LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

blog.documentfoundation.org

220 pointsrbanffy159 comments

While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it displeases me that the FOSS community is so hostile to the ribbon-style UI MS uses in its office product. Its such a great concept that using LO is like stepping back into the Office 97 days. Frankly, I'd rather just pay every few years for a home edition of Office than do all the mental gymnastic needed to properly switch to LO.

>Its such a great concept that using LO is like stepping back into the Office 97 days.

Maybe there's a reason why ribbon-style components haven't really taken off outside of core Microsoft products. I don't think the ribbon is actually that great-looking and I don't think it's that functional.

I'm also a fan of a LO forging it's own identity. For far to long Open Office strove to mimic MS Office in look-and-feel.

The Ribbon is amazing when you have lots and lots of commands, many which aren't always commonly used. Few programs approach the sheer number of commands. IIRC, in Office 2007 it was like 1300?

One of the main designers ran a blog explaining the design process. Even if you hate the ribbon, the explanation of how they came to it (heavily driven by telemetry, eye tracking studies, etc) is pretty cool. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story...

The video is great: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

I couldn't go back to taskbars and task panes after watching that.

Autodesk Inventor uses the Ribbon, and it makes doing 3D CAD extraordinarily intuitive.

I think the sibling comment is right---the ribbon makes a lot of sense when you have tons and tons of commands.

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

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

> I don't like the new MS UI.

It was introduced 8 years ago. It is hardly new anymore.

While going to the ribbon 8 years ago was a struggle, I couldn't go back now. The context aware parts, realtime previews, and just organisation is too good.

Unfortunately LibreOffice now feels cluttered and overly busy by comparison. That's more because Libre/Open Office has stood still, largely based on Office 9x rather than trying anything new themselves.

I'm not saying they should copy everything Microsoft does. I am saying that they should evolve themselves and look at where the industry is headed. For example look at all of the UI concepts from the web and touch devices, they've introduced a number of new ideas none of which Libre/Open Office have adopted.

If I wanted to use LibreOffice on my Surface Pro, I couldn't, no touch UI at all. That's a little disappointing.

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

I was a OF user for years before switching. I got Office 2010 because of a client and like you said after couple of weeks of trying was enough for me to like it. The workflow, the mouse over preview's in the ribbon and shortcuts is such an improvement. Now I can't see myself switching. One more note, money shouldn't be the reason not to switch, it's worth it if you use it for business. For personal use, Google (which I use too) or LO will do it.

I have been using it for three years. At work, I'm forced to use it. I still don't like it.

I can make due and get things done but when I have the choice, I go for a traditional UI. I prefer a regular Menu Bar.

I'm not saying that it sucks or that it shouldn't exist or that no one should use a ribbon. I'm just saying that I don't like ribbons and will continue to use standard interfaces.

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

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

Is it really worse than toolbar hell?

http://www.mlponies.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05...

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

For everything else text and icons is probably optimal.

Do you also struggle with tabbed web pages and toolbars? If you can't use either of those, then I agree, you will have problems with the ribbon.

If you can use both of those -- and I'm certain you can -- then I don't see why something that simply combines tabs and toolbar icons is such problem.

I really didn't find the jump from 2007 to 2010 jarring. Even 2010 to 2013 was trivial for me. The ribbon changes have been minor since its introduction.

Obviously 2003 to 2007 was a big deal due to the introduction of the ribbon, but we're taking something that happened eight years ago.

Microsoft also started some FUD when registering a patent of their ribbon design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_%28computing%29#Patent_...

Personally, FOSS or not, I simply don't like the ribbon style menu.

Agreed. Didn't like the ribbon at first, but grew to find it very useful for Office.

I like the ribbon, but it takes up too much vertical space on a 16:9 display, especially in Word. LO Sidebar uses the space better, and I can see more of the document at once.

Sure, but that's why you keep it closed almost all the time. For practical purposes, the ribbon takes up less space than the header on Notepad.

I've added my most used Word functions to the quick access bar, and some features are provided by the ghost menus that appear by the cursor, and I know a load of keyboard shortcuts. All of which means I very rarely open the ribbon. But when I do need it, it's orders of magnitude better than the rat's nest of menus and task panes we had before.

