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12 Ways LibreOffice Writer Tops MS Word
Open source office software is has gotten pretty good over the past decade or so; I got through grad school with OpenOffice (now known as LibreOfifice), and in my estimation was no worse off when it came to exchanging files with classmates than were friends with different versions of Word. Now, reader dgharmon writes "Writer has at least twelve major advantages over Word. Together, these advantages not only suggest a very different design philosophy from Word, but also demonstrate that, from the perspective of an expert user, Writer is the superior tool."
And there are an infinite number of reasons why LaTeX is better than both.
For at least the last three versions of Word, you can do pretty much anything you want in Word headers/footers. You can put in text boxes, graphics anywhere on the page, etc. I used to use Word headers to put in background graphics for the whole page.
I think a lot of people mistakenly think that Word headers are limited to the little box at the top of the page and don't realize that you can use them to put pretty much put anything, anywhere on the page. It will automatically take anything you do while in header/footer edit mode and put it in the background and replicate it on every page. Not sure if LibreOffice does that too or not, but I think the article makes it sound like Word's header and footer are a lot more restricted than they actually are.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It doesn't have that stupid Ribbon UI interface!
is better than one he does not use.
Not defending Word here, but MS PR can also write article '12 ways word tops writer'.
I like the Ribbon layout. Go figure. After an initial "what the hell?" week I got used to it, and now I don't even notice it or think about it.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The note that one can use Libre Office as a replacement for FrameMaker is interesting though.
The one feature I've always wanted to see in Word was for the style formatting area to have each paragraph style be a pop-up menu which one can click on (or better still tab to) and change the current paragraph style w/ the keyboard.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
. . .nothing beats lighting off the VBA editor, putting a leash on MS Word, and walking it around the block like your dog.
Although, as noted above, Emacs remains far above the fray.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I made a big mistake when I bought MS Office. I spent ~$150 and used it to update my resume. Have done very little else with it.
For us casual users the free version of Open/Libre Office can save a lot of money. PLUS writer doesn't come with the stupid ribbon interface. (Where's the find menu option? Where's spellcheck? I don't want to play Where's Waldo? with my software.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Did you like Microsoft Bob as well? How long have you been a member of the communist party?
Libreoffice writer is more annoying to use than Word, but it's not so bad. I use LaTeX/vim for the vast majority of what I write. It actually does what I tell it to do, which is better than any WYSISWG program.
What's really bad is Impress. It's a complete mess from a usability standpoint. When I need to make a presentation, I use Powerpoint. I should figure out how to use LaTeX instead.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I've used several variants of Libre/Open Office and I've found one fundamental problem with all of them. The developers insist on copying MS Word's brain dead interface.
One time, I was trying to do a vertical layout that should have been simple. After fighting with Open Office for about an hour, I gave up assuming that the Open Office developers just hated their users. So I broke down, fired up the Windows machine and started using MS Word.
What did I discover. All the brain cell killing UI design had been copied exactly from MS Word. So I will continue to use Libre Office and I will curse Microsoft every time I find a hard to use feature.
To the Libre Office developers, I say it's okay to branch from MS Word's UI, especially on the obscure features. Most of the users that can't deal with a different UI barely do more than change fonts anyway.
If I wanted superior formatting control, I'd use LaTeX. The primary reason I'm stuck with MS Word, and sometimes google docs, is due to superior collaboration tools: change tracking, multiple views for revision and final draft; identifiers for whose made changes where (provided the userid has been setup properly); notes/comments in the margins.
For the record, I haven't taken the recent version LibreOffice for a spin. But from what I remember of OpenOffice, these features were not that functional. I thought OpenOffice was a decent piece of software, but it's still based on prior definitions of what a documenting software has been, rather than what it could be.
Seems unfair to pick that direction. Why is that not Word's fault?
It is also why I always send important documents in pdf, I have seen different versions of Word render documents very differently.
I didn't get the hate for Ribbon either...till I realized that it was mainly all the people who had memorized all their shortcuts and exactly which obscure menu had the function/tools they needed to use. They were the power users of old, and suddenly they were castrated, and they were back to being on the same level as MS noobs. To make matters worse, the ribbon interface actually made the MS Office suite of software easier to use for noobs and probably made these same power users feel threatened.
I was never a power user of Excel/Word/Power Point 2003, but I always found them to be exceedingly frustrating to work with. Sure, if your work requires you to master those tools, I'm sure you'd get really good after months/years of use, but to a new user, the tons of nested menus with features hidden away made MS Office use an exercise in frustration.
Then I used Office 2007, and once I realized the orb was the file menu (that, I agree was a terrible decision), I found myself using tons of new features that I could never have known about or discovered in Office 2003. The quality of my Word documents, Powerpoint presentations and Excel files greatly improved. I actually find the interface extremely useful because everything is arranged in a logical manner and it is fairly easy to find the tools you need to use without having to spend tens of minutes trying to find the feature in some hidden menu.
Not to say that Word and Office doesn't have its fair share of issues (formatting documents consistently in Word is just a nightmare. I had to write my doctoral thesis in Word because my adviser did not know to use or care about LaTeX), but as far as the new ribbon interface goes, it certainly seems a big improvement over the old Office interface.
Word could be improved for some hardcore uses by getting rid of every last vestige of non-Unicode compliant font usage propagated in the name of backward-compatibility. And make all codepoint usage uniformly hexadecimal and accommodate double-byte codepoints in VBA, and stop trating Symbol font so weirdly. Harumph.
If LibreOffice gave me the power and flexibility to deal with Unicode properly, I'd jump on it for at home. At work,... always gonna be stuck with Word.
I'm with you on this one. Sure it took getting used to but now I find it much easier than browsing through multi-level menus. Plus it's really just a glorified quick access toolbar and you can do a lot of customization as to what commands are on it. I could live without the File menu taking over my whole window though.
The problem with ribbon I have is that it assumes what I need and don't need. It works fine until I have to do something that isn't easily found. Then it is hidden two or three menus deep that I have to use MS help or the Internet to find. I could customize the ribbon but that requires precognition that what I want is not obvious.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When I need to make a presentation, I use Powerpoint. I should figure out how to use LaTeX instead.
Check out the Beemer class; it's handy but not exactly pretty. However, you can find some decent templates floating around the net.
You're not alone. I like the ribbon.
It's a helluva lot better than a thousand menu layers.
All about me
I've had to only just use it because my new employer uses office (I use libre office at home) and no, ribbon is shit.
It does seem like LibreOffice's spell- and grammar-checking-tools still need some work, though.
Getting 403 Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html on this server.
. . . "Guys, we have a styles system! And it's better than Word's!"
From the title of the article, I was expecting 12 distinct and separate features, not 6 features and a treatise on how awesome Styles are in LibreOffice.
I am counting hyphens as another point in styles, because the hyphens point is essentially "You can specify this with styles too!"
You're not alone. I just don't like the fact that it requires actual processing power to work, unlike a regular old Word 2003-style menu... this results in keyboard shortcuts lagging on slow machines (such as netbooks). Other than that, I actually quite like it - much easier to find stuff if you're actually new to Office or haven't used the application for a while...
You don't have permission to access /applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html on this server.
Sigh :(
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Because the standard MS uses is now public.
PDF is good for the final version of a document, but not for collaborative editing. Whether or not MS gets its shit together for Skydrive/sharepoint and lets us edit documents as conveniently as google docs does remains to be seen, but that would be very appealing in a corporate setting.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Ltr4XFiuzEJ:www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca
Same here. Anyone found a working link?
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
I got that too.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?oe=utf-8&client=mozilla&hl=en&q=cache:3Ltr4XFiuzEJ:http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html+http%3A//www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html&ct=clnk OR http://preview.tinyurl.com/7u9z3j4 for Google's cached copy.
Weird that the non-cached copy worked fine and home page's link to the first page is broken too.
Print pages worked too:
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-2.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-3.html
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Their own front page has the broken link. After a frantic call from an MS Lawyer, they must have decided to pull it down, I guess...
I skimmed it. It apparently got slashdotted since then.
Isn't that the problem with any interface? Due to limited screen space, they can't make every option available in a menu system or the ribbon system (which is really still a hierarchical menu, just a different layout). So they have to make obvious the most common features, and hide some of the more esoteric ones. The benefit of the ribbon is that 90% of the functionality of Word is available in 3 clicks or less. With the old system, many more options were hidden in multiple layers deep. So much so, that people started requesting functionality to be added that has been there the whole time, because they couldn't find those features in the menu layout.
At any rate, if you really need to, you can customize the ribbon layout in Office 2010 in pretty much any way you choose.
