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, and with the upcoming release 6.3 there will be also a tip-of-the-day messagebox when you start the program.…
The work around user experience often requires to create a minimal working example. Either users report an issue or request enhancements, the comparison with the current situation is necessary. LibreOffice has a built-in feature to create dummy text (type dt and press F3) but this function inserts only unformatted text.…
Update (March 2023): This survey is closed. You can see what solution was picked on our bugtracker. The post below is still available to read but links to the survey have been removed.
The keyboard layout on Apple computers is special and some keys are missing.…
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 just add numbers in square brackets like [1] in engineering whereas humanities show name and year like (author, year).…
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 browse through the list and to search for glyphs contained in the selected font.…
Update (March 2023): This survey is closed. You can see on GitHub that borders were changed to blue. The post below is still available to read but links to the survey have been removed.
The icon theme Karasa Jaga has been introduced in release 6.1.…
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.
LibreOffice ships some images by default to fill the background of shapes.…
Working on the user experience often means making a feature optional. Some users may need a feature while others may find it distracting. An example is the tooltip shown on tracked changes.
While this tooltip is useful for the review, it just overlaps the text when editing, as long the information is not shown in the document margin (tdf#34355) or if you don’t use the Track Changes deck in the sidebar for some reason.…
Sometimes you may find galimatias in the user interface such as quirky captions, misleading descriptions, too long or to short texts, and strings that are not compliant to the guideline. Why not take this as the perfect start into easyhacking?
As explained in the posting on How to set up your environment, you can always search for unique strings.…
User-centered development is implicitly steering the development from the top of the cathedral. That means to start with a vision, the context of use, and the primary users etc, granularized later into product requirements with storyboards and use cases, and finally iterating with product design and development.…
