User Interface Archive

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

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

22 Jan 2021

How to make a star with LibreOffice

Some time ago we asked the people how they use LibreOffice Draw. And while the expectation was that this module receives only low appreciation the opposite is true. LibreOffice Draw is used to create block diagrams for

5 Nov 2019

Proposal to conveniently highlight and inspect styles in LibreOffice Writer

Styles are the essence of a text processor. And while experts love to unleash the power of LibreOffice Writer, it’s at the same time a major source of nuisance. In particular when you receive documents from other

15 Aug 2019

Poll about design preview for dropdown controls

Update (March 2023): This survey is closed. Results are available on our bugtracker. The post below is still available to read but links to the survey have been removed.

One of the tasks for the design team

26 Jun 2019

Easyhacking: How to create a new “Tip-Of-The-Day” dialog

LibreOffice is an application with a large number of expert features, and though aimed to be easy to use there are always surprising shortcuts to achieve a goal. We post every day a tip on Twitter,

19 Dec 2018

Save the bibliography?

LibreOffice has the capability to add references to a document and finally a bibliographical index, which is essential for scientific publications. The style of references depend on the journal and the discipline. So it is common to

14 Dec 2018

Special Characters: The Final Touch

Last year we revised the workflow to insert special characters. Based on a design proposal the dialog was reimplemented in a Google Summer of Code project by Akshay Deep. The new dialog allows to easily

8 Aug 2018

What’s new in LibreOffice 6.1 regarding user experience

The LibreOffice community regularly publishes new releases, and the latest version, 6.1, is released in August 2018. The design team worked hard to make this release as shiny as it deserves; here’s what we did.

Background images

LibreOffice ships

18 Feb 2018

Improvements to Font Listing

Font handling is a major topic for office suites and as a result, LibreOffice’s bug tracker has numerous reported issues and suggestions on how to enhance the workflow. In a past blog post, we presented a solution