News: 1612440785

On one hand they say companies are taking the product and not giving back, putting a strain in developers then state...

"that 73 per cent of commits to the LibreOffice code come from developers employed by these companies"

Or do they mean the support companies, rather than the end user companies?

Seems odd - baking your own cake and then paying to eat it.

Erm... where are you getting your ingredients from? ;)

When an arrogant project starts antagonising its users, it is destined to lose them.

"An increasing number of enterprises have chosen the version supported by volunteers over the version optimized for their needs. This has had a twofold negative consequence for the project: a poor use of volunteers' time, as they have to spend their time to solve problems for business that provide nothing in return to the community,..."

I don't know, a bug is a bug no matter if its reported by a business user or a home user. On top of that, the horrible UI and other usability deficiencies surely are not just paining business users but home users as well, so I fail to see how businesses using the free Community version would waste volunteers' time.

To me this reeks more like a stark attempt to get business users to pay up for TDF's support partners.

I'm not sure we can assume that all support calls are bugs..... if only that were true :-)

I think creating 7 alternative user interfaces is the biggest waste of volunteers time.

Rubbish.

Office 2007 and later are a shiny mess. Though there is a third party replacement for the evil ribbon, which makes access to features WORSE than conventional menus.

LO is far superior to MS Office 2003 in GUI and Writer works better than Word. The mistake is to use doc or docx for saving. Only use them to import or export. Use Styles properly. The undocked Style and Navigation windows are superior to MS Word 2007.

If yours lacks Polish then you might need to download the correct language pack or version https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/?type=deb-x86_64&version=7.1.0&lang=pl

Gdansk you for that…

"...LO is far superior to MS Office 2003 in GUI and Writer works better than Word. The mistake is to use doc or docx for saving. Only use them to import or export. Use Styles properly. The undocked Style and Navigation windows are superior to MS Word 2007..."

Or... as a business user, just use Word. You know it's compatible and you're not messing around with different formats to save or to export. You may be happy to do this but your average user doesn't want extra steps just to do their day job.

And here's an oft-overlooked point with regards to the ribbon in Office 2007.

MS did a ton of user research into the next features for Office.

And found out that a huge percentage of them were actually already available but users didn't know and/or couldn't find them.

So the aim of the original ribbon was to simplify that mess of sub-menus.

Which worked. For a time. But if you look at the last few releases of O365 you'll notice that MS are once again working hard to simplify the ribbon because like the original menus it's become cluttered and far less than intuitive to find things anymore, utterly defeating the whole object of having it in the first place.

I work in the EUC space. If you ask users, then the ribbon never comes up as being an issue for them except perhaps where some addon to e.g. Outlook or Excel has failed to put their icon onto it.

Rather than the ribbon, personally I find one of the areas where Word in particular is still ropy is collaborative working. Once a document gets above about 100 or so pages, it becomes a mess. Changes not saving or disappearing when someone edits a completely different part of the document. Corruption etc. That really is something they need to sort out properly because it's tedious as fuck working on an online copy and having to save a local backup just in case it decides to shit on the online one.

I'm sorry as a business user I find LibreOffice opens old MSWord documents better than a modern MSWord, What's funnier is it produces better quality MSWord documents than MSWord does. Often 20-30% smaller for the exact same content.

YMMV

AAC

Yeah, LO opens Word files just fine. It even saves small, not overly complex, Word files as DOCX without serious problems. Large, complex documents are an entirely different case. On several occasions around here LO has mangled the job of taking a DOCX file, making changes, and saving it as a DOCX file. I simply no longer trust it to round trip DOCX files. I _must_ be able to send DOCX, and usually receive DOCX. We tried to go all LO internally, but we can’t control documents from outside, which are almost always MS Office formats. Hell, we use Pages, despite its faults, for certain types of files and export to DOCX… and Pages doesn’t screw up the format, so it can be done. LO either can’t do it or doesn’t want to do it. Either way, they’re off the list of office suite replacements for MS Office. It’s a pity, really, they did a lot of things very well indeed, but we just can’t live with the round trip problems. And as long as we have to do business with people who use MS Office we will have to do round tripping. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote can round trip, with very few problems. LO, not so much. At least not in our experience. If this changes, perhaps then LO would be considered. Until then, it’s MS Office and Apple’s suite for us. Mostly MS Office.

Wow: 12 years and people still can't cope with a GUI change...