You can double click the heading on top of the ribbon to collapse the whole thing.

Indeed, I think it's been collapsed by default for some time...

You can collapse it. Then it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/owymIV4.png

Not everyone likes ribbons, and "touch-first Office" is going to be the thing LO needs to aim for, though probably not by imitation. LO could be a big part of making Linux tablets useful.

It already works (somewhat) on Android: http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/master/Android-ARM@2...

That's just a viewer. Getting documents to render and making a usable touch interface for editing documents are two very different things.

It's a viewer because editing is disabled. Editing is coming :-)

Having a well-supported full-featured word processor on Android should be very popular. It could multiply the audience for Libre Office. Congratulations on a monumental effort.

I have come to dislike all manner of menu based interfaces. They are annoying as fuck unless you are well used to the program, and then they keep changing them with different versions. What I would like is a search as you type entry field, similar to the Windows 7 start menu. I type in "cro..." and cross reference shows up, then I click on it. And it'd have the option of keeping the commonly used ones nearby for easy click. I havent used any apps that do this, but would love to see something like this.

The Mac OS X Help menu has this type of search, provided that all application commands are in menus.

Use command-shift-/ (shortcut to help search) in OS X to find any menu items. It is nearly instantaneous.

If Windows doesn't have the same thing already built in, I'd guess there must be some add-ons that do the same thing.

The ribbon is stacked button bars. Navigating the ribbon is as unsettling at stacked tab bars. One nice thing about menus is that you peruse them without clicking. Ribbons force you to hunt and peck through the layers with the mouse. Further, when you have no idea where anything is, it's easier to read the menu labels versus scanning the disparate icons and hovering for tooltips.

Hit Alt the numbers and letters are the shortcuts for moving around the ribbon. That's actually one of my favorite parts of the ribbon, you are able to see what the shortcuts are very easily. The alt trick works on just about anything in windows.

I believe there was controversy in the FOSS community over Microsoft's patent application for the concept: https://www.google.com/patents/US8255828

I'd speculate that this patent application provided at least a small amount of hesitation towards the FOSS community implementing a similar interface.

I have stayed on Office 2004 for Mac (running on Rosetta, and with the free docx compatibility plugin: I'm pathetic, I know) for the longest time on my laptop just to avoid having to use the ribbon (which I "experience" daily on my Windows machine unfortunately). Since my next Mac laptop won't have Rosetta I'll have to move on, and that means switching to LO, not upgrading Office.

And if LO ends up also using a ribbon, I'll move on to something else.

I think you can turn off the Ribbon and show the Formatting toolbar in Office 2008 and 2011 for Mac. Yes, this is Mac-only.

I absolutely despise ribbon interfaces. They're a show stopper for me.

I am forced to use it at work, so there's nothing I can do about that but FLOSS is all about user empowerment and choice so I don't think I'll ever use it at home.

I'll stay with an old version of the package if upgrading means having the ribbon foisted upon me.

I like the idea of having an option to select a Ribbon interface or a Standard interface. That way, everyone can get what they like.

What's wrong with the sidebar? If you think about it, most of your available unused screen real estate is on the side of the window, not the top... The sidebar, IMO, is rather more versatile than the ribbon anyway. (Thanks IBM!)

I downvoted. If you want to use the ribbon-style MS UI, then use MS products. I am glad to have a place to go that allows me to read and edit ubiquitous Office documents without having to be part of the Office eco-system. I agree that LibreOffice probably reminds more of old than of modern Office—I use both as little as possible, so don't keep up with the trends—but so what? To put it differently, why should Microsoft automatically be celebrated for monkeying with an input regime that worked? What is wrong with 'classic' software?

>> I downvoted.

Don't down vote people simply because you disagree with them. Just because you don't agree with their opinion doesn't mean it should be hidden from others. Use the down vote to hide comments that don't add to the discussion.

> Don't down vote people simply because you disagree with them. Just because you don't agree with their opinion doesn't mean it should be hidden from others.

