Re: [libreoffice-design] Just created a them whiteboard

Hi everyone,
I'm reposting a conversation I had with a user of LibreOffice, someone
whose company has hundreds of employees that use LibreOffice. The initial
topic was Templates, but what he is actually asking for is themes.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mirek M. <mazelm@gmail.com>
Date: 2012/5/2
Subject: Re: [Click or Tap] Comment: "Rare Opportunity at Making a
Difference!"
To: Dave Richards <drichard@largo.com>


Hi Dave,

2012/5/2 Dave Richards <drichard@largo.com>

> **
> Mirek  (cc to Michael for information only)
>
>      My comment was related to Templates.  What I have found  is that the
> least appreciated module of Libre/Open is Impress and the reason for it is
> related to templates.  Impress does everything they want technically, but
> they are just not able to figure out how to physically make that happen.
> What I have found through the years is that users are not spacial.  They
> don't picture the end product in their head and then find the steps to get
> there.  They really don't know what they can do, and don't know how they
> want it to look.  So where Impress fails is that it doesn't let them
> quickly and easily change colors and fonts, backgrounds and the look and
> feel of their presentation.

This is actually a deeper problem -- what you're looking for is themes
rather than templates. Templates are just saved presentations that the user
plans to reuse, themes work rather like styles, only they apply to the
whole presentation. Unfortunately, LibreOffice doesn't support themes yet.
You can read more about the topic here: http://blogs.kde.org/node/4515

What they want to do is have a few clicks and see their presentation change
> quickly, and then be able to make quick subtle changes and see how it will
> look.  They also are struggling greatly with the whole master slide concept
> and are not figuring out how to change the parent slide and make them all
> change easily.


I don't think these fit into the scope of the Templates dialog, but I will
keep them in mind for future work. I agree with what you're saying and I
myself have problems doing these things with Impress.

So in my mind templates would work better if they could:
> 1) graphically see the templates


The new dialog should put the design of the templates first, yes.

2) be able to see the templates against their work product with just a
> click or two

3) be able to undo the change quickily
> 4) be able to pull pieces or parts from the templates and use what they
> like and discard what they don't.

These three are a quesion of themes.

> Anyway, those are my high level observations in this area.


Thanks for the feedback -- it really was helpful.

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