Design Archive

26 Feb 2016

What do you expect from the sidebar in Libreoffice?

With the release of LibreOffice 4.1, the Sidebar was introduced. It was originally developed for IBM Lotus Symphony, apparently as an alternative to the toolbar, however the usability foundation of this concept was not elaborated. The question

22 Jan 2016

Way Down In The Libreoffice Menus

Introduction

With the release of LibreOffice 4.4 last year, we began making incremental updates to the main menus, with the major overhaul happening in the upcoming 5.1 release. The work is guided by LibreOffice’s new Human Interface

22 Dec 2015

Area fill options made consistent

Introduction

As in many other dialogs, Libreoffice provides a lot of functionality for tweaking the hell out of areas taken up by shapes, charts, frames, etc. You can have a solid background color, with or without transparency/opacity, you

13 Dec 2015

Style your tables

Introduction

Tables are one the most frequently used objects in documents. If you want to present data in a structured way with, for instance, small gridlines, a nice header, right aligned numbers, and highlighted totals- that’s a table.

16 Apr 2015

LibreOffice Design Session: Inserting a Chart

Probably everyone working with Libreoffice Calc is using charts. And maybe some wondered why the dialog to insert a chart has a wizard-like workflow for all the less relevant options. But inserting a chart is not only

2 Apr 2015

LibreOffice Design Session: Shapes

Libreoffice Draw was treated somewhat novercally in last time. But we didn’t forget it and started to pimp its look and feel. This design session was about moving the stencils from the shapes toolbar into the sidebar.

26 Mar 2015

LibreOffice Design Session: Special Character

The Libreoffice UX team discussed possible improvements for the dialog to insert special characters, in particular the feature of recently used items. But today we have more than one solution since the current dialog would still be

19 Mar 2015

LibreOffice Design Session: CMIS Improvement

Topic of last week’s Libreoffice design session was the integration of content management interoperability services (CMIS). Here is the outcome of this meeting.

This article was posted first on 2015-Mar-19 at user-prompt.com (site closed now)

Topic:

12 Mar 2015

LibreOffice Design Session: Entries at Indexes and Tables

The Libreoffice UX team started last week with another type of meeting, the design session. The goal is to discuss one issue in detail along with possible solutions, mostly a mockup. This includes a clear description of

19 Feb 2015

Tracking changes with LibreOffice

The Libreoffice UX team shows a proposal for the management of change tracking. It intends to have a comprehensive and good-looking overview but with the flexibility to add future enhancements.

This article was posted first