To be honest, I got angry and clicked the downvote arrow without sufficient consideration, then thought (since I couldn't undo it) that the civil thing to do was to explain.

Your personal moderation guidelines are admirable, but as they aren't in any way in-line with the moderation guidelines of the site, perhaps you should treat them like spiritual beliefs, and keep them to yourself?

EDIT: s/like your/like/g (unintentional ad-hominem)

Where did I mention spiritual beliefs??? As for these being my guidelines - they aren't. In my time using HN I've seen many, many people advocate that guideline. It might be useful to rethink your attitude when commenting your average karma is less than one.

There are a group of people who suggest that downvoting should only be used to hide comments that don't add to discussion.

PG has said that downvote to disagree is acceptable.

Can you point to anything in the guidelines or introductions or faqs about not downvotig for disagreement?

Since it's impossible to eliminate downvotig for disagreement you may as well just let it happen.

There definitely isn't anything in the guidelines pointing towards either behaviour. I totally respect PG's opinion on it. I find though that HN fosters better discussion that other sites because unpopular opinions are just down votes - they're debated and not hidden. I could just let it happen but hopefully by contributing my thoughts on it those who down vote for disagreement will change.

Yeah, I edited it, but understand I figured you were the kind of person who wouldn't barf all over a thread with your spiritual beliefs, and meant that part as a compliment.

I've advocated your same guidelines in the past, as they promote a healthy site/forum, but they are not HN's guidelines. PG has actually encouraged the antithesis of your guidelines in the past, so I'm compelled to tell you as much.

Sure that's fine. It's definitely not part of the guidelines (as you said) but I think it's also fine for me to advocate what I think leads to better discussions. It's one of the reasons I enjoy HN. Unlike other sites there is less hive mind. Unpopular opinions are debated rather than just hidden.

If you're suggesting that we should, as a site, act against the guidelines and push for unofficial guidelines that promote better posting, I think this is a fantastic idea.

Ad hominem attacks, however, are clearly not in-line with moderation guidelines. :P

Can you let me know where I made an ad-hominem? None was intended, but I'd like to correct that record.

Edit: ah. Everyone assumed I was talking about ggparent's spiritual beliefs. Amazing how a sole personal pronoun can alter intent.

Classic software worked just fine, in its day. I can still remember most of the classic WordStar commands. ;-)

The celebrations come when there are significant improvements, and there have been plenty of those. The (web-inspired) tabbed Office ribbon was a big one. Sorry they moved your cheese but the rest of the world isn't going to stop progressing even if you do.

>Classic software worked just fine, in its day. //

So, it doesn't work now?

The main question would be 'how much more productive one can be now than before?'. It would be nice if there were independent quantative studies on this - as word-processor use is a central part of most governments administrative functions I'd imagine that one can't move for the vast number of such studies ... lol.

I'm guessing that the UI changes between Wordstar and Office 2015 amount to a tiny change in the time needed both for training and useful production of word-processed documents. When it comes to spreadsheets I can see things have probably moved on - at least in speed of processing if nothing else.

I'd love to ask, of the top 100 functions used - how many weren't in office applications 5 years ago, 10 years ago? How has the average time per word in production of business letters changed (reduced?) over time and what specific [versions of] applications caused the greatest change?

I'd love to have answers to the same questions, but it will vary a lot according to what is being done and who is doing it.

If you're just typing simple text documents, the current Word is not going to save a massive amount of time over WordStar, but it will save some thanks to spelling corrections etc. And even a few seconds per hour per worker can represent a lot of value for large organizations.

If you're doing an essay or a brochure with headlines in different fonts, double-column text, embedded pictures, math equations etc, then the time savings will be massive. Just the ability to move a pic while text flows around it provides huge benefits.

When my son was in his early teens, I watched him use Microsoft Office to create complex documents that would have taken an IBM PROFS mainframe user weeks, or might have been impossible. His homework looked more professional than IBM's corporate documents.

I guess there are plenty of workers who use Word at the same level as they used WordStar, or who reckon that (back on topic!) LO is just as good. (Yes, LO is almost as good as Word if you just want to replace WordStar.)

