Comment by realityfactchex
4 hours ago
First of all, I love LibreOffice very much as the last bastion of sanity in classic document suites, and I love what Collabora is trying to do with the online piece. So, first, a million thanks. Truly.
Now, to put on the the "feedback is a gift" and "radical transparency" caps.
From the screenshot comparison in TFA: The new one looks all Microsoft-Ribbony. That's a huge step backward. The big strength of LibreOffice or Collabora Desktop Classic is that it has a sane UI/menubar visual paradigm. (Which MS obliterated eons ago.)
But let's talk about what matters: Collabora (the online document suite) is slow as heck.
It needs to be fast-updating for shared multi-user docs, like Google Docs/Sheets or Word/Excel 365.
That should be the top priority. Full stop.
LibreOffice works fine for desktop. But, for Collabora, the web experience needs to be fast. The lag in Collabora is simply unacceptable.
People expect online, and they expect collaborative, and they expect nearly instantaneous updates (at least not painful to type and wait for screen to update).
Talk about misplaced priorities. In my very humble opinion.
At least to me, it seems most regular users would struggle and have their productivity reduced attempting to learn a new word processing UI. Everyone and their extended family has been trained on Microsoft products, with Microsoft UI design.
I think this matters for the paying customers of things like Collabora and LibreOffice, as they're using it in a work environment. Not at home.
I agree - we're coming up on 20 years of the ribbon, it is too jarring to go back to the fixed toolbars and the vast majority of computer users have no experience with the "old way."
Except for all the people who use Google Docs, I suppose.
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> most regular users would...have their productivity reduced...this matters for the paying customers...using it in a work environment
If the concern is business productivity, then it might be interesting to read that at least some research indicates (perhaps counterintuitively to some) that classic style is better:
"...results indicate that Excel 2003 is significantly superior to Excel 2007 in all the dependent variables...results support the conclusion that the user interface of Excel 2007 did change for the worst in comparison with the user interface of the 2003 version." [0]
[0] Morales (2010), A COMPARATIVE USABILITY STUDY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE 2007 AND MICROSOFT OFFICE 2003, https://scholar7-dev.uprm.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/a03...
A study from 16 years ago is hardly relevant anymore. Back in 2003, people were still familiar with Office 2003's layout; most people have long since forgotten that layout or never learnt it in the first place.
The author doesn't discuss users' existing familiarity with Office 2003 and they only mention the word 'training' once, that "software design to interact with technology should require the least amount of training as possible" whilst never acknowledging that training in, and even qualifications in, the use of the Office suite was very much a thing in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Even then, the most problems were had in Excel. Advanced usage of Excel is done by technical people who would have had some training. Word and PowerPoint weren't shown to have significant difference in usability; arguably, Word is the program most people forced to use the Office suite spend their time in.
Never mind the ways by which the Ribbon and computers have changed since Office 2007. Options moved around, the Ribbon height reduced, screens having gotten wider to compress fewer options into submenus…
The author states at the end of their conclusion:
> In order to determine if the result of the study with respect to the Excel 2007 application persists and are not due to the learning curve the experiment can be repeated with users having at least three years using this version.
Do you know if the author or anybody else followed up?
It would be more interesting to see a comparison between Office 365 now that the interface has effectively become the de facto standard (same as Windows, macOS, mobile, tablet, and the web version) and Google Sheets (which retains the menus, toolbar, etc.).
I'm no lover of the Ribbon myself but I feel like there's better evidence for it not being the ideal interface than this which wouldn't have convinced me even at the time.
This isn't the proof that'll bring down the titan.
The question is, if you grant that a different design is better in a vacuum, how to weigh that against the benefits of existing familiarity.
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> It needs to be fast-updating for shared multi-user docs, like Google Docs/Sheets or Word/Excel 365.
In my experience, Google Docs has this, but realtime collaboration with Word is unusable. Which is interesting, because that means a huge number of existing Office 365 users have yet to experience it.
I wonder if there's an opportunity there.
Ribbon has it's uses for certain people or situations. Of course menu is much faster but again for certain people.
The internal guts of Collabora's data models and such are based on the LibreOffice code, right? My understanding is that it's really hard to get Google Docs-like performance with real-time multi-user editing if the whole app wasn't engineered from the ground up to make it possible, which LibreOffice wasn't.
Unless Microsoft complete re-wrote Office to add Sharepoint collaboration features, they seem to have managed it.
I would not be surprised to learn that substantial parts of the core of Office were rewritten to make that possible. Unlike Collabora/LibreOffice, Microsoft is one of the most well-resourced organizations in the world and can afford to do that kind of colossally expensive project. Of course, they'd need an extremely compelling reason to do so, but Google Docs was an existential threat to their market share.
Also, other commenters report that the real-time collaborative editing experience in Office is more sluggish than in Google Docs, and this is consistent with my own admittedly very limited anecdotal experience, and if this has persisted for years it may well be for deep architectual reasons.
Office for web and desktop office were literally separate teams, in separate locations, when I worked there. Complete separation unified only by a document output.
> The new one looks all Microsoft-Ribbony
LibreOffice has a Ribbon interface option, too.
If both remain available options, that's fine. Sometimes the new thing becomes the default, and then the old thing gets dropped.
That is not going to happen with LibreOffice.
I'm currently working on a set of documents with 3 or 4 other people in collabora and we have no more problems than with office 365. It works. You can type simultaneously even in the same line (one types while another corrects the spelling of the previous word, etc), no problem at all.