard with the features in MS Office, it always leads to a terrible mess, where I (after having waisted three days with a well-meaning support person somewhere in Bangalore) need to copy and paste page by page into a fresh document, and hurry off to make a pdf of it before anybody mess up the formatting again. Citations, or more generally cross-referencing is one of the problem spots that have given me grief. Sometimes I wonder whether the proponents of MS Office ever have had any experience with serious documents. To me, a hundred pages was always a hard limit before everything went nuclear.
Actually, it has consistently been so bad that I have stayed away from large Word reports the last years. Instead, mediawiki has provided a much better way of communicating results, and preserving knowledge. The added value for the employer is just tremendous, I cannot imagine how ineffective the old word reports were at preserving knowledge. Preserving knowledge is the main challenge of technology companies today, and MS Office is not helping. Don't even get me started on Sharepoint.
Spreadsheets are if possible even worse. Seems some people try use them for developing full graphical applications, producing advanced reports, and doing complex calculations and data management. It is my firm belief that such endavours are best undertaken in more tailored environments.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 19, 2013 21:42 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
The ribbon makes a fine replacement for a stack of toolbars, but a poor replacement for the menu bar (IMHO, of course).
People needing to do "serious" work mostly don't use MS Word in any case due to its abysmal styling and layout controls.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 20, 2013 10:07 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
> People needing to do "serious" work mostly don't use MS Word in any case due to its abysmal styling and layout controls.
And with this comment, you've just shown that you're totally biased and not worth listening to, thanks.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 20, 2013 12:38 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
You say bias and I say regrettable. The amount of hair-tearing frustration involved in trying to make a document done in MSWord look good approaches incredible as complexity or size increases.
There are a lot of people who don't have or don't know about better options, but nobody who has a choice uses Word for anything that requires sophisticated layout or styling. If some places require .doc submissions... so much the worse, they'll get poorly formatted input.
A word processor isn't a typesetting/page layout program and isn't supposed to be. Word compounds this by making even simple things harder than they have to be.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 20, 2013 12:46 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
Your post mistake/miswording is this: "serious work" == "sophisticated layout or styling".
Yes Word isn't the good tool for sophisticated layout or styling, but in most case people don't care they can do their "serious work" with basic layout/styling.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 20, 2013 10:11 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
> People needing to do "serious" work mostly don't use MS Word in any case due to its abysmal styling and layout controls.
I keep hearing this, but that might only be true in your world. You'd be surprised how many e.g. academic journals in the social and management sciences accept *only* .doc[x] for submissions, for instance. (where often the backoffice converts the files to latex files as part of the typesetting).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 15, 2013 8:41 UTC (Fri) by MortenSickel (subscriber, #3238) [Link]
In my former job I was using MS office a lot, and never really got used to the ribbon, one of my main annoiances was like you said "They occupy way to much space vertically, a show-stopper in itself." - especially when working on a not-too-large widescreen laptop - but somehow I discovered that by clicking the bottom of the ribbon, it get minimized .- so then it was possible to Get Work Done (tm) - despite the ribbon. Just clik on it again and it is back to it old space-waste.
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