I had the same result, so I started reading the comments to see if others were able to read the article. And then...oh yeah...this is Slashdot. At least the posters read the title or the comments would be off topic. :-)
I've yet to load any Word file and have it look the same as it does in Word, and that's a deal breaker in a collaborative setting.
In the long run, it sounds to me like a deal breaker for Microsoft Word.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
No No TROFF on a daisywheel printer is the only way to produce goodlooking documents fools! it has been down hill from there.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Putting latex files under revision control just works. Doesn't work so well with word/openoffice.
There's one major flaw in OO or LO. That's the difficulty of changing a document to Landscape mode.
Word: Click Landscape radio button
OO: Search on google for the tutorial, edit a template, save, open the new docume... you know what, I don't know. It's a PITA and it's a killer PITA that's probably the biggest reason there isn't a bigger market share. Half the documents I write are in landscape mode.
And I use Ubuntu at home (with significant modifications), I've contributed to one of the projects, and I've done life-critical assembly programming for money.
If I think it's a PITA, 80%+ of the potential users will think it's impossible.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
The original post states "I got through grad school with OpenOffice (now known as LibreOfifice)," I thought OpenOffice was still OpenOffice and LibreOffice is a fork project of OpenOffice based on reaction to Oracle's purchase of Sun.
Who says it was after 20 comments? None of them appear to have RTFA. The article may never have existed!
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Love Libre but the MS Word spell check is way better. I doubt I can type two paragraphs without Libre saying I have misspelled a word that is, in fact, spelled correctly. Nice to see that Libre is pulling away from the creepy Oracle version.
That is false.
The docx Word 2010 produces does not follow the documented standard.
Even if it was true, the openoffice/libreoffice document types are actually publicly documented.
I don't mind the ribbon much one way or the other - but I still find myself getting more use out of an extensively customized Quick Access Toolbar than out of the ribbon itself.
LaTeX without the ugliness... Still my favorite document production system.
I can top it. It miss Clippy. I thought the Ewoks and Jar Jar were cute. And I liked disco.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Let's see:
Using more screen real estate at the top of the window just as the industry is moving to 16:9, 1080p screens with more horizontal space: FAIL. (especially c.f. the palette used in the previous Mac version).
Dynamically hiding icons or drastically changing their appearance depending on the window width.... have wide/narrow layouts maybe, but continually juggle the layout as you resize? FAIL.
With two such fundamental design fails, Is there a need to go any further?
(There's also the nice new equation editor that only works in one font, Callibri, when most of the universe specifies either Times or TeX Computer Modern for equations, but that's not a ribbon fail).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
...and in the darkness bind them?
Only if you remembered to number the cards.
What I don't like about the ribbon is that there are many functions I used to use regularly that were always on screen. Now they're spread out across many different ribbon tabs, and sometimes where they ended up is non-intuitive for me. What used to be a simple click turns into an Easter egg hunt.
Perhaps if I used Office daily, I'd develop the appropriate muscle memory. But, I only use it a few times a month, and it's usually different apps -- this week it's Excel, next week it's PowerPoint.
I don't care if "zoom", "increase font size", "merge and center", and "fill with color" all belong on logically different tabs based on their function. For me, they all belong on the "I use this regularly" page.
Program Intellivision!
I use LibreOffice on my computer. While I don't use it much, I haven't used MS Word in years. I generally find LibreOffice to be harder to use and less professional-looking than MS Office. How do I know? A few months ago, we were putting together some documents for work. Other people in the office were using MS Office and I was using LibreOffice. Sending documents back and forth between us mostly worked, although there were sometimes things that didn't appear in the LibreOffice version of the document (if I remember right, it was some image data in the headers and footers and sometimes signatures wouldn't show up in LibreOffice). I was sometimes surprised when I looked at a document in MS Office because I'd suddenly discover that something important wasn't showing up at all in LibreOffice and there was no indication that something was supposed to be there. Also, formatting had a tendency to get messed up. Don't get me started on getting charts to format correctly on LibreOffice. When I'd go over to my coworkers computers and look at/adjust the document in MS Office, it was generally a better experience (even though I haven't used MS Office in years). My conclusion was that MS Office was just plain a better program and LibreOffice has some usability issues and looked like it was a number of years behind MS.
I use LibreOffice because it's free - that's the only reason. If both were free, I'd use MS Office. But, for someone who wouldn't spend a lot of time using LibreOffice/MSOffice, it's just not worth my money to buy a copy of MS Office.
Revision control is only a collaboration tool to those who haven't used real collaboration tools.
Here they come.
See, here they are.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Man I dislike the ribbon. But even more I dislike how word 2011 puts all your embedded figures and textboxes in these weird hierarchy of wrappers I find impossible to manipulate. I can't find anything that word 2011 does better than 2008 did.
When I want to lower my blood pressure I turn to apple Pages. man what a breath of fresh air. It too has a different interface than the old word, but it is very very self consistent so the learning curve is fast. unlike the ribbon which is required for some functions, the toolbar is not required for any function, it is just for convenience.
There is exactly one problem I've had with Pages that is a show stopper. The folks at Zotero have a stick up their ass about trying to make zotero compatible with apple. They say it is because it is an undocumented API. but it is just xml, easy to read, and easy to figure out how to add end notes into. Various people have shown how to do this with perl scripts. but no Zotero somehow has this apple-hate vibe.
Thus endnotes are crippled on Pages.
I wish apple would implement their own bibliography system in pages in a way like zotero.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What you're missing is that before the ribbon it was easier to self discover the menu option that was needed and it wasn't buried 3 menus deep. As for customization, I already told you that while I can customize the ribbon, it requires precognition that I need to customize the menu. So I will need to memorize every single tab/button arrangement to know that something I will need isn't easily found before I start working on a document. If it is something I use all the time, customizing the ribbon makes sense but otherwise, I'm spending too much time looking for things.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This is it. Lots of people had behavioural understanding of how to use the old menu system, and it had 2 decades of inertia behind it. But that didn't make it a good way to do things. For all the new users (3rd world, and high school kids learning) the old system didn't really click with their understanding of how computers behaved. It very much represented things as layers of types of computer operations, not types of tasks you want to perform.
They've taken some time to get it improved, and there are certainly areas for improvement, but the user experience, and the learning curve for the ribbon are vastly preferable to the old system.
Interesting. So they got slammed, and the nancyboy admin decided to 403 that one page. Never seen that response to a slashdot avalanche. I'll dig it up later I suppose.
Oh, by the way, they have LOTS of interesting looking articles from the home page! <evil grin>
Check them out! http://www.datamation.com/
MuaHaHaHa!!
I just know I'm screwing my karma, but what the hell.
1. Has a vastly larger market share then LibreOffice. 2. You can get support on it though millions of forums, tech net articles. 3. Virtually no training need to introduce it in to an already existing windows echo system. 4. Its supported by coders that are paid to fix problems, not volunteers. 5. Integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft Office Products 6. Integrates seamlessly with Share Point. 7. Microsoft has been doing this for years, Libre is still "new" to the game and im sure there are others but im tired of typing and have to get back to work.
Well, you can always use LaTeX and Git and...
Kidding, kidding, but by having superior tools I guess you also meant more user friendly.
Why bother? The site is down.
Yes. You are the only one.
You are correct.
Only the slashdot summary makes this mistake. The actual article is written by someone who knows a lot more about the subject than the slashdot submitter and the slashdot editor who approved this story.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
I've done work (including international work) as a trained technical writer (in the Information Mapping methodology). I have to say that I much prefer LibreOffice to Word. The reason for this is that LibreOffice is fairly simple and doesn't get in your way (Clippy may not be visible anymore, but the 'help' that actually hinders is still there behind the scenes in Office - so you end up wrestling with it).
I couldn't read the article (got the Permission Denied error), but find that Word beats LibreOffice on the default style templates supplied. The coloring of tables is excellent in Word, while the LibreOffice styles are not as easy on the eye. LibreOffice completely kicks Word when it comes to PDF export. Exporting PDFs from Word is a nightmare, not only do the PDFs come out borked but it actually can foobar the original Word document too (since it can re-format the document as it attempts to figure out how to render the PDF) - that is so brain-dead.
The other thing I've noticed is that LibreOffice is much more responsive to user input. For some reason Word 2011 on the Mac is dog slow, uses a lot of CPU in the background even when you are idle (not typing) and crashes. This is most unlike other Mac programs. I used to think Office on Windows sucked because of Windows, with my Mac experience I have come to the realization that it is Microsoft Office that is the dog, and I simply cannot recommend it for use (and can't understand those that would, unless they don't know any better, or don't write professionally so never see the pain points).
