
LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever - rbanffy
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2015/01/29/libreoffice-4-4-the-most-beautiful-libreoffice-ever/
======
drzaiusapelord
While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it displeases me that
the FOSS community is so hostile to the ribbon-style UI MS uses in its office
product. Its such a great concept that using LO is like stepping back into the
Office 97 days. Frankly, I'd rather just pay every few years for a home
edition of Office than do all the mental gymnastic needed to properly switch
to LO.

~~~
e40
That's your opinion. I don't like the new MS UI. In fact, paying for Office
every few years means relearning a new UI, or at least relearning where
everything is on the menus now. I find that incredibly frustrating and
annoying.

My issue with LO is that it doesn't work on complex spreadsheets and
powerpoints. I had spreadsheets corrupted and I just had to turn away from LO
and go back to Office. I was much happier in LO, but alas I cannot stay.

~~~
worklogin
Did you try the ribbon for a week or two? I loathed it too. But then I got
used to its workflow. It exposes a lot more options more intuitively than the
current LO menu system.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
I have to use Office at work. I have not liked the ribbon since it came out.
It's not that I don't like new ideas. I am a SW dev and I embrace new. I
change jobs every 6 mos just so I don't have to deal with old code, that's how
much I like new things. The ribbon sucks. It mind numbingly sucks.

Note: Some of this was an exaggeration to drive home the point of how bad the
ribbon interface sucks.

~~~
andybak
Is it really worse than toolbar hell?

[http://www.mlponies.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05...](http://www.mlponies.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05/officebars.png)

Icons without text labels work ONLY for frequently performed tasks with an
obvious visual representation.

For everything else text _and_ icons is probably optimal.

------
jrochkind1
So it's better... but from the screenshot, I'd say myself it's design now
reaches "barely acceptable", instead of the previous "pretty bad", but not
"delightful" either.

Of course, I think I could say the same (or worse) about MS Word, it's main
competitor. So.

~~~
_-__---
Curious - there are a lot of ways to say the terminal "so." I would have
thought that ellipses (so...) capture the affect with which most people
deliver it, but the hard stop actually adds a nice twang to it. I imagine the
speaker quickly saying it, pursing their lips slightly and tilting their head
to one side while maintaining eye contact with the other party in the
conversation.

But yeah, totes agree on the design/aesthetics. It's pretty 2008 freeware-
tier.

~~~
a---------
DAE pedantry?!?

~~~
Retra
Analysis is not pedantry.

------
bitL
I am probably in the minority, but even AbiWord looks way better than this new
design - let's have simplistic monochrome icons on our 4k 10-bit displays
everywhere! Also, the font on toolbars is sci-fi and not serious-work-like.
Huge white spaces everywhere with gradients out of place. I like the new fonts
(seems inspired by Yosemite) and the bottom shape panel is nice as well.

~~~
gkop
AbiWord and Gnumeric have _always_ looked better than their LibreOffice
counterparts!

~~~
anon13839
Gnumeric is a large steaming pile of dog poo. Do a sort on a largeish file and
it will consume all the known RAM in the universe. Do the same operation in
Excel and it barely breaks a sweat.

~~~
krylon
I once had to open a CSV file with about 2,000 columns. Excel failed me,
OpenOffice/LibreOffice failed me, only Gnumeric managed to open the file.

I'll admit that I only deal with that many columns on very rare occasions, but
it does come in handy sometimes.

~~~
DanBC
In theory Excel can open files with 16,384 columns so it's surprising it
failed.

[https://support.office.com/en-nz/article/Excel-
specification...](https://support.office.com/en-nz/article/Excel-
specifications-and-limits-1672b34d-7043-467e-8e27-269d656771c3)

~~~
krylon
I might misremember the number of columns (could have been 20,000 - also, it
had _many_ rows), or maybe the 16,384 column limit applies to xls(x) files
only, not to importing CSV files.

I remember at first cursing at Excel, then realizing what a ridiculously large
number of columns the file had.

------
chops
While I appreciate effort put into making the interface prettier, one of the
things that really detracts from LibreOffice and why I almost invariably end
up installing MS Word for clients is the confusing way which the mail merge
system is designed in LibreOffice. I've done it enough times now to know
mostly how to get it working for myself, but there's no way in hell I'll try
teaching a client how to do a mail merge in LibreOffice.

And even myself, I've had to completely scrap documents I'm working on because
LibreOffice gets confused and does what I'm assuming is some kind of join,
resulting in tons of duplicates when it comes time to print[1]. It's almost
certainly user error, but where to fix it is unclear. That whole mechanism
needs to be gutted and reworked.

But I continue to deal with it because Linux is my primary environment and
it's good enough in everything else I have to deal with.

[1] something like multiple data sources used accidentally, even though both
point at the same source file, and even after wiping all data sources, the
issue remains.

