FF

I’m on OpenOffice 2.4 and it does what I need. I’m use to it and find it perfectly usable. If it is made easier and better then I’m all for that.

OpenOffice is one of the those apps (like Firefox) that non F/OSS try and like. Many school districts give it away to their students as a free alternative to MSOffice. Choice is good.

But it does strike me that Renaissance isn’t a million miles away from it in many ways, and it proves that OOo doesn’t have to have a sucky UI.

Symphony’s not amazing, but it’s a lot better thought out.

A hell of a lot of previously happy MS Office users hated the last version of Office. Mostly because although the previous UI was a bit clumsy, it had the benefit of being familiar. Because so much was radically changed, a lot of folk who could care less about UI ergonomics felt burdoned by having to relearn how to use the UI when they didn’t feel the old one was “broken”. The did relearn it eventually, but only because they had no choice in the matter. I hope we don’t go too far down that road.

If IBM had actually developed that stuff out in the open, the rationale for Renaissance would be severely curtailed: all the sharp edges seem to have been rounded off, the UI looks more modern and certainly a lot simpler.

OOo’s code base is indeed hard to hack on, and to divide up the developer community in the way IBM have is bizarre.

The exception to my usage is the database, I am still stuck using Access.

I work in a school, and have to support users using MS Office. While at first the Ribbon seemed completely alien to me, when used in Access recently it actually does make some sense (to me at least).

On my Desktop machine I use ooo, and really don’t have any problems with it. That doesn’t necessarily mean though that the GUI is perfect, and I agree that a redesign is a good thing.

It seems working from first principles has been really good. The opposite approach could’ve been tried, utilising what was there and just adding buttons, moving buttons etc.

The pressure on the school I work at to migrate to office 2007 was quite large. More and more students were getting new PC’s, and bringing files in for me to convert. Guess what I used to convert the files?

The above paragraph explains the background for this paragraph. The company used to supply a lot of schools in the UK with their school network, equipment and software have decided to install ooo on all the school computers (in Dudley, West Midlands) anyway.

I think this is a massive, and very important thing for this large company to install open source software on such a large amount of PCs.

The question is though, why did they do it? Was it the “familiarity” of GUI with the GUI of office 2003?

I’m not sure, but I am pleased with the result!

I don’t know if I love the GUI. It will be interesting to see how they incorporate this in the final product. It’s interesting just to see something new (and in some ways innovative) in this product space. Some of the design elements, like switching between the master and design view were pretty nice.

However, I hope they focus on fixing the functionality of some of the internal tools as well. Please, PLEASE, do something about the chart tools!

After you use the wizard to create and initial chart in OOo, don’t expect to do too much with it. Changing layouts or playing with the visualization after that point is a real pain and very error prone. Still, I wish them luck.

Let’s hope it goes well.

“Spolsky: Cool, alright, that was an interesting conversation. Thanks Josh for the question. Josh, also while we also have you on the line, thanks for all the transcripts that you’ve done, and all the editing of transcripts on the wiki.

By the way, if this is your first time listening we do have a large team of volunteers around the world who are all contributing to the transcript website which you can get to at blog.stackoverflow.com and there are transcripts that are provided for the benefit of search engines like Google and also for the benefit of the hearing impaired who can’t listen to our podcast. So thank-you to all those volunteers who contribute those: thank-you very much.

If you have a question or something you want to debate or something interesting or something that’ll cause an argument between me and Jeff here, because we don’t argue enough. Please record it in the form of an MP3 or Ogg Vorbis and e-mail it to podcast@stackoverflow.com.”

It doesn’t always work. The earlier episodes have more detailed transcripts than the latest which mostly have “Edit Me” links. And some are hilarious commentary on the show itself.

But, it’s a start and could help with searching for content in previous podcasts.

I think Larry’s comment about using JavaFX in OOo was meant to embiggen the profile of JavaFX and give it a really meaty application to give it kudos (which just sounds like PR spin), but I think if they’re going to completely redesign the UI and then use JavaFX for it, then it’s a great idea.

I agree with Aq to say hats off for putting the effort in. As Tola says, Google Docs does almost enough for any casual office product user, so if OpenOffice wants to get real attention they need to make it different and coming up with really novel but usable UIs is one way to do that.

With regard to UI mockups, thanks for the Pencil link. I might look at it for work I’m doing right now, which I’ve been using (and struggling a little) OmniGraffle Pro for, which is pay-for, Mac only, and is a general if flexible drawing tool, not a UI design tool.

Certainly as far as I’ve seen if you want a UI mockup with any animation or functionality you have to code it. Something like Impress with scripting to modify components as part of a transition would be pretty cool (e.g. take text of this field, call it $username, then set this new label to the same text, say “Welcome ” + $username). Can you do that with Impress/other tools?

I gotta say, the functional prototype of Impress is really frickin’ cool, IMHO, and I do like the new widgets and ways of doing things (like the little x/+/2 bit and the toolbar tabs at the top where a lot of space is often wasted).

Excellent shot again, guys, and thanks but not thank for the heavy breathing Aq. ;o)

The UI could be better though, but I hate the MS ribbon thing with a vengeance, its a complete pain in the [expletive removed] so id say a flat no to that one if it was introduced.

I seem to remember larry wanting to add the javafx stuff to it, but I think that is still not os software so believe it shouldn’t have any place in open office…i could be wrong about it not being os though…will actually go look now

I think the fact that they are willing to discuss and change the UI does show hope for the project…

I recommend it to my students, who don’t always have cash (blowing all their money on Ramen Noodles again!) for the acedemic version of Microsoft or Corel Office.

Anyone using an office suite other than the above mentioned, or Koffice?