Oh yeah, if you are more serious then paying for Adobe Acrobat is a good idea. Beats LibreOffice on functionality and result (although not on price), and is superior to MS Office (although not on price). For really scientific/technical stuff LaTeX is king, and even has easy to use interfaces like LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) to ease use for beginners.
Here is an abstract at least.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Yeah, no kidding. I especially like the feature with it where I can minimize it and never see its ugly face ever again.
Because the standard MS uses is now public.
If you're referring to OOXML, then perhaps you should take a look at how Word does in the OOXML conformance test suite. Last time I checked, there were about 10,000 test failures.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
MS Word just seems to make printing envelopes painless.
Try it with libreoffice. I bet you won't find it as easy.
Copy and pasting addresses is faster than handwriting them.
You send out your resume as an editable Word document?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
And after decades, I'm still waiting for Word (or LibreOffice) to add the typographic notion of a floating display: a block of image/text/whatever that has to stay together, but can automatically float to the top of the next page if there's not room at the current point of the current page, with text continuing to fill so the current page doesn't have extra white space at the bottom. It's an important feature in books and most technical reports, and the automatic bit is critical in large "living" documents that are revised regularly. Troff could manage it more than 30 years ago; LaTeX for almost as long.
....What? Why is that not Word's fault? Is it Microsoft's job to ensure that their formats are being loading properly in all third party software?
Points in favor of Microsoft Word:
1. Incompatibility
2. General shittiness
In other news, self-flagellation is on the rise.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You really speak personally for all the users at your company and they all dislike the ribbon? Really? You're not exaggerating even a little bit to make your point of view look stronger?
The Help menu on OS X contains a search field at the top. This will search help, but it will also search menu items. For example, if I type 'utf-8' into it in Safari, it will return a single item, and when I select it it will open the Text Encoding submenu of the View menu and highlight the Unicode (UTF-8) option. It makes finding things in submenus a lot less painful.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They don't say which version of Word. I suspect it's 5.5 for DOS
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I've yet to load any Word document into a different version of Word and have it look the same.
This does not appear to be a deal breaker for anyone.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
FOREVER!
I thought OpenOffice was a decent piece of software, but it's still based on prior definitions of what a documenting software has been, rather than what it could be.
That's one of the reasons I love Google Docs and Google Calendar. Those projects do not try to replicate Word and Outlook, they only compete obliquely with them.
I tried using Writer for a month. I tried really hard to get used to it. There were several places that showed how Writer was not sufficient for my needs, most things were just general annoyances of an unpolished product (the awful paste mechanism that needed a special dialogue box not to copy the origin formatting for one). But one thing stuck out that made me switch back. In particular, writer has a lot more trouble with non-English character formatting than Word does. It got to the point where Writer would even crash when I tried to paste non-English characters. After that, I gave up and went back to word.
Because they don't follow their own documented standard and refuse to add functionality to read other documented standards to their software.
"You don't have permission to access that page on this server".
mark
Have you tried the item that says "Step-by-step Mail Merge Wizard"? It can't get much more obvious than that....
I do like it. I really don't get it why people are so upset with it. Now the hot corners in the new Windows 8 desktop - that sux.
I found that once I started using the scroll wheel to cycle through the different ribbons I became less annoyed with the increased menu clicks. I still prefer keyboard shortcuts.
Self discovery is overrated. It takes all of two seconds to type it into help and get the answer.
I can top it. It miss Clippy. I thought the Ewoks and Jar Jar were cute. And I liked disco.
You like things that everyone else hates, so...... you're a hipster?
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
I'm not sure I would ascribe so much psychology to it. The interface changed significantly, and everyone who was used to the old interface found the new interface counter-intuitive and difficult to use, so they raged. It's what users do.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Are you joking? Menu : Format / Page. Then check "orientation : landscape" in the Page tab.
(translated from the French menus, may be slightly different on your computer)
I was recently introduced to Emacs' org-mode. It is really GREAT. I never looked into it before, as I thought it was basically a to-do list manager â" But no. I am currently using it mostly as a word processor (well, for semi-complex documents, as it makes little sense if your documents have no structure at all) and for presentations. And I'm still only beginning to love it (and am sure I'm truly underutilizing it). /italics/, *boldface*, =code=, nested/itemized lists with hyphens, etc.), and with three keystrokes, you export to your favorite format. C-c C-e b shows the document as a (inter-linked) HTML page, C-c C-e d compiles it with LaTeX into a PDF, etc.
True to the WYSIWYM mode, you work with a regular plain text file. There is a good deal of markup, but quite easy to learn (i.e.
You can actually do most of this in LaTeX too. My latest book is about Go and was written while the final spec was still in flux, so it got a lot of iterations through copyediting before the final version. I used latexdiff to produce PDFs indicating all of the changes since the previous version, including insertions and deletions. I have it integrated into my build system, so I can just specify a subversion revision number and have it give me a diff against that one. You can also use standard tools for revision control and for small changes just look at the raw diff without typesetting it.
OpenOffice does have change tracking, but somehow the performance is terrible. On a large document, with changes visible, on a 2.2GHz quad core i7, it took several seconds for each character I typed to show up.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What you're missing is that before the ribbon it was easier to self discover the menu option that was needed and it wasn't buried 3 menus deep.
It was easy to self discover, how? By doing an exhaustive search on the menus? Because they're not that intuitive. For example, in OO if I want to edit a bibliography, I have to go to Tools-Bibliography Database. If I want to add the bibliography to the document I have to go to Insert - Indexes and Tables - Bibliography Entry, where I can either add an item to the document's biblography database (which is separate from the bibliography database in the tools menu for some reason) or I can add a specific entry. Then to insert the actualy bib to the document you go to the oh so intuitive Insert - Indexes and Tables - Insert - Indexes and Tables, where you can insert among other indexes and tables, the bibliography.
In Office 2010, all these options are found under References - Bibliography.
Or how about my favorite, changing page orientation. In Open Office, it's under Formant - Page - Page. Why is such a common function as changing page orientation, among other things like page dimensions and margins hidden so well?
I already told you that while I can customize the ribbon, it requires precognition that I need to customize the menu.
Again, how is that different compared to the old menu. It's a provable fact that more options are deeper in the old menu system. Given this, how is it less likely you'll need to search for a feature in the old menu system? You make no sense.
Some places request that you send it in that format, and any other format would be ignored.
> Seems unfair to pick that direction. Why is that not Word's fault?
Because Word is the incumbent. If you as a contender want to talk to the incumbent, you have to learn the incumbents preferred language But LibreOffice gains a significant amount of users, this unfair requirement will not be valid any more.
It is important to remember that LibreOffice is fighting an uphill battle here, and this is by definition not fair, so you dont have to play fair. The incumbent did not win his top-of-hill position by playing fair, but by lockin deceit.
One possible way to gain foothold is abuse of authority. Leverage whatevery you have to push LibreOffice. If you can force LibreOffice on somebody, do it without remorse. Require anybody less influential and depending on you to communicate with you through LibreOffice. If you can, hurt them financially and tell them why. Drive the cost of using MSO up, while making LO look like a good way to cut costs.
The people do not really need MSO, they're just addicted to it. The detoxification therapy may not a pleasent experience for them, but it is their fault they got addicted in the first place and helped making other people addicted.
so...... you're a hipster?
I have a MacBook and iPad to prove it.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
no surprise to me that this guy (browse his other articles here http://www.datamation.com/author/Bruce-Byfield-6030.html - obviously a pretty big fan of open source and linux) can find 12 reasons why *HE* thinks libreoffice writer beats microsoft word.
but for every one person like this, there's a hundred + that can easily flip that around (word beats writer)
It takes 2 seconds if you know the exact terminology Help expects. Otherwise it can take a while then you go to Google and use your terminology (which is more common) and someone else tells you the MS terminology. Or if it was self discovery, you would have been done already.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If the problem is about using binary files, you can now save LibreOffice files in an uncompressed flat XML format (.fodt for text files). This might create problems with images though (I'm not sure how they are handled, maybe with base64), unless you link them, but LaTeX would have the same ones.
Of course because they are faster with someone that has the skill to use them.
IME one doesn't want stuff floating / moving around while editing --- leave that for when actually building the pages.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The note that one can use Libre Office as a replacement for FrameMaker is interesting though.
