solarkraft 12 hours ago

Is this be the long awaited LibreOffice modernization?

I think it’s remarkable how almost every popular application makes the step of being a web-app at some point. It makes total sense but is a bit of a funny double shoe horning situation here.

The birth and death of javascript remains accurate.

mmarian 2 hours ago

Just tried it. Honestly, I prefer the old LibreOffice experience. Dark mode auto-adapted from my machine's preferences, top bar fits within laptop width, don't have to click a button to start editing. Ever so slightly faster.

stby 11 hours ago

I actually quite like the UI of MS Office, but nevertheless I don't understand why so many competitors try to make clones. Say what you want, but MS has a huge head start here and everyone else is just making worse looking copies of the way MS Office looked years ago.

And of course, is this really the final form of office applications? Is it maybe time to just go back to the drawing board, think about workflows, the current state of technology, future trends, and build a UI that works maybe even better, looks cleaner, fits on more screens?

  • joseda-hg 8 hours ago

    The problem being, one of the biggest hurdles for any office suite that isn't Google's or Microsoft's is adoption, and one way to mitigate that is making a clone

    The nerds will send you a PDF generated from a LATEX file, but most office workers in the world don't care enough to figure out why the shortcuts they memorized 20 years ago don't work in 'weird word' or their formulas break on 'weird excel'

    • KetoManx64 4 hours ago

      This is it. I daily drive Linux at my current job but worked with Excel for a decade at my precious jobs and it's incredibly annoying to have to stop my workflow and figure out where LibreOffice hid the menu option for things I have hotkey memory for in Excel. Yes I know they're not the same, but I honestly don't care, I just want to create a table and sort by a column so I can move on to my DevOPS tasks.

  • forgotpwd16 5 hours ago

    >the current state of technology, future trends

    An AI office suite startup has taken long enough to appear.

  • steve1977 11 hours ago

    That’s actually what I like about Apple Numbers… it’s not trying to be Excel.