~~~
ForHackernews
Huh. This is an interesting example of a feature that's very important to some
people, and utterly irrelevant to others. I had never even heard of "mail
merge" in the context of word processing software, only mass-emailers, and it
would never have occurred to me that anyone was using desktop word processing
software to run their paper-mailing campaigns.

~~~
chops
It's pretty common in the small business world, or even printing
envelopes/labels for christmas cards, wedding invitations, etc. Most recently,
I'm using it for rapid prototyping of cards for a board game I'm making, but I
do also use it for small direct mailing campaigns (under 200 destinations) for
my business.

------
ExpiredLink
Exhaustive and seamless import and export of Microsoft formats - that's the
most important and desired LibreOffice feature for me and probably for for
most LO users!

~~~
skrowl
This works nearly flawlessly for me since 4.0.

So so many Excel files. Ugh.

~~~
imron
It's the 'nearly' that's the kicker.

~~~
chris_wot
We encourage bug reports :-)

------
ryanthejuggler
The icons need color for easy differentiation. These crisp monochrome icons
are nice in theory, but when you're quickly scanning for an icon it all goes
to mush in your vision.

~~~
xico
They are not nice in vision theory at least. To make them as differentiable as
you could, they should all have different texture, orientations and colours.

------
fafner
More detailed change log by Michael Meeks:
[https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-
the-...](https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-the-
hood-4-4.html)

------
robin_reala
If anyone follows this, what’s the current with LibreOffice vs OpenOffice.org?
Is one objectively better than the other now? What has the community momentum?

~~~
jpfr
LibreOffice has all the momentum, all the brain share and all the innovations.
They made massive changes and miraculously brought a crufty code base full of
technological debt back to life.

Now they started to care about aestethics. And suddenly people notice. :-)

~~~
benwaffle
meanwhile, OpenOffice added some comic sans to their logo
[http://www.openoffice.org/](http://www.openoffice.org/)

------
aceperry
When I saw the headline, I thought, "Oh no, I hope they didn't implement the
MS Ribbon?" Thankfully they didn't. That MS bug still trips me up whenever I
fire up Word. Looks ok, I don't really notice much, mainly because I hardly
use it or Word.

~~~
scholia
You should read some of the other comments here. A lot of us have spent half a
decade enjoying the massive improvements brought by the ribbon, and it's quite
surprising there are still a few, er, very late adopters.

------
cheald
Windows user here. It's not particularly any prettier, and Calc doesn't open
CSVs correctly anymore. So yeah, there's that.

[http://i.imgur.com/i1YuVXA.png](http://i.imgur.com/i1YuVXA.png)

~~~
berkut
Importing of CSVs is a joke in both OO and LibreOffice - I literally have to
rename files to .csv to get them to interpret .txt (or other extensions) as
comma-separated - there's no nice "Import" menu like Excel has had for
decades.

Even opening Calc first then using its menu to open a .txt opens the file in
LibreOffice Writer!

And then of course Gnome's (on Linux) file browsers no longer support renaming
of files in the browsers, so you have to mess around elsewhere.

~~~
stinky613
I had no idea that LibreOffice can't be forced to recognize that a .txt file
is CSV; that sounds annoying.

Watch out, though, for handling CSV files in Excel if you're using an encoding
other than ANSI.

Excel for Windows does not correctly write UTF-8 files[1]

Excel for Mac lists 'UTF-8' as an import CSV encoding option but Excel for Mac
does not import UTF-8 CSV files[2]

[1]Response from MS employee: "Unfortunately, not all applications can encode
files in UTF-8 by default, and Microsoft Excel is one of them."
[http://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/office/forum/office_2013_...](http://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/office/forum/office_2013_release-excel/how-can-i-save-a-csv-with-
utf-8-encoding-using/12801501-c1e4-4a64-80d9-96b680b64cfe)

[2]Response from MS employee: "Excel for Mac does not currently support UTF-8"
\-- despite UTF-8 being an option in Excel for Mac
[http://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-m...](http://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macexcel/mac-excel-converts-utf-8-characters-to-
underlines/7c4cdaa7-bfa3-41a2-8482-554ae235227b)

------
shRaj9fEc8Vith
Don't OSS project has professional designer? I mean like Apple-quality
designers?

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Have you ever tried contributing to a popular FOSS product? I have. Expect to
be downvoted, yelled at, etc for suggesting change, especially change that's
an emotional issue for geeks (implementing a ribbon-like interface, you know
the one started by the 'evil' microsoft). Linus's childish attitude is pretty
much the poster boy for this attitude. Namecalling is the norm.

There are so many cultural and management issues with big FOSS projects, you
could write 100 phd disserations about it. Its not generally a welcoming and
innovating environment. Generally, from what I've seen, its the products with
the very small teams (or sometimes one person) who seems to make the
breakthroughs and everyone eventually just copies those guys.