If only it had table styles... The way I see it, the two office packages simply have different sets of weaknesses. Call me a whiner, but I'm still waiting for a sane solution of the document preparation process problem. Troff has a nice pipelined architecture, but poor page layout capabilities, not to mention the obscure input format. TeX has great output quality, but again, page layout quickly gets obscure and writing code for it is unbelievable mess. (Sorry, I live in the 21st century, we have much better languages that the token sequence substitution stuff with no useful abstraction mechanisms for larger programs. LuaTeX fixes this a bit, though.) FrameMaker has a sane GUI input component, unlike Word and Writer, but it's proprietary and a larger install than both. And horribly monolithic. XML based tools nicely abstract a part of the problem (the definition of the meta-model for documents), but at the terrible cost of being partly backwards-compatible (idea-wise) with the unbelievable crap called SGML. I won't comment on the failure called XSLT, which combines the richness of a first-order functional language, popularity of LISP and succintness of XML notation in one neat package, since I would have to spew around words that the spell checker wouldn't pass through.
At least, they should finally implement table styles. Their absence is not funny at all.
Ezekiel 23:20
.
I have never had a problem printing envelopes with any version of Microsoft Word.
The examples you are giving is that LibreOffice doesn't place things where Office does. That isn't the same as self-discovery. As for customizing the ribbon, how do I know that I need to customize the ribbon before I know that it doesn't have the option I want. I first have to search all the ribbons then help or whatever to find my option. At that point I can decide if the feature is important enough to customize the ribbon. That's as silly as asking me do I know where I misplaced my keys. If I knew where I misplaced my keys, they wouldn't be misplaced. Is that any clearer?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The #1 aspect of Writer that is superior to Word is in handling floating inline images. It isn't rocket science, but Word seems intentionally designed maximally piss off the user:
1) Images don't actually end up where you drop them. You move it to where you want it on the page, then Word randomly decides to lay it out somewhere else.
2) Captions by default are separate from images, so you move the image and the caption stays behind. Worse, if you are editing text earlier in the document causing the image to move, the caption ends up in some other random location.
3) Images and captions in the body often end up wandering around the page and laid out overlapping the header or footer.
4) Sometimes you move an image or a caption, and it just vanishes. (It may not technically be "gone", but if you can't find it to click on it, it might as well be).
5) Anchoring to a specific page doesn't work if text stream position of the image isn't also on that page. Again, incredibly annoying if you are editing text earlier in the document.
6) Images are considered part of a paragraph for layout, sometimes resulting in half a page of whitespace on the previous page because Word randomly decided it can't fit both the paragraph and the image in the available space, and refuses to split the paragraph across pages.
7) If you click on an image and say "change picture" to replace the image with, say, an updated image of identical dimensions, it will forget that you had resized the image and force you to redo all the tweaking to sizing and layout you had already done.
Clearly, Word's image layout is stuck in 1995 because to actually fix it would break the ten billion Word documents already out there, but it is worth pointing out that LibreOffice has far saner and more predictable behavior in every case.
I wonder how many heart attacks have been caused by blood pressure spikes in frustration over Word's terrible, buggy, asinine layout algorithms?
Agreed, it can be done and the parent post was overblown. But it *is* in a stupid and non-intuitive place and it took me a heck of a long time to find it, too. Just irritating.
A resume is a pretty simple document type to keep an entire copy of msoffice around for. There's nothing in a resume that should be impacted by using ANY other alternative. It simply should not be that large or complex.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
One is a commercial product that keeps a monster company afloat the other is done by a community of I'd say mostly volunteers? So what if LO has some issues for what you get its like getting a Yaris that has uncomfortable seats and missing 30HP and getting it for free or buy it from Toyota for $11K hmm....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
they created f...ing ribbon which takes same amount of space as menu line and two or three toolbars and provides ten times less features.
You can't reliably parse text from a PDF (PDF mostly has no concept of paragraphs - just glyphs on a page). And how are they going to use their keyword scanner otherwise?
01010010 01100101 01100001 01101100 00100000 01101101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100111 01110010 01100001 01101101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00101110
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
The main reason for crashes in LibreOffice appears to be system memory. With sixteen gigabytes of RAM, Writer has yet to crash any document that I have opened -- something that I can't say about Word.
Does anyone else think that having to have 16 GB of ram to prevent your word processor from crashing is a bit excessive?
Then defecting to an entirely different product should not be a problem then. It doesn't even have to be Free Software. It could be one of those commercial Win32 competitors that have been marginalized.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I skimmed through the points, and I'm not impressed. Probably the most interesting area is how Writer offers more control over exporting to PDF. You can specify image compression levels, what page gets displayed on a 'preview', and other parts of the exported PDF. (It didn't say that you could create/modify the PDF's Table of Contents, and I bet you can't. That would have been a big bonus.)
The rest of the points sounded like comments someone who doesn't actually use Word would make.
-Can't modify styles by some hierarchy.
--I'm still unclear what they mean by that. I can easily modify styles in Word and have them reflected throughout the document.
-Some comment about how Word relies on a standardized "Normal" template. They mention Writer maintains a standard template, too, but somehow they liked Writer's implementation better. (Not a good enough explanation for that.)
-They mention Writer has "true WYSIWYG header/footers"...which Word does, too.
For someone with experience using Word in a professional/academic setting, their points were under developed and just not all that good. The one area they had me really interested, PDF exports, they didn't go into enough detail on. If Writer can actually output decently useful PDFs, then that's a major selling point! Move that point up to Num1 instead of Num 11 or wherever it was.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
The examples you are giving is that LibreOffice doesn't place things where Office does. That isn't the same as self-discovery.
Sure it is. Let's say I open Word and I want to add a biliography. After scanning the tabs, the obvious one is References, with second place being Insert. Then all the options are right there in front of me. In Writer, Insert is the most obvious menu, but there is no option for bibliography. There's an option for indexes and tables, and even in there the option to add a bibliography is missing, but hidden under the nondescriptive "Index and Tables."
The old menu requires you to carefully search through each flyout in each menuto find something. In the ribbon, those flyouts are all open at once, so what is an O(n^2) search in the old menu, is a O(n) search in the ribbon. Due to this design, the chances are the function you want is only 2 clicks away at most, and if you don't know where it is finding it should take less time, and at the very most you'll relegate yourself to the help box much faster if something is not present on the ribbon menu.
As for customizing the ribbon, how do I know that I need to customize the ribbon before I know that it doesn't have the option I want. I first have to search all the ribbons then help or whatever to find my option. At that point I can decide if the feature is important enough to customize the ribbon. That's as silly as asking me do I know where I misplaced my keys. If I knew where I misplaced my keys, they wouldn't be misplaced. Is that any clearer?
You still haven't answered how this is different than any other interface? How do I know I have to customize the menu interface before searching through the menu interface. Your complaint is not specific to the ribbon at all.
Ten times less features? Looking at a default install of Open Office Writer, I see 46 features within 1 click. In Word I see 42 features within 1 click. Features within 2 clicks are much higher in Word than Open Office Writer.
It didn't sell 200 million copies because it was the best program available, but because companies got bundles, have upgrade contracts and are already using older versions. Since the older versions no longer get updates, or will not get them in the near future, companies decide to upgrade. They seldom re-evaluate the competution, but just buy "the lastest version" and get unpleasant surprises like a lot of users not being able to do their regular work with the ribbon.
If they would seriously investigate what office suite would be best to purchase, before accepting the bundle or upgrading to the latest version of what they already have, I'm fairly certain that about half, maybe more of those 200M would not have been sold. Yes, I'm saying half. Word 2010 may be an annoyance, but it's still one of the better document editors around for general office use by office staff.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
And Interleaf about 20 years ago, for those who prefer something WYSIWYG. I have yet to encounter a visual editor as good as that one, that did what I need for those kinds of documents.
Word and other word processors do have that all-things-to-all-people-who-put-words-on-paper (or now, on-the-web) problem. But they've all spent decades pursuing features I can't imagine anybody using, while missing stuff that anybody who has to set up a large document will use all the time, and that Interleaf and LaTeX had forever.
Open source office software is has gotten pretty good
Now if they only added a decent grammar check.
Unfortunately, about 99.997% of documents written today are not academic papers or theses written to comply with the house style of a few hundred journals and a few hundred major institutions.
Even if they were, LaTeX's typesetting power now looks like the first car with an internal combustion engine: a revolutionary advance in technology at the time, that is now so antiquated and incompatible with modern standards that it has little value outside of its niche except as a historical curiosity.
Your argument about LaTeX controlling the logical design is well-taken, but unfortunately it never really did that, because in practice it conflated content and presentation to such an extent that you couldn't really separate them in anything beyond trivial cases.