But are those our criteria? Should we ignore the fact that people who have open minds and a willingness to explore (like children) can quickly and easily do new things that they can't?

Productivity isn't really the benchmark for LibreOffice, at least not until they're close to 100% compatible with the latest version of Office. Compatibility with everybody else's bizarre, overcomplicated, crappy files is the benchmark, and they use a hell of a lot more features than WordStar ever had.

I'd prefer to have a product with a crappy UI that can interoperate with everybody else seamlessly, than one with a great, simple UI that can't.

Spreadsheets are the scary bit of software -- they're used for everything. And when I say "they" I mean "MS Excel" mostly.

There are groups that investigate the risks. EUSPRIG (European Spreadsheet Risk interest Group) has some great documents. http://www.eusprig.org/quotes.htm

I don't know if anyone is testing the main spreadsheet software with fuzzer-like tools; or if there are any mass audits of spreedsheets. Both would be useful.

> Sorry they moved your cheese but the rest of the world isn't going to stop progressing even if you do.

I was not complaining about progress (which, in this case, I would simply call change). I was merely responding to drzaiusapelord's complaint about LibreOffice not 'keeping up' with MS Office by expressing my appreciation for the existence of a more 'classical' alternative.

Upvoted. For explaining your downvote instead of just throwing it out there and mentioning a perfectly valid sentiment, even if I don't fully agree.

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

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

One thing that won't show up in screenshots is the UI interaction. On my Mac, the tools on the bottom and right edges can't keep up when resizing the window. Sometimes it's a fraction of a second lag as I drag, sometimes it simply doesn't update until I let go of the mouse.

I know we're a grumpy lot here at HN, but I'd expect better than this even if it were a web app.

I'm having issues like that with several apps lately and I'm thinking it's a Java thing.

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

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

Heh, I like the effect too. It's more like "So, there's that." or "So, there's that, then." then the more questioning "So..." . I find "So." to be more effectively sardonic without using the tired trendy "So, there's that."

Since we're going off topic, I thought this was a pretty funny treatment of the ellipsis http://www.themillions.com/2014/01/dumbest-thing-ever-scribb...

DAE pedantry?!?

Analysis is not pedantry.

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

AbiWord and Gnumeric have always looked better than their LibreOffice counterparts!

Gnumeric is utterly broken on xfce since gnome 3 or something. Invisible check marks, weird gradients everywhere, etc.

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

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

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

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

https://support.office.com/en-nz/article/Excel-specification...

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

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

Provide a proper test case to the developers and they will likely fix it. I've had extraordinarily nice experiences with bug reports to gnumeric so far.

I like AbiWord, but for some reason it keeps crashing on my Arch Linux system.

Between Libre Calc and Excel, I've always had to revert to Excel for its Pivot Table features. Libre Calc has thus far made a very weak stab at that for me.

I've found that logging a bug on the AbiSource bug tracker results in fairly prompt attention and, in the case of the pdf export bug I walked into, a prompt fix.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/abiword/+bug/1262375/

http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13586

Thanks. I did like Abiword but for that problem - it's really lightweight and has the core functionality that I need. I'm presently using LaTeX/emacs for my documents.

I think Libre Calc has a pivot table feature though. Are you missing a feature within the pivot table options?

Yes, Calc does have pivot tables, but it is very limited. Even the number of levels (dimensions) that you can nest was inadequate the last time I checked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some businesses use Microsoft Office for business processes that go far beyond Mail-Merge, but are essentially unknown to people who don't work for large corporations. Have a look at the half-dozen Microsoft Office programs you've never used, and that many people have not even heard of.

This is one reason why it took Munich a whole decade to switch most (but not all) users from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, and they probably lost a ton of money on the switch (ie if you honestly counted lost productivity, which I'd bet is still being lost).

I'd also guess that a German city's use of Microsoft Office is probably pretty trivial compared to an American Fortune 50 corporation.

If someone wants to do a PhD on this, I'd love to read it ;-)

Think snail mail, not email.

That's not good at all. If you log a bug, you should be able to send over the documents in confidence - this sounds pretty bad.

