[nothis]

It's more the fact that they hold a quasi-monopoly AND have severe interface flaws that are now "standard". If it was just one of the two, I think people would be more forgiving (see Adobe Photoshop/InDesign, which, while flawed, understand user interface).

I have seen people waste hours doing things in MS Office that should take 5 minutes because of how broken its UX is. They got a tiny little bit better but then you try setting the print area for an Excel table again and spend a good 15 minutes and you know they still have the same problems at their core.

The problem with LibreOffice & Co is that they basically just copy Microsoft's mistakes, making UX an afterthought with wobbly, unaligned buttons and illogical grouping and hierarchies of different elements. We'll likely won't escape that office software hell any time soon but projects like LibreOffice at least have the freedom to chisel at its foundation.

[yellow_postit]

This really underestimates the amount of work that goes into UX for such a massively used product. Look no further than the ribbon to see the type of backlash that comes from any interface update. For any sufficiently large and complex project nearly every new UI tweak willl help some and hurt others. Measuring and walking that line is not to be underestimated.

[awoeirl]

So, I have a relative who worked Microsoft UI, and know a lot about it from that. I understand all the design and user testing that was involved.

This is what I see:

With the ribbon, MS came up with something that was nice and innovative. But it was also incomplete. Unlike the menu, which was consistent across all the functions you might want to apply, the ribbon exists for some things, and then you break into this totally different UI for other things.

Is this ok? My concern is that with Microsoft's monopoly (still) we could argue until we were blue in the face about whether or not the ribbon as implemented was worth it or not, and will never know because there were not really any other options other than "ribbon or not." We can't tell if people just habituated to the ribbon's flaws, or decided that the pros of upgrading outweighed the cons, or were forced to upgrade, directly or indirectly, by the legions of corporate decision makers who were afraid to be lagging behind, or what.

Office has improved a lot since LibreOffice's predecessor, OO, emerged. In some ways I think MS Office is superior. But I still have this nagging feeling that we never know what we could have had if there were more competition, in terms of pricing, options, formats, etc. I also resent being forced to use MS Office for things that absolutely do not require it at all (e.g., by certain publishers, etc.). Because then I have to choose an OS that MS Office is on, and then certain hardware, etc. It's not the cost of MS Cloud or whatever anymore, it's that cost, plus the hardware infrastructure that's required to run it.

At the moment LO, for me, is competitive with MS Office, and meets my needs, and to me that's important.

I don't think there's anything wrong with MS charging for a product. What I do think is wrong is everyone requiring it, explicitly or implicitly, and there being lack of choice. At the moment I'm not even sure that's MS's fault--most of the time I encounter it I attribute it to laziness or inconsiderateness.

[JBlue42]

Users get used to the flaws, shortcuts, or workarounds. That's with any software I've found. I typically argue that the difference between being 'experienced' with a bit of software vs basic/intermediate knowledge is having a greater depth of understanding of all the flaws and how to get around them.

[taoistextremist]

Makes me think how I've just given up on doing any kind of complicated formatting with word processing software. They give you the tools for it, it seems, but you start adding tables and graphics and equations, the minute you hit enter and go to a new line it somehow displaces itself or some other odd behavior. And it's not exclusive to Microsoft.

If I ever need to do something like that I just pull out a text editor and start writing stuff up in TeX now, which while it doesn't really cause me any distress because I've learned TeX, is kind of ridiculous for the many people who've had no reason to learn TeX because they expected word processors to work as advertised.

[lakechfoma]

I love the Office UI/UX. My only complaint is with cloud integrations it defaults the save dialog to onedrive or whatever, which I never use. But otherwise what problems do you have with it? The breadth of tools/options is incredible. The ease of use of many of them is on point. The only reason I prefer MS Office over Libre is because of the UI honestly. I would rather use Libre but I can never find what I'm trying to do.

[sireat]

LibreOffice should shine in customizability but it is not the case for intermediate users.

Anecdotally I was trying to set up a simple keyboard shortcut to change color of a row of the selected cell in a spreadsheet.

Neither Excel nor Calc offer this functionality out-of-box except for user defined macros.

On LibreCalc 5.3 custom keyboard shortcuts are awkwardly defined but once I figured shortcuts out I got stuck on recording a macro. There was a choice of Python,Java and I think VBA lookalike. Very nice, except it was not immediately obvious on how to proceed. I'd love to use Python to script Calc but I did not have time to hunt for the API.

On Excel 2013, within 5 minutes I was able to record a macro then edit the VBA not having used VBA in 5 years. Plus I was able to add a few extra bonus macro commands within 15minutes.

I am sure you can do really nifty stuff when you become a power user in LibreOffice. The problem is that a large proportion of users are casual users like me.

By comparison, I can create and edit nice macros in Photoshop/Illustrator only being a very casual user(maybe once every few months).