[Someone]

On the other hand, for the typical westerner, "does not look nice but it is functional" does not cut it for other products, either. Even power drills aren't purely sold on functionality.

I certainly have some aversion against Libre Office because it does not look nice.

[cookiecaper]

I think it looks and works fine. "Looks nice" is a totally subjective argument that often leads to abominable design, a trend disguised as a function.

[Nux]

How does LO not look nice? What exactly is ugly about it? I used MS Office as well, I certainly don't find it beautiful. I think LO looks nice enough and is good enough and luckily I'm not alone believing this.

It has been many years since I stopped installing pirated MS Office suites on friends' computers and used OpenOffice and now LibreOffice instead. No complaints so far.

[Someone]

OK. Downloaded 4.0 to check it out. Some examples of what I find 'not nice' in half an hour or so of looking. None of them are showstoppers, but together, they give me the impression of "functional, but I have seen nicer":

Deviations from Mac OS style:

- application menu stays highlighted when preferences dialog is open.

- Does not use standard font and style dialogs => unnecessary learning curve; sharing styles with other applications does not seem possible.

- Does not use standard color dialogs => unnecessary learning curve; sharing palettes with other applications does not seem possible.

- Focus rectangles in dialogs even if that is disabled in system settings.

- OK button on the left, Cancel on the right.

- A setting for not aliasing screen fonts that are too small? Why not follow the system setting?

- Non-standard "Save changes before closing" dialogs: - weird shape (wide and very low) - incorrect order of buttons - non-standard button texts - non-standard 'Question' icon - extremely little room between button texts and button borders

- I expect 'Spell check' in the Edit menu, not in the Tools menu.

- "Page Setup" is missing. Instead, we have "Printer Settings"

General

- Focus rectangles look ugly (should not use dotted lines; dotted line is too close to the text)

- Spacing of lines in tree view in Preferences looks too small to me.

- Way too many settings (examples: a toggle for graphics antialiasing?)

- Why is this still combined as a single application?

- In the Tools-Customize dialog, menu separator lines are drawn using hyphens, not by drawing a line.

- Striped dialog backgrounds in a Mac App released in 2013?

- Help menu's "What's this?" item does not appear to do anything (its feedback is a pointer change, but that change does not happen if there is no window below the mouse. With large screens, it is easy to get there (say when having a HN reply window side by side with a LibreOffice window)

- Help menu has 5 menu items and 3 separator lines.

- Try spell-checking an empty document. Dialog opens, immediately an alert pops up "The spellcheck of this sheet has been completed." If you click OK, both the alert and the spell check dialog close.

- When you make row height lower, row numbers should, at some stage, start using a smaller font. They don't.

[Gormo]

I agree that LibreOffice may deviate significantly from OS-native UI conventions, but this is reasonable given its nature as a cross-platform project based on highly-portable OS-independent libraries. And there are plenty of applications that target particular platforms, but employ their own set of custom UI conventions; some are worse than the platform standards, some are better. It's the usability of the application's own set of conventions, and the consistency therein, that should be the basis of judgment; using the OS's stylistic defaults as the benchmark seems relatively arbitrary, especially, again, for a cross-platform application.

I don't know how it compares to iWork, but when I compare LibreOffice to Microsoft Office on the basis of internal consistency, parsimony (for lack of a better term), and even adherence to established platform conventions (on Windows), LibreOffice wins on all counts. With each new version of Office, Microsoft adds yet more UI novelties to its haphazard collection of product-specific menu styles, dialog boxes, and toolbars.

[gruuby]

But have you seen nicer without paying money for it? I think the little nags you presented don't outweigh the price you have to pay for MS Office. Not for me anyway.

[mynameisvlad]

That's a bad road to go down, though. We shouldn't be content with it looking okay just because it's free.

[xtracto]

Care to elaborate why?

I mean, this is a program, of which a lot of people put a lot of effort and which works pretty well. These people are making the program available for free no strings attached for anyone who wants to download it.

I understand that your personal tastes are too refined for the software, but for a lot of people, having this fully functional and free office suite is a great help.

Or as they say around here "A caballo dado, no se le ve colmillo".

[mynameisvlad]

Sure, it's great that it's free and fully functional, but that doesn't mean that anyone's criticisms of its design (which, even you have to admit, are a bit dated by now), aren't warranted simply because it's free.

This is a big problem that quite a few people seem to have. Just because a program is free, does not mean the userbase should have low expectations. It's great that it's accomplished so much, but it needs more work, and design is one of the areas which needs the most work right now. Especially if they are looking to get people to replace Office with it.

And I do agree, it looks okay. It's functional, and the UI gets the job done. But becoming complacent with it because it's free is not the right way to go about it.

[Someone]

I don't have MS Office, but I did buy Numbers, Pages, and Keynote, knowing well that OpenOffice (at the time, LibreOffice did not exist yet) is free and would likely handle many files better. I also do use LibreOffice, but only when I must.