Next time I encounter this, I'll definitely do it. I might still have a file around that's doing it, in which case, I'll give it a send hopefully today or tomorrow. Thanks!

Cheers - much appreciated.

Yes, and I'd add while it's possible to use a spreadsheet based data source for the mail merge - you have to go through a fairly obscure path to set it up. And most people asking me for help with mail merge have their data in spreadsheet form.

Exactly. This is the reason I keep an old laptop with MS Word running for myself. Fix this and I could go 100% LO.

There are actually changes to mail merge in this release. But it seems it is about performance and not the UI.

https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-the-...

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

while this feature makes LibreOffice gather more users, in the long term this strategy IMHO will not pay off. "Microsoft formats" is moving target and playing "catch up with microsoft" game all the time - wasting resources which otherwise could be poured into making product itself nicer, which in turn will convince users to switch based on features, not just on the fact, that it is free. I hope my idea make sense :)

I guess balance between two is necessary. You can't totally ignore MS formats, but focusing only on it - will stale this project.

Its not a moving target because old versions of office must open documents from new versions.

I've still got Word '97 documents where Writer frags the table formatting...

If you have one that is not private, please log a big along with the document and some sample screenshots of the correct and incorrect displays. Bugs like that tend to get our attention because they're easier to fix :)

I'd really love to, but in both cases where this has happened, the documents are very very private :(

Perhaps you could anonymize the data?

Or send it in private email.

This works nearly flawlessly for me since 4.0.

So so many Excel files. Ugh.

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

We encourage bug reports :-)

Not for docx. Ugh.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi

all 736?

I think it was a (snarky?) way of saying, "Remember that this is open source! Rather than simply groaning and giving up, please consider filing a bug report on it, and describing thjings in a way that we can reproduce it".

Most open source projects don't have a QA department, so they rely on us to file bug reports so that they can know about broken behavior.

It's not bugs, parts of the import obviously are not implemented (missing code, not faulty code).

What sort of stuff is missing? Genuinely interested.

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

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

This icon style is called Sifr. There are five other styles available in the View section of the Options dialog, which seems like at least three too many. I'm trying Oxygen for now.

More detailed change log by Michael Meeks: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-the-...

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

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

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

meanwhile, OpenOffice added some comic sans to their logo http://www.openoffice.org/

OpenOffice.org died years ago. You are probably thinking of Apache OpenOffice.

Regarding momentum, compare:

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/openoffice/trunk/?view=log

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/

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

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

too much hate on the ribbon. it's the logical choice a lot of people would make once menus get too busy. I don't love searching for things in the ribbon, but I certainly wouldn't love locating menu options either. At least the ribbon lends itself to contextual behaviors.

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

http://i.imgur.com/i1YuVXA.png

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1]Response from MS employee: "Unfortunately, not all applications can encode files in UTF-8 by default, and Microsoft Excel is one of them." http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_...

[2]Response from MS employee: "Excel for Mac does not currently support UTF-8" -- despite UTF-8 being an option in Excel for Mac http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-m...

Have you considered filing a bug report?

File a bug report, it works fine for me.

Earlier this week I wasted 45 minutes trying to figure out why the software I've been writing was producing Chinese CSVs, before I finally thought to open them in some software other than LibreOffice. Thanks, Libre!

Did you change the encoding to UTF8?

But it does look like our default option is now UTF-16, there's now a bug logged about this - https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88909

Sorry that your experience wasn't great though :-(

Yes, the encoding was UTF-8.

No worries: I'm a developer too; I know these things happen. Given some of the regressions I've been dealing with recently, it was entirely believable that but was in my software -- otherwise I would have cross-checked with something else much earlier!

Tried changing the encoding?

That did the trick. Flipped it to UTF-8 and it works now. I should have noticed that before, but then, I'm not sure why it's defaulting to UTF-16 for CSVs!

I appreciate the UI work, but come on, the simple stuff can't break.

Can you file a bug report and send over the file you are using?

Where should I file it?

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi

So that's a UTF-8 file? Funny it's coming up with UTF-16...

Filed. https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88909

It should just be a US-ASCII file, so yeah, UTF-8 works, while UTF-16 obviously wouldn't.