The TeX family remains the preeminent tool for exactly one task today: typesetting maths. And that's only because no-one else has yet created another set of tools and fonts for doing so that doesn't suck.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I recently had to stop editing a document in LibreOffice because it couldn't handle the change tracking. That's an important feature to me, and for a document that size (about 30 pages) it was far too slow to use.
It's also under-powered, and lacks some important tools that MS Office has had for years. I found an old copy of Word 2003 laying around, and it handled my document just fine.
I still use LibreOffice; in fact, for most stuff I find that Google Docs suffices and has the advantage of not having to install anything and I can edit from anywhere. But when I need to use change tracking, that old copy of Word is the only option.
WordStar 7.0d. Only way to go.
It is Microsoft's job to follow their own standard (OOXML). They can't even ensure that their formats are being loaded properly between the carious revisions of their own product.
sig: sauer
I refurbish old PCs and, working with the Knights of Columbus, donate them to needy families with kids who will benefit from having a functional PC, even if it is 6-8 years old.
Free software is incredible valuable, as these are families that don't have $150 for productivity software, or $75 for antivirus. I load these systems with Open Office, Avast, Chrome, Picasa, and similar packages. No adware, no trialware, just good, functional software.
The only downside is that one High School deducted 15 points from a student's paper because it was not submitted in Word 7 format. Ugh!
Vietnam Veteran / Former Postal Worker -- Use Caution When Taunting!
Let me explain this slowly: your suggestion to someone not finding something was to customize the ribbon. My point is that you cannot know to customize the ribbon without precognition. This is true of menus, ribbons, whatever. It is not a solution to the problem at all. The solution is to make the option easily and self discoverable. The ribbon makes it harder to do by MS purposefully obscuring what it considers less used feautures 2 or 3 menus deep. With the old way, it was there and more easily discoverered.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I've submitted my pdf resume to web sites which parse it in real time. They seem to do a reasonable job of parsing it as I rarely have to fix anything.
Someone has figured out how to do it. It can't be that hard.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Wait, what? In LO, I right click the page, select "Page..." and in there you can click the landscape radio button. Click OK and done. Or am I not getting exactly what you meant?
Here's the secret to immortality:
Disclaimer: I am not employed by Microsoft and although I haven't checked the mail today, I don't expect there to be a check from Oracle.
I have been using OpenOffice exclusively for the last nine years. I even was able to use it at work.
But: I had one case years ago where the footnotes should (a) restart at every chapter but (b) show up all at the end of the document with chapter headings in between. (And I know, neither Openoffice nor Word are intended for publishing, but that's how it is IRL.)
With some tricks Word could do it, StarOffice couldn't (and Openoffice still can't). I wrote to the forum at Sun, only to be told that I either don't know what I'm doing or that I'm requesting a feature nobody needs.
That's not a singular case. Developers at Sun were quite agressive towards people who had different opinions about GUI or feature decisions. The bibliography project had some interesting ideas, but none of that has been integrated for years. I hope it changes, once LibreOffice is running well enough to look at designs.
There is nothing "standard" about what MS is doing. It's smoke and mirrors. I did a couple proofs of concept for unbelieving superiors who bought into this "standard" stuff. It's a joke of a standard.
Here's a lovely tidbit that indicates how bad things are: you open an old word file in Office 97 format, and save it as docx, all using latest office. You then inspect it, and there's a little flag that basically tells word to format it as if it were old Office 97 or whatever. Yes, it's a docx file that merely carries the behavior expected of the old doc file. There's no documentation anywhere about how to implement that flag. A whole lot of docx documents has this flag set because, guess, what, they where effectively imported from old doc into docx. There is no way to handle this without reverse engineering what Office 97 did, and documenting its behavior.
Never forget that it doesn't appear that MS wrote the opendoc standard first and then worked off of it, in a clean room fashion, in implementing their xml office file format support. Nope. They were at best documenting things as they went, and the only "standard" is the microsoft implementation of it in their office product. If you try and come up with your own implementation, you'll run into endless slightly incorrect statements, slight bits of missing information, slight smoke and mirrors; the general feel of the standard is that it was someone's second thought, never meant to be used for implementing anything, but merely used to appease the (rightful) "oh noes vendor lock-in" crowd. Smoke and mirrors, that'll be all there's to it.
Yes, the opendoc standard does IIRC correctly document the xml schema and whatnot, but that's a far cry from implementing the formatting engine. Merely knowing the data structures is only one side of the medal. Similarly, if you were to attempt reverse-engineering the old document stream format, you'd only end up with how they represent the document data in the stream (doc is an OLE compound storage file). You still need to know how all this data drives the formatter to produce the visible output. And that formatter, ladies and gentlemen, is so intertwined with the details of the underlying GUI engine in Windows, that expecting a pixel-identical output is absurd unless you'd reverse engineer and produce a formal spec of the formatter code from old Word, and do the necessary work of documenting how it interacts with the font rendering system -- because that's also anything but trivial.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The sad thing is that there are so many horrendous usability issues and functional limitations with both packages that these comparisons feel a bit like asking whether the guy hurtling to the ground at 98% of terminal velocity is in more trouble than the guy who reaches 98.5%, without anyone considering that giving either a parachute would have made a lot more difference.
I can't understand how market forces haven't yet driven anyone to create a general document editor that actually caters to what modern users want to do. Developing a program on this kind of scale is a serious project, and taking on Microsoft front and centre is probably a fool's game, but it's not as if you'd need a 500-strong team for years to do vastly better than any current word processor or mainstream DTP package, and Not Being Word isn't the commercial suicide note it used to be now that the dominant applications are the ability to (a) collaborate effectively within an organisation and (b) produce PDFs or other mostly "final" representations for external distribution.
Can't we Kickstarter enough funding for a small team of smart people with the right mix of skills to spend a year building something actually good?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Are you kidding me?
I'll have to check that out once I get home, thanks.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
That's an old argument in favour of typesetting systems like TeX and friends.
The thing is — and I write this as a guy who now produces serious documents directly in InDesign — it doesn't actually seem to disrupt much of anything in practice. InDesign uses a TeX-style H&J algorithm, so things do occasionally jump around slightly as you're editing. Since you're concentrating on typing, more often than not at the end of a paragraph if you're typing very much, and the layout effectively updates instantly on any modern computer, it's all quite stable by the time you pause to review what you just typed. Ditto for anchored frames that shift up and down a sidebar as you edit the main text, for example.
Of course, if you're working on a "chaotic" layout where typing a single extra character really can trigger a huge change like shifting a half-page float from the bottom of page 10 to the top of page 11, a perfectly sensible alternative is to have a dedicated story editor that is WYSIWYG up to a point but then display full page layout reflows in a separate window/panel/something.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The heck? To me, all the formatting belongs in the Format menu. Why the heck did MS put page formatting under the File menu is beyond me. I always found it counterintuitive. I think that anyone arguing that Page formatting in the Format menu in OOo.org/LO is somehow bad have just never really critically looked at their daily work environment: it's a confounding mess and they merely grew used to it over the years.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Agreed, but most non-techies wouldnt even think of LaTeX. If you write anything with more than 4 pages and want wysiwyg, Open|Libre Office styles are just wonderful.
Word used to be that way, but now hides all these features, because that's where they see their market. And if all you do is a letter or a sign in ComicSans for the break room, that's just fine. Just like all these websites made with a click and publish tool (or even Word) are just fine.
I thought OpenOffice was a decent piece of software, but it's still based on prior definitions of what a documenting software has been, rather than what it could be.
Unfortunately, it still feels that way. The document format could do so much more. And if you think of the format like you think of a programming language, Open|Libre Office could allow more variations, even if it isn't offered by the standard gui.
You don't need to say it slower. I understand what perfectly what you're saying. I just think you're wrong.
My point is that you cannot know to customize the ribbon without precognition. This is true of menus, ribbons, whatever.
This is not the point you made originally. You're backtracking now. You asserted that the problem with the ribbon is that it assumes what you need and don't need and hides the rest. Now you say this is a problem with any menu system. So we are in agreeance now.
It is not a solution to the problem at all.
I'm not so sure this problem needs to be solved at all. How often do you need to find uncommon functions. By definition... not often. If you find you do need one often, just make a shortcut. You seem to want an interface that can read your mind and always activate the function you have in mind. This is unrealistic.
You make this assertion that "The ribbon makes it harder to do by MS purposefully obscuring what it considers less used feautures 2 or 3 menus deep. With the old way, it was there and more easily discoverered." But you have yet to substantiate this. I have provided several examples and reasons why the ribbon makes functions more easily discoverable. Let me enumerate and expand them for you and add a couple more.
