The irony is I remember the ribbon interface was universally hated on launch. It buried a ton of previously single click options behind tabs and dropdown menus.
Having discussed this with people who use MS Office, I can say the key point is this:
Libreoffices UI is DIFFERENT to Microsoft Office.
Thats the real impediment. I have applied "make it more like that" changes including font uploads. It's good. But it doesn't get over the user "principle of least astonishment" which is what drives the resistance.
There is a similar problem with the UI differences on OSX. otherwise rational people find the experience of moving to Office on OSX too hard.
(happy MS Office user on OSX, tolerably happy Libreoffice user on OSX and other platforms)
I prefer the classic Microsoft Office toolbar/menu interface to the ribbon, but I grew up on Office 97. A thought that dawned on me is that the ribbon has existed for nearly 20 years; it debuted in Microsoft Office 2007. There is now an entire generation of computer users who have never used pre-ribbon versions of Microsoft Office.
I don't know what it's like using modern Microsoft Office with no experience using toolbars and menus and then switching to LibreOffice, which still uses traditional toolbars and menus.
I prefer traditional toolbars and menus, but I remember Microsoft doing user studies when developing the original Office 2007 ribbon. It showed that the ribbon was more productive for beginners and casual users. Given that many office suite users are casual users who use word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools, Microsoft Office may be more productive for them than LibreOffice. It would be good if LibreOffice did user studies.
I tried OnlyOffice once (because I was trying MS Office alts) and I really liked it. That's what I've been using it for the last 3-4 years. Although I don't use these tools a lot.
“Better” is entirely subjective, complexity can provide improved power for advanced users but make it more difficult for new / average users by compartmenting the “happy path” regular actions into multiple composable disconnected features.
For example, LibreOffice doesn’t have the “Format as Table” feature from Excel, which in a single action combines adding sorting arrows along with a color scheme on a selected range of grouped cells. The range of grouped cells and the background colors in the Excel version auto-expand as new columns or rows are added. Sure, I could press 3-4 different hotkeys and manually update all of this in a sequence for LibreOffice Calc each time I modify the group of cells, but ideally the software would have some single unified action to not make me need to do that without resorting to creating custom possibly flaky macros.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 27.7 ms ] threadLibreoffices UI is DIFFERENT to Microsoft Office.
Thats the real impediment. I have applied "make it more like that" changes including font uploads. It's good. But it doesn't get over the user "principle of least astonishment" which is what drives the resistance.
There is a similar problem with the UI differences on OSX. otherwise rational people find the experience of moving to Office on OSX too hard.
(happy MS Office user on OSX, tolerably happy Libreoffice user on OSX and other platforms)
I don't know what it's like using modern Microsoft Office with no experience using toolbars and menus and then switching to LibreOffice, which still uses traditional toolbars and menus.
I prefer traditional toolbars and menus, but I remember Microsoft doing user studies when developing the original Office 2007 ribbon. It showed that the ribbon was more productive for beginners and casual users. Given that many office suite users are casual users who use word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools, Microsoft Office may be more productive for them than LibreOffice. It would be good if LibreOffice did user studies.
For example, LibreOffice doesn’t have the “Format as Table” feature from Excel, which in a single action combines adding sorting arrows along with a color scheme on a selected range of grouped cells. The range of grouped cells and the background colors in the Excel version auto-expand as new columns or rows are added. Sure, I could press 3-4 different hotkeys and manually update all of this in a sequence for LibreOffice Calc each time I modify the group of cells, but ideally the software would have some single unified action to not make me need to do that without resorting to creating custom possibly flaky macros.