My experience would be the contrary. I felt Libre Office had better document compatibility and a better user experience, so I stopped using Open Office. Maybe it improved since then. I would also like to see something to back up the claim you are talking about.
In my personal experience, when I first tried Open Office it ended up being a clunky, unreliable clone of older Microsoft Office products. It was still better than a kick in the teeth though.
In all honesty, after writing my own simple manual editor for PDF, I really don't envy the task of making something compatible with multiple other formats. It would be nice to see the project archived or completely released to the community to continue work on.
> ... clunky, unreliable clone of older Microsoft Office products. It was still better than a kick in the teeth though.
That's exactly why i am using Open/Libre office; at some point Microsoft Office got such a complicate UI (ever since they pushed the ribbon bar - that's when they kicked me in the teeth) that i am unable to use it - the alternative uses a much less complicated UI so i am with it.
Does the MS Office UI conform with the Windows UI guidelines ? I am not quite sure..
As for 'unreliable' - i can't share this perspective; LibreOffice works for me; didn't have any problems with OpenOffice either - before i switched to LibreOffice. I switched because LibreOffice is supposed to have better support.
Interesting that MS often gets to a point where the UI is quite adequate, but then they have to come up with something new, so they come out with an update that breaks it all. Happened with Windows, Office, Visual Studio, Visual Basic - you name it; i think it also happened with gmail - so it does not seem to be something exclusive to MS; i wonder if that is a general law of software development.
I almost never use any MS Office product (Latex for serious writing, R for statistics, ...) but when I have to because of a client or whatever, I find the Ribbon to be convenient for a non-power user.
It also makes shortcuts discoverable! Just hit the alt-key and virtually every thing pops up with it hot key. Hitting alt in a standard windows app only tells me what menus are available, not which actions are available.
Ok, maybe shortcuts are discoverable, but actual actions no longer are. Not everyone finds the ribbon an improvement; I feel the need to point that out since so many comments appeared praising the awfully opaque ribbon.
My disability means that I have to read through every single option, verbalizing it. Changing the layout that I know so well has meant that MS Office is no longer on the list of applications I bother with.
I know where everything is in Libre Office, it's quicker and less stressful to use. A number of people have told me that it's too bad, I'll just have to learn the new system. Honestly? I really don't care what those Microsoft fanboys think. The "new" system is just far too much work for me to be bothered re-learning. Libre Office/Open Office is more than good enough.
In my opinion yes. Or rather, Windows users have had decades being trained to find certain functionality under certain menu options to the degree that most will do it by second nature irrespective of the application they're in. The ribbon menu throws all that muscle memory away and leaves you trying to find it again in an interface that no other applications use.
I don't frequently need to use office products but when I do I find them absolutely infuriating.
The "no other applications use" is not strictly true anymore, and hasn't been for a while - most stock Windows apps use Ribbon now, even Explorer.
But in general, the problem that you (and the other adjacent comment) is describing is different - you're not talking about discoverability so much so as learned muscle memory. Obviously, changes do break that, but this doesn't necessarily imply that for a new user, discoverability is worse. You'd need to run a study to determine that.
The ribbon is probably the best example of "people are resistant to change". In retrospect, because I was grumpy about it too at the time. But once you get used to it, it's vastly superior in every conceivable way to the old UI.
It wasn't optimized for "people like it", it was optimized for ease-of-use and discoverability.
You could simultaneously hate it with a passion, and also be 3 times more efficient at editing a document while using it, and that counts as a success.
When the ribbon works, which is most of the time, it's pretty good.
When not, it can be a complete PITA. A few years ago I tried to change the scaling of an axis of a chart in Excel from linear to log, and it was so convoluted that I had to look up in the help each time I did it.
I guess the relevant question is whether this would have been easier if the ribbon didn't exist, and you had to do it through the menu bar.
It appears to me that the issue here is that Excel makes scaling the axis of a chart convoluted. Not that the ribbon makes it harder than the regular menu bar.
Love the ribbon too. OO/LO/iWork have become unusable for me since the ribbon.
The initial implementation of the ribbon sucked. It was too static, it didn't hide and took up a whole lot of space, and it didn't give you any pointers on KB shortcuts.
It also took MS some time of gathering data and telemetry to improve the layout. And frankly, it took users some time to adjust to the change.
The ribbon is much better now. But the people who like it, possibly still suffering from having to maybe defend it when it legitimately had flaws, are not as loud about it online.
I sort of think the infrastructure is in mostly in place to allow for themes that largely mimic the ribbon. Optional, of course :-)
The default should not be the ribbon, but there are aspects of the Ribbon LO could use.
But it's funny - the Symphony stuff that was given to Apache by IBM, and which Apache integrated and we snagged and further fixed and are enhancing is in so many ways better than the Ribbon! The Sidebar could, IMO, be enhanced and turned into the Ribbon.
"Does the MS Office UI conform with the Windows UI guidelines ?"
Definitely not. The ribbon style and circle menu are a different design universe entirely. I agree that moving things around was annoying.
"As for 'unreliable' - i can't share this perspective; LibreOffice works for me; didn't have any problems with OpenOffice either - before i switched to LibreOffice. I switched because LibreOffice is supposed to have better support."
The unreliability for me was a mixture of not such great support and occasional crashing. Libreoffice was much better.
I originally moved from Microsoft office because I got tired of pirating the latest version. It was a hassle because of the time to download (I had a slow connection) and the risk of viruses each stage. The move to Linux was the final nail in the coffin for me.
As time has gone on I have come to appreciate open software, which again makes Windows (or Apple) not an option for me.