1) The ribbon layout decreases search time. Finding a function in the old menu takes time O(m*n*p) where m is the number of menus, n is the number of items in the menus, and p is the number of flyouts. Finding a function in the ribbon takes time O(m*n) where m is the number of tabs and n is the number of items in the tabs.
2) The layout of the ribbon allows for more items to be displayed at once. Thus the number of items 2 clicks away are much higher than in the old menu. Thus the need to drill down into sub menus is decreased compared to the old menu.
3)The ribbon uses icons and words to represent functions, which makes them not only easier to remember but easier to scan quickly. In a menu system you have to read each of the words, one after another to find the one you want. And sometimes, a picture is a better representation for a function, like a style or a shape or a chart. For instance, the ribbon allows plenty of space to visualize all of the text styles. Rather than reading "heading 1" "heading 2" "text body" etc... as in Open Office Writer, you see them visually in Word due to the Ribbon.
4) The ribbon has more logical groupings for functions due to more space. Like the example I gave, Bibliography functions are under reference. In the old menu system, several related functions might be spread across different menus.
5) Context specific ribbons bring together common tools. For example with graphs, all graph functions are available in context tabs. In the old menu system, they try to replicate this with context toolbars, but the toolbar changes depending on the part of the graph you have selected. So rather than having everything in front of you, you have to click on the different chart pieces to try and find the function you want. Not very discoverable.
Now, how exactly does the old menu system beat these features of the ribbon in terms of discoverability?
It's certainly possible, but it's more similar to how an OCR does it minus the actual deciphering of characters. Open a PDF file in notepad and you'll have an idea how hard it is (it's not a binary format at all if you have no pictures). Most systems that do an accurate job rendering it to plain text render the PDF and then try to reproduce the spacing/formatting in text form.
If ALL you want is the keywords, there are easier ways of getting the text out, but they aren't all reliable.
Totally agree. It's very helpful to see all the options on each tab right away. If they are in the menu, they are hidden under submenus etc, and it's just text. In the ribbon, what you want to do is also somewhat graphically displayed. For example, I want to turn numbers into percent, I click the "%" sign. I don't go into Tools->Format->Percent etc.
So no, you are not alone in liking the Ribbon. I bet that most people still making fun of the ribbon after all these years (it's been what, 5 years?) haven't actually tried to use it.
That's in development
Like others mentioned, subversion and git aren't bad tools either, though I guess they wouldn't be worth the effort unless the project is of textbook proportions.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
So add them to the "Quick Access Toolbar" up at the top of the window and you're golden. Don't like the toolbar there? Click on the drop-down and have it displayed below the ribbon. Don't like the ribbon taking up space? Click that same drop-down and minimize the ribbon.
Want to copy them from computer to computer? You can do that too!
Copying Office Quick Access Toolbars
When I first saw the ribbon in Office 2007 I was apprehensive but I've come to really like it.
Actually, I have to admit, I'm on the first generation of the ribbon in 2007. I haven't upgraded to 2010 yet.
Program Intellivision!
I've had the "pleasure" of using Google Docs when organisations I've worked with adopted it as their corporate standard.
Google Docs competes with Word in about the same way that a basic text editor with a distributed version control system does, except that Google Docs is slightly more interactive and much more likely to corrupt your document.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
These can all be placed on the quick-access toolbar, or you can customize the ribbon so that "Mr. Z's Favorite Commands" shows up in the ribbon as a tab, which you can easily customize to add whatever items you wish to.
It requires some time and attention to get these things set up, but I don't see anything you're saying "I wish I could..." that's impossible with the ribbon interface, or even all that difficult with the ribbon interface. Anecdotally, I find the Ribbon much easier to customize than the old menu system was.
That is false. The docx Word 2010 produces does not follow the documented standard.
Office 2007 does follow Ecma-376 1st edition, but not 2nd one (aka ISO/IEC 29500).
Office 2010 supports read support for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional and Strict, and write support for Transitional only (not for Strict).
2007 did not support the ISO spec, because that came out long after it was released (Ecma spec was pretty much what Word did, but ISO changed quite a bit in it).
2010 supports ISO spec, but only in its transitional mode, not strict.
Keyboard shortcuts all remain the same, by the way, so those who used them wouldn't care. It's about mouse muscle memory only.
With respect to orb (the Ribbon term for it is "pearl") for the file menu, there was enough negative feedback on that that it was actually changed to just read "File" in Office 2010.
It's actually one feature that I'm surprised is not pervasive yet. Search over all commands in the application is extremely useful, especially for the more complicated suites like Office or VS.
It's slowly trickling down elsewhere - e.g. we've added something like it in VS11 (with more filtering features, but that's feasible because it's a product for developers who can handle and appreciate that complexity), and, I believe, most Java IDEs have had similar for a while now. But why not e.g. add it to the standard Win32 menu control? Or, in frameworks which have UI actions as first-class entities regardless of their placement (e.g. WPF commands, or Qt actions), provide a stock widget to search through all actions available in the current context.
I don't care if "zoom", "increase font size", "merge and center", and "fill with color" all belong on logically different tabs based on their function. For me, they all belong on the "I use this regularly" page.
That's what the Quick Access toolbar (the thingy on the left in the title bar) is for.
1. Libre/Open office needs to figure out that tables are NOT spreadsheets. When I select a row and hit ^X, it should delete the entire row, not just the data. Same with moving rows.
2. Libre/Open office makes it nearly impossible to hide text. With word, there is a formatting option, "hidden." With Libre, you have to set up a rule, write a bunch of Visual Basic, access a database.... I exaggerate, but not much.
One note: I'm working on a document in Open Office that's about 450 pages on a netbook with 1 gig of memory, a single 1Ghz processor, and it's perfectly usable. (Ubuntu netbook remix)
I hate it, not for being what it is, or for "threathening my superiority" - I hated it just for being different from the old versions.
Why? Today I use word approximately once per year, for filling out some form that has been created by the administration. This almost-never use frequency does not warrant learning a new type of interface, so I looked for a way to switch back to the old style which I know (like you could with winXP - switch back to the win2000 style of menus etc.). It didn't exist, and the forums I tried to ask on was full of trolls insisting in that it was better.
Maybe it is better, maybe not - I really don't care. It stands between me and what I need to do, and it refuses to move aside. So therefore, the only thing left was to hate it...
(It should probably be mentioned that this word-editing session ended with me unzipping the docx, editing the XML with EMACS, rezipping it and adding the extension. All that to fix a well-known bug where clicking the correct button in the UI doesn't change the lock status of the document. So I was quite fed up already...)
This is the key difference between menus and toolbars. Words have an inherent meaning - if you're literate, you can at least read it, and probably infer its meaning. Pictures require a cultural context, which changes over time. For instance, when's the last time you saw a 3.5" floppy disk, outside of the toolbar in most applications? How do I teach my kids that this means "save file"? "Well, this little blue box with the little white box, that means save. Why? Well, long before you were born..." The obvious conclusion is that at some point I'm going to have to learn a new icon, even if I don't know what it's going to be yet. And this gets back to the self-discovery. When you peruse menus looking for that one feature you need, even if you have the wrong name for it you should be able to have an idea of what the names there do mean, and find the right one. The up side is, if you have the wrong name for it, you'll have at least heard of the right name by the time you find it.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
At any rate, if you really need to, you can customize the ribbon layout in Office 2010 in pretty much any way you choose.
Except to look like the old menu & toolbar combination
Revision control is only a collaboration tool to those who haven't used real collaboration tools.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know how to use revision control.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yes, you need to go further. With respect to vertical screen realestate, when maximized, from the top of the screen to the top of the word document, Word and Writer use the SAME amount of vertical space. Further, you can minimize the ribbon and bring it back in a single click. Cannot do that with toolbars in writer. Especially on a 1080 screen, this is not an issue.
Second, icons are not hidden until the window is about 960px wide, and only the least used functions are grouped at that point. Most used functions like font tools are not hidden until the window is around 440 pixels. Note that toolbars will also hide functions depending on window size. The different and benefit of the Ribbon is that large icons are turned into small icons before they are hidden, allowing more functionality to be present at smaller resolutions compared to the toolbar.
There's also the nice new equation editor that only works in one font, Callibri, when most of the universe specifies either Times or TeX Computer Modern for equations, but that's not a ribbon fail
The font is Cambria Math, and you can change it as long as you have a font that supports all the math. I've done it just fine.
