In plotting the course for changes in LibreOffice Writer,
developers would do well to listen to people who use the program for
many hours a day instead of theorists who do more thinking and
programming than typing.
Change for change sake is rarely a good thing. Change that brings
modest improvement for a new user may be a nuisance to the experienced
user. There is a fine balance between the value of the improvement and
the inconvenience to the experienced user base.
One of the reasons I moved from Microsoft products to Linux and
OpenOffice and now LibreOffice was the incessant change from version to
version with no improvement in usability worthy of the learning curve
required for the new version. It seemed that the process was designed to
sell upgrades more than to improve the product. I did not mind the cost,
but did hate the learning curve with no perceivable benefit.
William F. Buckley once said "/I'm told there are better programs,
but I'm also told there are better alphabets./" referring to unwanted
changes in WordStar and its replacements programs. I too used that
program in the early 80s. Some of the features for selecting large
blocks of text worked better than the alternatives available today. Many
of the changes came from people who do much more thinking than typing.
As a lawyer I often type for hours per day. I often must copy and
paste into gedit and then copy and paste into LibreOffice to get rid of
multiple hyperlinks and other undesirable baggage present in the source.
Some web content providers add hundreds of links in legal documents to
make copying difficult. Some even include mechanisms to crash MS Word or
OpenOffice. I learned to copy into a primitive editor and then into my
word processor to strip out such baggage and avoid such crashes. I
haven't tried to see if the crash mechanisms will crash LibreOffice, but
I suspect they will.
Have you ever tried to copy and paste fifty pages out of a hundred
page document? It was easy to do in WordStar but difficult with all of
the scrolling in current era programs. WordStar had a simple command to
mark a starting spot for selection and another command to mark the
ending spot for a selection. Perhaps there is an easy way in
LibreOffice. If so please let me know.
Many of the help mechanisms in LibreOffice and MS Word are useful
in a long document and a nuisance in a short document. There should be a
simple way to individually disable each help feature in a document. No
Bullets and Numbering, no formatting of table entries, no AutoCorrect.
Many casual users don't use tables because of the spread-sheet like
features that are useful to the sophisticated user but can be a nuisance
to a casual user. AutoCorrect must have thirty options, but "never" is
not one of them.
There is logic for the major changes that Microsoft uses to sell
new product. There is little reason to make changes to LibreOffice for
change sake. Change should be optional unless the benefit is profound
and the learning curve small. There should always be an easy way to
disable any help feature that changes the document. Both the opt-out
and opt-in should be easy to select for individual documents.
Jim Fuqua
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