Good usability means keeping software simple by supporting only those use cases that are relevant for the majority of users. But not everyone is happy with changes and misses functions for special workflows. That happened for the color palette, which was revised in the last release of LibreOffice – we
Author: Heiko Tietze
Please participate in a survey about the standard color palette
With the latest update of color palettes published in New Color Palettes in LibreOffice we also introduced a new standard palette that has room for improvement. We asked for input on the design mailing list and received three new variants. Now it’s up to you to decided which one you
Guidelines for keyboard navigation in the sidebar
LibreOffice takes accessibility seriously, and we want to make our program as enjoyable for users with disabilities as it is for everyone else. That means we care about motor impairments and, for instance, we always provide different ways for interacting with the software. And, of course, accessibility covers a wide
DIY UI: How to create your own Notebookbar
Introduced recently with the MUFFIN concept, the Notebookbar is a blank canvas where controls can be placed and arranged freely. It offers all freedom to users who are not afraid to fiddle around with an integrated development environment (IDE). Here we explain how to start from scratch. Setting up the
New Color Palettes in LibreOffice
A color palette is an arrangement of a limited set of colors resembling a painter’s palette. Some collections are officially standardized, others are individually assembled to serve, for instance, a branding purpose or to convey a certain mood. Among many other things, good design means to have a limited number
Evolving Past the Restrictions of Toolbars
Toolbars are a common toolkit control that have been around since the dawn of GUI applications, providing direct access to an application’s most frequently used functions. But with increasing scope, the number of frequently used functions grows to an extent that can have a detrimental impact on quickly locating a
Additions to LibreOffice
Software in general is made for many users, one size fits none. Personal preferences have to be taken into consideration as well as different workflows with varying goals. The broader the scope the more features needs to be flexible making the product often bulky. And while configuration for a well-structured
Dealing with Missing Fonts
When documents are sent from one computer to the next or opened on the same computer in a different operating system, these documents may not look the same unless all the fonts used in the document are available on the other computer or operating system. For this reason, exporting documents
Tickets on behalf of UX
The simplest way to contribute to LibreOffice is to submit bugs and enhancement requests to our bugtracker. This is also true for design and usability related issues, where up until now we had the ux-advice component that these bugs were assigned to. This was changed recently and we now have
Insert and Playback of Online Media
Gone are the days when users were limited to embedding local media and clip art bundled with an office suite, as we now live at a time where there is a plethora of online media at a user’s fingertips, so an office suite should make it easy for its users