I changed Clippy over to the kitty cat and never minded it again.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Do you enjoy working for such extremely stiff and bureaucratic companies? :)
c++;
Though don't tell LibreOffice you want "PDF A/1-a" format (i.e. embedded fonts) because if you do, it will generate a broken PDF that Acrobat Reader(!!) will not be able to open.
"There was an error processing a page. Invalid colorspace."
Maybe having fewer options makes it easier to test for this sort of thing. I bet Word's PDF exporter has been tested with Acrobat Reader...
You're an immobile computer, remember?
I believe they've learned since Office 2010 sheds the orb for a more traditional File tab (which looks a lot like a large menu).
>>>The only downside is that one High School deducted 15 points from a student's paper because it was not submitted in Word 7 format
That teacher would get bitch-slapped.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Microsoft has sold 200 million licenses of word. Of that number, many were part of license programs that expire. For example, my company had a license that would renew each year, and would apply to only the current version of the Microsoft products. Another factor in the number of sales: old versions of office cannot open docx format files. A final factor is that many companies (and individuals) replace their PCs every 3-5 years and portions of old versions of Office typically don't work on newer MS operating systems. For example, Outlook 2000 would not work on Windows Vista.
All of the above issues are economic issues and tend to be more important to large scale buyers than largely cosmetic features like replacing a menu and tool bar with a ribbon. I'm glad you personally like the ribbon. Someone has to.
-- $G
OpenOffice's/LibreOffice's dictionary can't hold a candle to Word. Neither in English, nor in Spanish.
Sorry, I know is trollish, but I had to vent it!
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Oh, I read it, hoping it would point out all the features I need in Word were actually incorporated into Libre Office now too. Nope.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The strange thing is, who are all these "noobs"?
High-school kids in 2007 were using Word for the first time?
What did they use prior to that? 5-year olds can run Word (or Writer).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
See, I actually appreciate that, for some, the Ribbon might be more appropriate. That's great (for you).
If there were a competitive marketplace, every office program writing to a standard format (like OpenDocument format), some with ribbons, others with menus, others with vim keybindings, life would be awesome.
The reason people complain is that the Ribbon is forced upon them by some Program Manager in a monopolist's Office team.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I can't say for sure now, but can't you do that with frames and the appropriate settings on other paragraphs' styles?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Yup. I found out the hard way TWICE. Normal letters and office handouts don't fare so badly, but resumes are the most easy to mis-convert computer layout system that is mainstream out there:
1) bullet points always mess up by disappearing, getting retabbed in the wrong direction, or using some silly glyph
2) Fonts and spacing looks wrong
3) If you're lucky that 1 and 2 isnt' bad enough, your carefully crafted ODF [that got too-quickly exported to DOC] shows up in the hands of your 5 interviewers, but is no longer in the compacted one-page fit you so carefully battled your text into becoming... because everything repaginated without your knowing.
In fact, this may be your recruiter's fault --they go in there and add a company letterhead to customize your contact info adding bit-rot when resaving and potentially killing even a well-converted but unstable house-of-cards document.
Lacking office during my one serious linux-only period, I got the free and legal Word 2003 Viewer for windows. The downside was that dual-booting to Windows just to test against a hated MS product gets tiresome. And believe you me, if you become uninsured + unemployed then job boards, recruiters and dream postings will pull you to customize more times than you can mind OpenOffice has behaved with your formatting house-of-cards... you probably will make changes to your resume every week and have several parallel versions stashed, each with monthly changes. It's only a matter of time before you realize you messed up, but potentially losing job leads is a bitter experience.
As with many things, it depends on what you consider important. The ability to use word or other office applications in scripts, automatically update via WSUS, integrate with sharepoint, be 100% compatible with other MS office users, etc may be more important to some.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Ya, but when everyone around you uses word or google docs in a collaborative fashion, it's much harder to convince everyone else to go with revision control+latex. WISYWIG+built in revision control ends up being the path of least resistance when including non-engineer folks in the loop. Plus it's easier to edit someone else's content without having to parse the LaTeX syntax every time.
Nice. I look forward to that update. I hope it's compatible with docx; that would make it easier to transition between the two.
I tried using word in a collaborative fashion once, it was a mess. If anyone opened the file with a more recent version of word than the rest, it magically made the file only work with that most recent version. And it's just a mess to exchange files by email and remember which version is which. It's also impossible to work in parallel on different parts of the same document.
It just doesn't work.
Advantage: Hierarchical Paragraph Styles.. "since every style is based on Normal"
Let's examine that. The first four properties of a style in Word 2010, sitting open next to me.
-Name
-Style type
-Style based on
-Style for following paragraph
So a Style can be based on any other style, or (no style) should you want to start from blank. Does that sound like a hierarchy? It does to me, and I use it as one. Set up what you want. Knock yourself out. It works, and allows you to create a hierarchy.
His piece on list styles/bullets seems slightly ill informed too, as is the tirade on headers and footers, tables of contents... Word can do what is described.
Custom properties, linked to fields, are extensively used by many organisations and what he's describing sounds more like Word than Writer to me. That one has me really confused as metadata management is really quite good in word.
In short, I know Word quite well and I think the 'advantages' that are being proposed as Writer advantages are simply down to the author's lack of knowledge.
I fully expect flamebait moderation for this, but it would be nice if someone could point out where I'm wrong!
Basically a canonical example of FUD: "If it's not from MS, don't trust it!".
You can explain to your Client or your Dad that "This is OK; I'm using LibreOffice". Explain to them the concept of FUD and how they're being made fools of by MS.
And if they choose to understand, it still won't matter. "Office said it's dangerous; I'm not putting it on my computer, and I don't have time to listen to you."
"Office File Validation is used to validate that Binary File Format files conform to the Microsoft Office File Format. The user will be notified of possible security risks if files fail to conform to the format."
To demonstrate... .doc, .xls.
Create or edit a document with a non-MS editor and save it in a MSOffice format e.g.
Now, try to open it in MSOffice 2010+ (or office 2003/2007 with the addin)
Depending on your configuration, you will see one of two messages:
“Office File Validation detected a problem while trying to open this file. Opening it may be dangerous”
“Office has detected a problem with this file. To help protect your computer this file cannot be opened.”
Regardless of which of the previous posts are true, the consensus seems to be 'real men waste time and effort doing everything in the hardest most complicated possible way.' As a fake man, I use whatever language/environment combination allows me to complete the project as desired in the shortest amount of time. This means IDE's like visual studio and eclipse, and for making games I use unity3d. Sure there are a lot of restrictions like the inability to easily add libraries and the opaqueness of certain aspects of the physics engine and graphics pipeline. But I am trying to put out basic proof of concept prototypes and if I can get it done in a week with a few efficiency issues, I will take that over getting it done in 3 months on a lower level where I have complete control. Like I said, I am just not a real man.
If the total number of items is the same, then the search time would be the same. But lots of options are not IN the ribbon, and for those the search time is a lot higher.
Menus also have icons. Thus the menu has both the icon AND the word. In the ribbon I have put my mouse over each icon, wait for the tooltip to pop up and then quickly read the text, hoping it doesn't disappear before I've read it. That takes a LOT more time than scanning menus with text+icons.
Logical grouping is not specific to menus or the ribbon and thus irrelevant.
Context specific ribbons are horrible because they make the structure change meaning I keep having to search. On top of that, I can not discover what is not there. With a greyed-out item I can at least find the item, and it being greyed-out is a good indication my context is wrong.
I have tried to use open alternatives to Word, but they just don't cut it when trying to collaborate with others. Cross compatibility with Word is poor, particularly for long manuscripts that are edited extensively with track changes. It just isn't worth the headache, and trying to convince academics to convert to something else is nearly impossible.
And LaTeX is not an option, most people I collaborate use Word for manuscript prep. And I will preemptively state that many journals we submit to openly state they prefer manuscripts written in Word, but will accept LaTeX...
If the total number of items is the same, then the search time would be the same. But lots of options are not IN the ribbon, and for those the search time is a lot higher.
In the menu system I have to scan every menu, moving the mouse up and down to open all the flyouts to scan all the options. In the Ribbon I just have to scan every tab, moving my mouse across to click on each tab. Much easier. And by my count, there are 197 selectable items by default in the Word 2010 ribbon, whereas in Writer 3.3.0 there are 148 selectable items in the menu. This of course includes the "table" menu in Writer, which is mostly grayed out until you select a table. When a table is added in Word the Ribbon grows by 58 selectable functions.
The whole point of the Ribbon is it allows access to *more* items in fewer clicks. You're the first person I've ever seen claim that the ribbon contains less items. Many options like page orientation are right in the ribbon whereas in Writer they are 3 layers deep in a new window.
