[libreoffice-users] Re: Engaging Users in the LibreOffice Project

Hi, Paul,

On 11/2/13 4:23 PM, Paul wrote:
> Hi Ken,
>
> > I'd like to see some serious competition for MS Office,
> > but there appears to be none, either open source or commercial.
> Why do you say there is no serious competition to MS Office?
> Personally, I find LO to be slightly easier to use than MS Office
> (although the difference is negligible, barring the ribbon, which I
> find terrible), and just as functional for all my needs, and most of
> the needs I have ever seen anybody use. I grant you that there are
> possibly some advanced uses of Excel in particular that LO may not be
> equal to, and integration with things like Exchange and Active
> Directory that MS Office obviously has the edge in, but I have never
> seen these in practice. I'm interested to know what aspects you find
> lacking in LO.

Let's start with some general points to start with.  First, the user. 
For most home users,  who probably are not as experienced or 
knowledgeable of Word and LO as you and I,  the advanced features are 
not needed.  So something simpler to use, like Kingsoft Office Free, are 
more suited to those users.  And there are other free and commercial 
office products that offer .doc/.docx compatibility.  I can't say how 
good it is, I've never sat down to try them.  So LO and the other Ooo 
branches are not unique in that aspect, so LO is not the only game in 
town for that.

I did recently ask a friend to write a letter of recommendation for a 
job application packet.  She did it in Word on her Mac.  Displayed like 
crap!  Fortunately, printing it as a PDF file didn't exhibit any problems.

BTW, I hate that frickin' ribbon too.  Thankfully, you can turn it off 
and have the old menu system back.

And any particular interface, hereinafter (lawyer-like enough?   LOL) 
called the UI, may not fit a particular user.  For about an hour a few 
weeks ago, I played with a product called SSOffice, or similar name, and 
I really, really liked the UI.  Better than Word or LO.  But it may not 
be for everyone.  And it doesn't run on a Mac.  :-(

If you want to entice people to switch from Product X to LO, you not 
only have to be as good as Product X, you have to be a Helluva lot 
better.  Pricing is not that important anymore.  Gone are the days when 
standalone MS Word would be in the $300-$400 range.  And if you're a 
business, that purchase is tax deductible.

Free is just not good enough as a marketing tool anymore.

And you aren't competing with just MS Office, you're also competing with 
every other document program out there, and that includes typesetting 
programs like LyX (free) used by many in the math and science world, and 
DTP software such as Scribus, Publisher, Adobe Pagemaker, and others in 
between.

For something more specific:

        https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44871
        https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46986

Working around these issues creates more work for the user than doing 
the same things in Word.  Would you switch to a program that causes more 
work for you?

Then, there is this thread I started 10/29/13:

        news://news.gmane.org:119/l4pbem$2ud$1@ger.gmane.org

	In case the link doesn't work in your reader/email/whatever, the 
subject is "Picture size
        controls".

People who've used Word will expect that feature to work similarly, 
since the text in the dialogue box has a very similar meaning.  Graphics 
programs that offer free drawing will use something like LO's method, 
but people working with documents will not have a clue.  And it's also 
extra work compared to Word.  When you have that option engaged in Word, 
when you are in the document just grab a handle and resize maintaining 
the aspect ratio until you get what you want.  With LO, you have to 
experiment to get the right size you want.

I have a list of other items in LO that didn't work right or as expected 
in 3.x.x that I have not double checked in 4.1.2.3.  Why?  It goes back 
to the two bugs above, that I filed.  It's obviously not important to 
the developers.  But it *is* important to me.  If features I use do not 
work or work correctly, why would I stay?  That's why I'm looking for 
new alternatives to to LO.  And for my Windows friends, I recommend they 
try Kingsoft Office Free.

You simply have to be better than the others.  And I don't see that yet 
in LO.

I will give LO the nod in help files, though often missing something. 
It's on the hard drive, you do not need internet access to read them as 
you do in Word.

--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 24.0
Thunderbird 17.0.8
LibreOffice 4.1.2.3


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