LibreOffice Writer has long been a trusted tool for users worldwide, offering an open-source solution for documents. But what happens when we take a step back and look at the user experience? How do templates fit into the workflows of users, what makes a great template and where do users want LibreOffice writer to improve?…
13 Jan 2025
20 Dec 2024
LibreOffice Themes will replace the color customization
Since the first implementation of a dark color theme we continuously improved the customization of LibreOffice. In a GSoC projects this year, Sahil Gautam made it possible to not only change the application colors but also what is defined by the operating system respectively the desktop environment.…
17 Jul 2024
Peer-to-peer collaboration with LibreOffice
A while ago, Simon Phipps, member of the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation, shared the idea to introduce a peer-to-peer collaboration built in to desktop LibreOffice without the requirement for a cloud provider. This idea has received a lot of attention inside the organization and the design team has started to outline the project now.…
5 Jun 2024
Convenient handling of shortcuts
Shortcuts are a major topic for user experience. Novices are advised to learn basic shortcuts beyond the famous Ctrl+C/X/V like Ctrl+1/2/3.. to quickly change the paragraph style to heading 1/2/3… in Writer. Once you have learned those combinations you never want to unlearn and to change the muscle memory.…
12 Jan 2024
Comments in Sidebar
Using comments is a key feature in text processing. A typical workflow might be to review a document where notes are made by different colleagues. LibreOffice Writer currently shows these comments in the document margin, which is limited to the page height, ending up in the need to scroll long text (even while editing [1]) and eventually in paging-like interactions if the number of comments exceed the total size.…
29 Nov 2022
Results from the survey about LibreOffice Impress
Similar to the questionnaires about LibreOffice Draw (see first and second blog post) and LibreOffice Calc (see this post) we now run a survey on LibreOffice Impress to learn how the program is utilized, what features are used most frequently, and what users see as positive and negative and what they expect of the future.…
1 Nov 2022
Community support needed: We want to use our users personal data
What comes to your mind, when you ask yourself why people use LibreOffice? A “stunning user experience” is likely not in the top list. And unfortunately we share this problem with a lot of user facing Free Software.
And there is a common reason: We value the privacy of our users.…
15 Jul 2022
Vote on the LibreOffice branding icons
The LibreOffice application icons are undoubtedly awesome. But over the years they have become a bit dated and do not fit well into the zeitgeisty icon design. Plus, the set has no good main icon, which is in particular an issue on macOS where this icon is shown on the launcher bar.…
11 Apr 2022
Improve the table configuration in LibreOffice Writer
Configuring tables is an every day task for word processors. Most users likely insert a table via menu or toolbar and size the columns per mouse. This usually wont result in a satisfying precision and the table properties dialog would be the next step.…
18 Oct 2021
Results from the Survey about LibreOffice Calc
Introduction
Earlier this year we run a survey on LibreOffice Calc. It was inspired by a similar questionnaire for LibreOffice Draw (see first and second blog post). The Calc survey was used to learn about how Calc is being used, what features are most important to users and where they expect to see the improvements to the software.…