Thanks Italo for clipping many weekly resources about LibreOffice around the world. I am surprised mine is here. I know this from Dr. Roy at Mastodon. Congratulations for the success of LibreOffice!
By James Harking
Hi Italo,
An interesting update as usual, thank you. I think there is a common thread with those links:
The Phoronix Link
If you read the comments there isn’t really much discussion about new functionality rather back end changes in V7 but there is a telling comment that I am pasting below:
06-22-2020, 05:11 PM
I hope that it will feel more fresh, modern, smooth, refined and fun. LibreOffice 6.4 feels very old school.
From the 2nd article you linked to from the download crew the below statements are highlighted as areas to be improved in LibreOffice:
‘While LibreOffice lacks the slick presentation of rival Windows freebie Kingsoft Office Suite Free and its Office-inspired ribbon interface, it has the major advantage of offering a full set of office applications, including database, drawing package and mathematical tool on top of the requisite word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool found in most free office suites.
While it’s definitely more navigable than before thanks to better placement of tools and visual previews of styles direct from the main toolbar, it still looks a little dated, despite the refreshed icon sets.’
I think that this highlights the lack of discoverability of features in LibreOffice for average end users. LibreOffice as I know you are aware of does have have a user view somewhat equivalent to the ‘Ribbon’ in the Notebook bar tabbed interface.
The trouble is that not many people do not know that this exists. It is a feature that needs to be highlighted to all users, I feel the default view causes negative first impressions for many that remain with users of the suite, certainly my opinion is that a new user should be encouraged to use LibreOffice over Kingsoft, it appears that the fact that Kingsoft is perceived to look better is reason to go with it primarily from that article.
I discussed some of my rational in a Reddit post with Mike Saunders and on the LibreOffice blog:
I think if you have 5 minutes spare it is worth reading to understand the opinion that a number of LibreOffice users have.
To your Final linked post of LibreOffice on ZorinOS
I think the headline really says it all:
LibreOffice Looks Gorgeous on Zorin OS
Do you know that LibreOffice looks pretty on Zorin? The developers apparently made excellent effort so that its appearance looks well shaped as from its desktop, its start menu, to file manager, every app looks pretty, and this includes the office suite. I present you here short videos and simple reviews of these beautiful combination for our computing. Enjoy!
Now the reason primarily for this is that they are shipping with the Tabbed interface by default from the Notebookbar / Muffin menu.
This gives a very fresh look to LibreOffice that sadly you don’t get out of the box with 6.4 / 7 beta 2. The little customization mader by the Zorin team have really improved the acceptance factor. I dare say for anyone under the age of 18 in education they will have likely only ever known an interface ‘similar’ to this from Microsoft Office.
For younger people the shipping interface is harder to use and less familiar due to the likeness to the older Microsoft Office 97 – 2003 versions.
There is an open bug report to this that new users should be presented with a choice of interface on first launching the software. This is how Kingsoft and Softmakes / Free Office work.
By default the OnlyOffice client also looks somewhat similar to Microsoft Office also.
Please do not think I am criticizing the current interface, far from it I think it has proved to work well for many years but I do not believe it is what newer and younger users are used to and not showing off other interfaces to LibreOffice is a competitive disadvantage.
By offering users a choice on the interface they use on first launch you would be cattering for all users and this would quell the concerns of the people who constantly refer to LibreOffice looking ‘dated.’
Finally can I ask if there is their any priorityto improve the look of LibreOffice on Windows as currently it looks considerably worse than the Linux counterpart? As the vast majority of LibreOffice users are on Windows it would make some sense to put effort here.
The open bug I referred to earlier regarding an option user interface selection on first start for LibreOffice is:
Thanks Italo for clipping many weekly resources about LibreOffice around the world. I am surprised mine is here. I know this from Dr. Roy at Mastodon. Congratulations for the success of LibreOffice!
Hi Italo,
An interesting update as usual, thank you. I think there is a common thread with those links:
The Phoronix Link
If you read the comments there isn’t really much discussion about new functionality rather back end changes in V7 but there is a telling comment that I am pasting below:
06-22-2020, 05:11 PM
I hope that it will feel more fresh, modern, smooth, refined and fun. LibreOffice 6.4 feels very old school.
From the 2nd article you linked to from the download crew the below statements are highlighted as areas to be improved in LibreOffice:
‘While LibreOffice lacks the slick presentation of rival Windows freebie Kingsoft Office Suite Free and its Office-inspired ribbon interface, it has the major advantage of offering a full set of office applications, including database, drawing package and mathematical tool on top of the requisite word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool found in most free office suites.
While it’s definitely more navigable than before thanks to better placement of tools and visual previews of styles direct from the main toolbar, it still looks a little dated, despite the refreshed icon sets.’
I think that this highlights the lack of discoverability of features in LibreOffice for average end users. LibreOffice as I know you are aware of does have have a user view somewhat equivalent to the ‘Ribbon’ in the Notebook bar tabbed interface.
The trouble is that not many people do not know that this exists. It is a feature that needs to be highlighted to all users, I feel the default view causes negative first impressions for many that remain with users of the suite, certainly my opinion is that a new user should be encouraged to use LibreOffice over Kingsoft, it appears that the fact that Kingsoft is perceived to look better is reason to go with it primarily from that article.
I discussed some of my rational in a Reddit post with Mike Saunders and on the LibreOffice blog:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/06/24/annual-report-2019-updates-from-the-design-community/
https://www.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/hf2tyt/annual_report_2019_updates_from_libreoffices/fvxmvgm/
I think if you have 5 minutes spare it is worth reading to understand the opinion that a number of LibreOffice users have.
To your Final linked post of LibreOffice on ZorinOS
I think the headline really says it all:
LibreOffice Looks Gorgeous on Zorin OS
Do you know that LibreOffice looks pretty on Zorin? The developers apparently made excellent effort so that its appearance looks well shaped as from its desktop, its start menu, to file manager, every app looks pretty, and this includes the office suite. I present you here short videos and simple reviews of these beautiful combination for our computing. Enjoy!
Now the reason primarily for this is that they are shipping with the Tabbed interface by default from the Notebookbar / Muffin menu.
This gives a very fresh look to LibreOffice that sadly you don’t get out of the box with 6.4 / 7 beta 2. The little customization mader by the Zorin team have really improved the acceptance factor. I dare say for anyone under the age of 18 in education they will have likely only ever known an interface ‘similar’ to this from Microsoft Office.
For younger people the shipping interface is harder to use and less familiar due to the likeness to the older Microsoft Office 97 – 2003 versions.
There is an open bug report to this that new users should be presented with a choice of interface on first launching the software. This is how Kingsoft and Softmakes / Free Office work.
By default the OnlyOffice client also looks somewhat similar to Microsoft Office also.
Please do not think I am criticizing the current interface, far from it I think it has proved to work well for many years but I do not believe it is what newer and younger users are used to and not showing off other interfaces to LibreOffice is a competitive disadvantage.
By offering users a choice on the interface they use on first launch you would be cattering for all users and this would quell the concerns of the people who constantly refer to LibreOffice looking ‘dated.’
Finally can I ask if there is their any priorityto improve the look of LibreOffice on Windows as currently it looks considerably worse than the Linux counterpart? As the vast majority of LibreOffice users are on Windows it would make some sense to put effort here.
The open bug I referred to earlier regarding an option user interface selection on first start for LibreOffice is:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117463
Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts.
Kind regards,
James