LibreOffice 4.0 Released With Immense Changes

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Originally Posted by Linuxhippy

Actually they are not using GTK except for theming their own toolkit (Firefox is implemented the same way).

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I'm not sure about LibreOffice but this is definatly not true for Firefox. Firefox has seperate GUI code for each platform and for Linux its written in GTK.

You just need to look at the GTK2 to GTK3 port bug to see its much more than theming https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627699

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Originally Posted by Linuxhippy

I have to use the Ribbon stuff as MSOffice-2010 is actually standard at the company I work for and to be honest actually dislike it a lot.

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The 'ribbon' is astonishingly good at displaying lots of icons I have no need or intention to use at the time while hiding the ones I do want. If only they could flip a switch somewhere to make it the other way around, and hide the ones I don't want, it would be a decent interface.

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Originally Posted by cbamber85

Err... What? It's more advanced because it uses a UI paradigm from the Windows 95 days? No. The Ribbon interface was the best to happen to MSO in a good few releases.

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9 out of 10 people I know hate it. 1 likes it, apparently you fall into this 10% category. But to be true, it should have been made available, but only and only as option. Right now it is forced over people just like Metro is forced by 8. People run away, 10% stays. Actually, I don't care, because I never used MSO - only at worked I was forced one time to use Windows, and first few times I found "Classic Menu" extension, that worked more or less, but several days later I installed portable LibreOffice there and forgot any issues.

The single thing I like about MSO is how they allow to intelligently draw "tables", this is much harder in LO.

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Originally Posted by brosis

9 out of 10 people I know hate it.

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Do they have reasons? Have they actually used it? I wrote 2 thesis, 1 with 2003 and one with 2007. I have to say that the ribbon style is much easier and flexible as soon as you are used to it.
There sure is a transition phase where you have the "what? where is this option? it used to be here" moments, but this is quickly over and you can be productive. Now that I know where the stuff is I don't want to switch back to the 2003 style.

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Originally Posted by edsdead

I am not sure I agree with your statement "While LibreOffice isn't yet up to par with Microsoft Office...". My wife has written her PhD in LibreOffice. She is currently working in publishing. Prior to that she taught English at the University level for 15 years. She has extensive experience using both MS Word and LibreOffice Writer. I have used Calc, Impress, Excel, and PowerPoint extensively myself. Writer, Calc, and Impress are at least as good as the comparable parts of MS Office.

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Writer as good as Word ? Are you kidding ? It's buggy and painfully slow. For instance, try inserting some images and manipulate them. Sometimes it takes up to a minute to change the image settings.

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Originally Posted by uid313

They added useless shit like Firefox personas skin support, instead of porting it o GTK3, improving the file format support, or shipping some post-1995 templates for Impress.

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While I'm not a huge fan of either, OpenOffice 4.0 sounds way more exciting. At least Apache is developing a widescreen-friendly UI for OpenOffice.

Is LO's grammar checker now better or equal to Word's?

I just wish OpenOffice.org will die already, it's unnecessary to split the development like this.

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Originally Posted by timothyja

I'm not sure about LibreOffice but this is definatly not true for Firefox. Firefox has seperate GUI code for each platform and for Linux its written in GTK.

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All Mozilla software uses GUI written in XUL. GTK acts simply as a backend for XUL on Linux. There was a Qt port for a while, but it was discontinued.

And LibreOffice, like StarOffice is based on VCL, their internal toolkit. There is a Qt version of that too.

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Originally Posted by droste

Do they have reasons? Have they actually used it? I wrote 2 thesis, 1 with 2003 and one with 2007. I have to say that the ribbon style is much easier and flexible as soon as you are used to it.
There sure is a transition phase where you have the "what? where is this option? it used to be here" moments, but this is quickly over and you can be productive. Now that I know where the stuff is I don't want to switch back to the 2003 style.

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I used office every day at work for over 15 years. Word, Excel, Power Point, not just small items but 100s of page word documents with headers, footers, tables, table of contents, index, graphics, links, 500meg plus excel sheets with plots, tables charts, huge formulas and 200 page power point documents with all of the special features you can embed in those. I can say you are the first person that I have found who likes the ribbon. Why do people not like it?

1. Everyone knew where everything was and most all programs have the same kind of layout. It would be like switching your keyboard from a qwerty to a dvorak for just one program. Not a change most people like.
2. It takes more clicks to get what you want done.
3. More screen real estate is taken up by that monstrosity.
4. No option to have the old style layout, it was just forced.

What bonus does it have? I can't find any advantage to it. From my point of view it was something MS threw out there to try and sell more copies of office since 99.99% of the people never use even half of the features of any of the office programs. Other than the format file change really you could put office 95 in front of people and most won't notice a missing feature because what they use is already there. At my work once they upgraded office to the ribbon versions people started downloading LO like mad and using it. Now most of the use of MSO is for documents and sheets with lots of macros in them.