Can you imagine someone with great credentials and a great portfolio trying to
engage the LO team on a novel interface? Can you imagine the Linus-like
comments aimed at her way? That's a major demotivator for innovation, change,
and success. Oh god, heaven forbid you're a woman in FOSS telling men to make
a change. That's an even worse nightmare right there.

This is why, I think, so much FOSS stuff looks like shit and has poor
documentation. The artsy crowd, visual thinkers, UI nerds, and the writers are
systemically kicked around to the point where they don't contribute much, so a
lot of UI decisions are made by coders, who typically are creatures of habit
and have a "if it aint broke why fix it" mentality in regards to interfaces
and other features.

This is also why OSX is such a wonderful product. Apple took all the strong
BSD code and dismissed the linux and BSD WM's and put a WM on there that
didn't suck. Apple had the management structure to implement effective change
without a "coder's veto" so many FOSS products suffer from. Or how Apple took
KDE's khtml/webkit and wove both Safari and mobile Safari around it.

~~~
vinkelhake
I think a lot of it comes down to what a visual designer can contribute. FOSS
projects are typically the sum of individual contributions from a lot of
people, all scratching their itches. There is limited scope for someone to
_tell_ other people what they need to do.

A designer who can't code is dependent on other people donating their time so
that the design can be realized. This puts the designer at an immediate
disadvantage.

~~~
throwaway349283
If you don't value design you're incompetent as a developer. Why would you
even contribute to a project if you don't want what's best for the project?

~~~
vsync
Maybe they do value design. Maybe they just value different designs than you.

------
cxxio
Sigh. I see the trend of horrible single colour icons has now spread to
LibreOffice.

~~~
grandinj
There are multiple icon sets so you are welcome to switch to a more colorful
set :)

------
V-2
These colorful, podgy toolbar icons (on Windows) remind me of Ami Pro for some
reason :)
[http://i61.tinypic.com/2cmly5c.jpg](http://i61.tinypic.com/2cmly5c.jpg)

------
ionforce
Hard to take them seriously when they insist that their main application icon
is "beautiful" as well.

Beauty aside, having an open office alternative is always welcome.

------
e0m
While the icons may have gotten flatter, it still didn't fix any of the major
information architecture issues that plague MSWord clones of the 2000s.

The "design problems" aren't the colors, it's being responsive to exactly what
users want to do without putting unnecessary interface elements in their way.

Take a look at HackPad for an example of great text editing experiences.

~~~
jerf
If you're trying to "edit text" with LibreOffice, you've already picked the
wrong tool for the job. The fact that a lot of people end up picking the wrong
tool for the job isn't really LibreOffice's fault, nor does anything
immediately leap to mind that they can do about that. In the meantime, a
"document editor" is definitely a viable use case, even if it isn't the all-
consuming use case that your usual Microsoft Word oriented "computer science"
high school class may inadvertently teach.

------
gosukiwi
Looks like software from the 2000's :( They should just hire someone to make a
modern design

~~~
nhaehnle
Even if it does, so what? I'm all for having designers on the team, but
gratuitous redesigns often end up for the worse.

Something like LibreOffice is a giant piece of software produced by a team
that is far too small. They have to be conservative, and they have to focus
their energy properly.

Frankly, instead of playing around with trying to make things "beautiful"
(which is hopeless anyway, given how opinions differ), I'd rather they turned
their design brains towards the kind of small tweaks that make the UI flow
better. There are bound to be hundreds or thousands of little corners where
twiddling slightly with the layout of menus, dialog boxes, etc. would make
users more productive. Focus on those, please. (Note that judging by the more
detailed reports, this is actually what they are doing.)

~~~
tormeh
The Ribbon UI idea - to highlight contextually relevant options and hide
irrelevant ones - seems like a worthy idea to copy. That said, using
horizontal rather than vertical space would be good.

~~~
nhaehnle
There are good things about the ribbon, true, and you're spot on about using
horizontal space. I wonder though whether the LibreOffice team have enough
solid data about user behavior to make good decisions in what would be a huge
redesign - not to mention that, judging by the screenshots, they are already
starting to make good use of horizontal space.

Also, I'd personally prefer if instead of just permuting UI elements they
would adapt some of the really nice ideas that really make things flow better
for everyday users. I suppose it's nice to have a bigger Undo button, but
wouldn't it be less contentious and more useful in the long term to teach
people about Ctrl+Z?

In particular, the live previews don't require a permutation of the UI layout,
and (during my admittedly limited use) I found it to be the nicest of the
changes that people usually associate with the Ribbon.

------
shenoyroopesh
12000 defects fixed?!

OMG! One Herculean effort this must have been.