There's nothing wrong with the Office ribbon. There isn't now, and there never was. Just old people who can't learn new skills (systemd)

No, Writer is NOT better than Word. Style support is not as good as Word 2003; Word style support has improved with every new version, so Word 2019 is _considerably_ better at it than Writer. Table support is improved over what it was, but still isn’t up to Word; LO’s problem is that Word has had good table support since 1986, LO has a lot to catch up on. At least they’re better with tables than with styles. (Yes, I spend a lot of my day with tables, and use styles a LOT, I don’t use Pages because I hate the way it does styles, and, to a lesser extent, tables.)

Worse, the suggested ‘save as ODT, export to DOCX’ causes problems. Part of it is that DOCX is a moving target. Part of it is that some LO features are not available in DOCX, including lots of stuff to do with styles and tables, and this appears to be deliberate; things under the hood are not quite compatible. Exporting causes complex documents to have serious problems. (Guess how I know) And because some features are not available in DOCX, you _must_ save as ODT and export… and then spend time fixing the problems.

The majority of my documents go to MS Office users. It’s simply easier to just use MS Office and have done.

I don’t care about the Ribbon. I really don’t. I do care about my documents. I can generate documents my way with MS Office and minimal effort, while it takes effort to do the same in LO, and more effort to fix the exports.

And, one more thing: there are MS Office versions available for iPad. No official LO for iPad. I can touch up my MS Office documents from my iPad, but not any LO documents. Being able to fix things on an iPad has been a lifesaver more than once. Not having an official iOS version is a significant handicap for LO.

YMMV.

Oh dear, I hope that isn't an accident waiting to happen. A whole new world of toxic documents.

Downvoted for the old reference. Also, the ribbon was a pig to get to know and that is one of the reasons I persisted with Open Office and into LibreOffice. My boss lady was a big user of Office productivity software and she hates the ribbon still. Menus evolved a long time ago and they work. Getting rid of them was not wise.

They can slap it on an M1, yet cannot slap it on Android and run it on a tablet?

The problem here is Google's choices with Android:

No paged virtual memory support in Android, apps are limited to 512Mb heap, Windows had virtual memory since Windows 3.1 in 1992 FFS, so why not Android? You Google programmers know how to do a the super-fast paged heap garbage collector/compactor right? The type where you remap pages not copy bytes around? These are 64 bit processors now, you have all that address space to page into. You can make it faster AND support large memory models for apps in Android. I have a tablet in front of me that cost barely $150 and has 8GB RAM, and yet the OS on it lets me access 1/16th of that RAM! This needs fixed!

Android apps have a lifespan determined by Google code, not the user. So no "save work before exit?". That data you worked on all day? Poof and its gone when you switch apps.

Poor cross platform independence, all the crap of variable screen sizes is loaded onto the apps.

Piss poor stylus support. By default (excluding Samsung) you won't get hover events in Android, so apps cannot use stylus-Hover unless they're designed exclusively for Samsung devices.

Mouse events likewise not device independent, a click isn't downgraded to touch event if the app doesn't support clicks.

Some incredibly bad GUI design choices. Take a tablet it will usually be used in landscape, so its a letterbox with limited vertical screen space. So then someone decides to take the top part as the status bar, and the bottom part as the navigation bar. A big thick bar across the bottom with 3 pissy little buttons on it. So now your landscape tablet screen is even more letter box format! WHY?

You can hide the bars in an app, but that only really works if you hide top AND bottom together (your full screen mode puts the app interface under the status bar even if you're not going to hide the status bar) and those bars will pop straight back up when you tap the screen. You tap on the app to do something and the navigation bar pops right back up as if every tap means the user is finished with the app. This is a business app and you probably want the status bar there all the time, but the navigation buttons you only need when you're finished with the app..... and since they are designed to work on a phone in portrait, you could fit the navigation buttons on the middle of the status bar in when in landscape. There simply isn't a need to waste huge tracts of screen.

It should be trivial to port apps like Libre Office to Android and get them to work consistently, but it is not. Fix this.

Much complexity and history lurks here. Menu bloat is a problem with these massive office applications, which Microsoft addressed with its ribbon UI in Office 97.

No, Office 97 was a good version! The ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access.

I switched my company to Open Office and then Libre Office as my users wanted to cling on to Office 97 well into the 21st century. It's always been good enough for what we needed, although LO has performed significantly better in later releases.

And yes, I used to donate to TDF

And highly to be praised for that.

I'm not part of a team working on collaborative documents; my documents, my storage, my problem, thanks.

And well suited for the coming era of safely air-gapped corporate documentation..

I donated. As an individual. They have a 501(3)(c) which is good for us old farts doing QCDs from our tIRAs.