[Someone1234]

> I find the ribbon gui horrible.

You're in the minority. Context aware UI is superior to most since you only see elements when they're relevant rather than constantly. This creates a much less cluttered interface, but without actually sacrificing any power/functionality.

Plus LibreOffice 5 lacks legitimately useful things like real-time previews of font/size changes (via hover), graph previews, text style template saving (e.g. set up a custom title style, and you can quickly re-use that style later in that same document inc. size/font/color/etc), et al.

Back with Microsoft Office 2003 I'd agree that the then OpenOffice was a legitimate competitor. And Office 2007 had some legit problems that kept that true, but by Office 2010 LibreOffice was bested and 2013/2016 only worsened its position.

I cannot see why I'd use LibreOffice on Windows today. Cost perhaps?

[Drdrdrq]

>> I find the ribbon gui horrible. > You're in the minority.

Not so sure about that, I personally hate it too and know of many who have trouble with it. Its main problem is discoverability of features. With menus you could walk from first to the last to find the feature you needed (even if it was grayed out, signaling that you are in a wrong context to use it), while this is very difficult to do with ribbon bar. Especially as sometimes the feature is triggered via button, sometimes it is hidden behind a dropdown arrow, via some link... In Outlook 2010 I learned to search for features on the Internet because it takes too much time to look for them in UI. Awful UI, I hate it with passion.

EDIT: MS Office vs. Libre/OpenOffice: one reason is that I can install LO/OO on OS of my choice (Linux usually). The other is that I can install whatever version I want without licensing issues and cost. Last but not least, it has a normal menu. The only downside is interoperability - if it is important for you to edit MS documents 100% like you would in MS Office, then you really have no choice.

[RP_Joe]

And remember they are working with a world wide set of users. Many cultures do not like the fancy ribbon.

[kem]

Part of what concerns me about the UI discussion with LO is that the choices are held up as either Microsoft ribbon-style UI, or the current UI, as if because Microsoft adopted it and there wasn't a complete mutiny, it was a good idea.

Remember that Microsoft Word is entrenched in lots of places for various reasons, and it would take a major screw up before people wouldn't continue using it. I think what happened with the ribbon is that there were somethings that were better, and other things that were not, so people shrugged and went on with their lives.

This doesn't mean the ribbon was better.

Personally, for me, the ribbon is inconsistent. The context-aware part is good, but it's implemented inconsistently. So for me, I prefer the current LO UI even as I see room for improvement.

The upshot is that these discussions of LO "being so far behind the times" strike me as odd, because they come across as assuming that change is necessarily good for change's sake.

There are more serious problems with LO in my mind, such as the equation editing markup system--it's something that used to be light-years ahead of Word with, and now is lagging significantly.

[chipotle_coyote]

I suspect a lot of times what people are picking up on when they say that LibreOffice looks antiquated is less the underlying UX choices than the actual aesthetics of the application. The last time I looked at LibreOffice (about a year ago) it had the look and feel of an Office 2003 competitor. As silly as it may sound, it can be hard to get past that perception. A (relatively) simple design refresh might do wonders.

Having said that, I don't really like LO's actual UX choices. Every time I try to use it, I get infuriated trying to do something relatively easy. (Take setting up different headers/footers on the first page of the document. I appreciate that making these "page styles" is theoretically more flexible, but just about every other word processor I use simply gives me a checkbox labeled "Different First Page.")

[Silhouette]

It's also disappointing, though unfortunately rather characteristic of OSS UI discussions, that the only options most people here are even considering seem to be the traditional (old MS Office) toolbars and the (new MS office) ribbon.

From a UI point of view, if your best idea is to do what the established, dominant, commercial/proprietary software has already had for some time, you obviously can't ever be better than your competition. You're permanently playing catch-up.

If your goal is just to provide a free-as-in-either clone of that established commercial/proprietary software, maybe that's OK.

If your goal is to produce the best software you can to help users get their office work done, to make something better in its own right and not just because of economic or philosophical priorities, then the first thing a good UI designer is going to do is step back and start asking lots of questions about the fundamentals. What work actually needs to be done? How do users want to do it? How can office software help? Are the features and UI of a traditional word processor or spreadsheet or presentation software of 20-30 years ago still useful and relevant in 2016?

Working with textual information and tables is surely still useful, and so is collecting and combining information to form some coherent overall presentation, but office work today is also often about working with information from many different sources, and examining it in different ways, and doing these things collaboratively and in real time. There are many successful online tools based on these ideas today, but a lot of them are an attractive UI on top of simple functionality like storing team to-do lists and providing real-time chat. I'm not sure how many of these systems can cope with larger projects and more demanding work yet, the kind of thing that might be written up in a word processor as a set of 100-page reports that would form the basis for a multi-year project, or managed using spreadsheets with many tables and complicated formulae to derive the information that users need in a convenient format.

Personally, I think there's a lot of potential yet for more powerful and useful and productive office software, but not within the narrow bounds of the traditional model that the likes of MS Office and LibreOffice follow. Unless you have people looking at the big picture and being creative about how to represent information and interact with it, discussions about what colour the chrome should be or whether to use a traditional toolbar or context-sensitive ribbon probably have relatively little value. There is only so much benefit to achieve with cosmetic tweaks, no matter how pretty your icons are.

[slacka]

I don't know who's in the minority, but he's not alone. I hate the ribbon element.

I'm all for context aware UIs, but in today's world of 16:9 monitors, a huge ribbon wasting all that precious vertical real estate is a terrible design choice. A good model to follow is Apple's iWork, where they have a single context aware toolbar with the advanced, detailed options managed in the sidebar. For quick edits, they should use a ‘floatbar’, a UI element that appears above selected text with a minimal set of the most commonly used buttons.

If there are any designers here, you can help out by subscribing to the design mailing list.

[ckcheng]

Some use LibreOffice to maintain compatibility and consistency between Mac, Windows, and Linux. I switch between all three platforms regularly, and it's nice that LO has tri-platform compatibility.

LibreOffice also makes it easy to re-encode files, when saving, into multiple formats by using MultiFormatSave extension. It's useful for saving important documents for "future proofing" purposes [1].

Oh and yes, the cost is nice too. It doesn't hurt that I also don't like the ribbon gui.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11502529

[zeveb]

> Context aware UI is superior to most since you only see elements when they're relevant rather than constantly.

It also means both that it's impossible to see everything that is possible and that there's a hard limit on what can be possible in any context.

The former is a problem with editors like vi or emacs (there's no immediately-obvious list of all the possible actions — although once a beginner learns C-h m things being to change), but the latter is where they shine.

There's also no apparent rhyme or reason to what actions are or are not considered in-context.

Just show me what I can do and let me do it!

[buovjaga]

> text style template saving (e.g. set up a custom title style, and you can quickly re-use that style later in that same document inc. size/font/color/etc)

You can create character and paragraph styles in LibreOffice.