Menus also have icons. Thus the menu has both the icon AND the word. In the ribbon I have put my mouse over each icon, wait for the tooltip to pop up and then quickly read the text, hoping it doesn't disappear before I've read it. That takes a LOT more time than scanning menus with text+icons.
Sparsely... less than half the items have icons, and there's no clear reason for which have icons and which don't. In Office, every function is accompanied by an icon and text except the most common like "bold" or "justify" an the like. The only time icons don't have text are when the ribbon begins to compress on a very small screen. You wouldn't happen to be using it in less than 1000px of horizontal resolution?
Also, hovering over an item in the ribbon doesn't just give you its name (and it stays as long as your mouse is there. Have you even used Word 2010?); it gives you a little description of what that function does and in some cases a picture preview. Hovering over an item in a menu does nothing because hovering is reserved for opening flyouts.
And of course you have your toolbar which is icons only, even for uncommon functions. Or you could change it to icons+text, but then it takes up an enormous amount of space due to the 1D layout and gets truncated,so that half of the functions are hiding. The 2D layout of the Ribbon allows for icon+text and doesn't hide anything.
Further, you didn't address the ability of the ribbon to show style previews. Its size allows this, whereas the menu+toolbar do not have enough room to provide this convenience.
Logical grouping is not specific to menus or the ribbon and thus irrelevant.
It's highly relevant when every menu system out there can't do it right. The ribbon has labels for each of the groupings in each tab, which makes the ordering more logical and decreases function search time. In the menu system, there are horizontal rules that separate each group, but there is no indication as to the contents of the group. You have to infer this based on group membership, which is counter productive. Until the menu system changes to add semantic context to the groupings they create, this is indeed specific to ribbons.
Context specific ribbons are horrible because they make the structure change meaning I keep having to search. On top of that, I can not discover what is not there. With a greyed-out item I can at least find the item, and it being greyed-out is a good indication my context is wrong.
Menu+toolbar systems have context specific toolbars as well. For example, Writer has a table menu, and when you create a table, a table toolbar appears. Greyed out items are unhelpful because a) they don't need to be there taking up space if you can't use them and b) give you no indication on how to use them anyway. Discoverability of these context specific ribbon tabs is easy, as they appear as soon as you insert their context,
Those features can certainly deal with the "display" part of the problem, but they don't deal with the "floating" part. Both Word and Writer insist that things be attached -- to the page, to a paragraph, to a character, somewhere. They don't (and after this long, I'm inclined to say won't ever) address the underlying issue that in some types of document, strict ordering is relaxed for certain types of objects when the material is laid out on finite pages.
Putting latex files under revision control just works. Doesn't work so well with word/openoffice.
LaTeX files under revision control works okay, but it's a far cry from the sort of collaboration enabled by Word, which is itself a pale, pale shadow of the sort of collaboration enabled by Google Docs.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That will change the orientation of ALL pages. If you only need one, you'll have to go to Format -->Paragraph -->Text Flow-->Breaks, check "Insert" and "With Page Style"and then select "Landscape", so yeah, it's not precisely intuitive.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Having everyone have a different ribbon is not a feature when you're trying to explain how to do something, perhaps because you don't have access to some machine from which you can access the user's computer remotely to show them what you're talking about. You used to just be able to tell them go here, go here, click this to get the toolbars they needed, and then click the little book with the A on it or whatever. That's over. The future has become a more confusing place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
huh? Everyone has the same ribbon unless they customize it. Obviously someone who customizes the ribbon is more advanced and isn't going to need an explanation on how to do or find something.
I could customize the ribbon but that requires precognition that what I want is not obvious.
Time and time again I keep saying the same thing. I am not responsible for your lack of understanding. Customizing the ribbon or menu (as I stated in the very beginning) is not the solution to the fact that things are not obvious. With menus, things are not buried as much as with ribbons which gives a better chance at self discovery. Yes someone can design menus that are completely incomprehensible but that's another topic. Ribbons by their nature tend to bury things under multiple layers.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We got a lot of those kids into university. And they didn't really know how to use word. Sure they could open it and start typing, but that couldn't format a document to change their lives. They certainly can now though.
Being able to 'use' any of the office products isn't just open them start typing win, it's being able to actually do something useful with the document. Templates, style guides, being able to produce documents for different purposes, backing up data. Even basic stuff like changing fonts or adding superscripts and subscripts, I don't have to help first year university students with that anymore. I certainly did 4 or 5 years ago though.
What people learned before was behaviours. Actions that resulted in what they wanted, with no idea what those actions were actually doing, or why, just 'click these buttons in this order and you'll get it to do this thing you wanted'. They didn't actually understand, they just wrote memorized a series of steps. They couldn't come up with steps on their own to save their lives. That applies to far more than just highschool kids, but to most users in general. The new ribbon at least sort of categorizes things by what you're trying to do. If it's not on the home screen (which is a stupid name, but whatever) then it's in sort of sensible easier to understand places. If I want to work with references I'm not trying to find where I insert references, and most of the format menu made sense when there was a lot less screen real estate but can be don't much more gracefully now. The old system was really organized the way the programmers were organized. "edit" "format" "tools" and "window" don't really convey what they actually are from a user perspective, they sound more like how the departments within microsoft were organized, so if you were in the 'tools group' your work ended up in a sub menu layer of 'tools'. You then needed to be able to guess enough about how computer software was written to figure out if the thing you were trying to do was a 'tools' problem or a 'format' problem or a 'edit' problem, and hunt for it there, if you wanted to try and understand.
Don't get me wrong, the ribbon isn't perfect, but if I want to make document mailings, or put in references or collaboratively edit the ribbon makes those tasks a lot clearer to novice users.
With menus, things are not buried as much as with ribbons which gives a better chance at self discovery. Ribbons by their nature tend to bury things under multiple layers.
I spent the last 5 posts giving you concrete reasons for why your assertions are wrong. You can't just contradict me with no reasons or evidence. I've argued that:
A) there are more options available in total on the default ribbon (197 options in Word 2010 compared to 148 in Writer 3.3). Since the ribbon organizes items in 2D and take up more space then a menu, by their very nature they allow more items to be displayed at once and better organize those items using pictures, size, and text. Given that there is more space for more items, and there is a higher item count, how can you claim that the ribbon is hiding functionality more than a menu?
B) Menus by *their* nature tend to bury things in layers. I have evidence for this: click on a menu and you see a bunch of sideways pointing arrows that denote a flyout. Those are layers under which functions are buried! Ribbons are only 1 layers deep. You click on a layer, and you see everything at once. No need to go through a bunch of flyouts. This improves discoverability over the menu.
C) Self discovery is improved in the ribbon, for all the reasons I listed in my last post that you have yet to comment on. You keep asserting that the ribbon is not obvious, yet provide no evidence or reasons to back this up, in spite of the reasons I enumerated for you.
Time and time again I keep saying the same thing. I am not responsible for your lack of understanding.
My advice is don't reply with the same thing as you have been, because I read it and I understand it, but I think you are wrong for all the reasons I posted here and above (which you seem to have not read, since you haven't refuted any specific point). You have yet to present any evidence to support your point of view, and you have yet to refute my point of view. You just keep saying the same thing. That's not my fault, that's yours.
True. When it's 2-3 people, an individual tends to put a lock on it until they've done all their changes (2-3 days max). If the group becomes larger, it gets placed on a website; People edit the document and upload their most recent copy. Ultimately, there is some group coordination that goes on beforehand and Word becomes a poor-man's version control. Dealing with these hassles in an organized fashion is still cheaper (for time) than requiring everyone to learn LaTeX+svn.
Yes, that worked, thank you. While I like LaTeX for stuff printed on paper, the fonts (and lack of flow) make LaTeX less than desirable for display on a screen.
Also cost and the flexibility to change the OS.
Just migrated one of my clients to open office (85 PCs) purely for cost considerations. This is a hospital with a basic hospital management system and regular office use. They are still on XP and I will next migrate them to a linux based OS.
BUT unfortunately, they have a few software packages that use excel as a database so I need to find an alternative for departments that use these PCs (21 PCs in all). Note that getting the software changed isn't a practical option in this case.
I tried to load MDAC (the microsoft data access compnents) but it still doesn't work.
Any suggestions? OK
Because the standard MS uses is now public.
Because the standard MS uses is now "public".
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
I'd dare say that combine the quirks one must learn and the constant tossing of every feature in every single spot drowning you out, MS Office is the PHP of productivity software.
When I first read that, I really thought you'd written "MS Office is the PHB of productivity software."
I guess that still kinda works.
Kinda like MS Office.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."