Cheers.

Thanks! Despite my complaining, I do use and love LibreOffice. Thanks for all your hard work!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>There is limited scope for someone to tell other people what they need to do.

A well run project would be soliciting UI changes, mock-ups, demos, etc. They would be planning it out, have an implementation schedule, etc. Frankly, the idea that designers waltz in and yell at humble nerds is more than a little overly generous to the broken Linus-style FOSS management style.

Exactly. In some sense, you have to dictate to people who you have no power over, and do not respect you (obviously, I'm exaggerating a bit).

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

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

You know, even though I think there are pretty decent Linux DEs today (I'll gladly take Gnome 3 over the OSX or Windows GUIs), you are completely right about the community having an awful attitude towards their designers. See all the hate thrown at Gnome 3, Unity and Pantheon... Those projects are the only ones keeping Linux from looking like it's 10-20 years behind its competitors in UI design.

Not hating them but a few of those people always seem to have brilliant ideas that they try to force (spatial nautilus for the oldtimers, breaking alt-tab in unity etc).

Where it gets really annoying is when they remove the options - our way or the highway, again something borroed straight from Apple.

(yeah, a little tongue in cheek is implied here, I am bo designer and I haven't done much research in UX)

There is a LibreOffice design team. I think one of the issues do far was we have had to do a lot of re plumbing which users don't really see - heck even the build system was overhauled to allow easier builds!

There's a lot more to go, but we're making progress and I think you'll start to see better UI improvements this year. I recall the first versions of Mozilla - I couldn't even type into edit boxes when I first started, but look at it now :-)

These things take time, but we have commitment and an enthusiastic community - and actually our developers are pretty responsive. well... most of us :-)

I think your comment is a bit unfair. All the problems you mentioned also exist outside of the FOSS world. People feel the same frustration, but they typically won't say it because of some kind of hierarchy. Is that a good thing? I'm not sure.

The other thing is that FOSS projects typically involve contributors from all around the world and cultural differences are always very sneaky, it looks like everybody is a hacker, but in fact most share completely different cultural codes. For example I've noticed that people from the US are used to cheer a lot, that definitely not the case everywhere. So for US contributors, I'm guessing working with people with a different mindset with respect to criticism can be quite a shock.

So the beauty of FOSS is that it kinda works despite the extreme work conditions (distributed / remote / every body is allowed to say whatever / people work when and if they want / etc.)

> ... so much FOSS stuff looks like shit and has poor documentation.

Compared to what? By volume? Go read the documentation for openbsd, freebsd or vim. I've never seen more thoughtfully structured documentation.

> Oh god, heaven forbid you're a woman in FOSS telling men to make a change.

I wonder how long it is going to take before it becomes obvious that this sort of whining is counterproductive and induces fatigue in even those who are sympathetic. Consider what is actually happening in open source software development. Consider the personality types of those drawn to a field with such great opportunity for self determination, and risk for failure and public humiliation. Whining isn't going to help you in that environment.

> ... the writers are systemically kicked around to the point where they don't contribute much ...

I've never seen this happen, most of the projects I've been part of bend over backwards to encourage writers. Where did you see this?

Come hack on LibreOffice we're a fairly friendly bunch :)

Hmmm. Then again, look to gnome and unity to see what happens when designers and ux experts can do what they want: they copy Apple, features and bugs ;-)

For us who use Linux not because of the price but because of the usability it offers this is of course not what we want however cool it looks.

There are thousands and thousands of FOSS projects. I'm sorry to hear your particular experience sucked, but painting them all with the same brush is to say the least over generalizing. Do your complaints apply to LibreOffice? Are they Linus-esque in their arrogance when being suggested improvements?

Which project was it you were treated this way on? I've had some great experiences with FOSS.

The problem is that under most open source models of governance, it's far easier to create good software than to design good interfaces due to the processes involved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're getting there. But it takes time and we have only recently gotten a dedicated ui design team, who are doing a great job, but it's a really big product so there is only such they coukd get done in one release. Expect more improvement in this area in future releases.

12000 defects fixed?!

OMG! One Herculean effort this must have been.

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