Office suites and user interface
I decided to re-download OpenOffice and NeoOffice to see if anything had changed. After all, OpenOffice 3 came out in October, and I hadn’t taken the time to try it out.
However, there is a huge problem with these productivity suites: the interface. No matter what features they add, they still haven’t changed the GUI (graphical user interface), and that pains me.
Why do I complain? They are excellent, fully-fledged productivity suites, and free!
The problem is that I don’t only want features. I want something usable. I want to use an application that will help me do what I hope to achieve by being as invisible as possible. And, unfortunately, the user interface in both NeoOffice and OpenOffice is an ugly remnant of five-ten years ago. To tell you the truth, I believe that even Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac was nicer than them.
And, to tell you the truth, I hoped that NeoOffice would be miles ahead of OpenOffice, interface-wise, because NeoOffice was actually created to provide Mac users with a native version of OpenOffice (before version 3, OpenOffice was not a native Mac OS X application, and used the “X11″ system). Turns out most of the NeoOffice effort goes into code and features, not the GUI.
Let’s take a look using a screenshot comparison within the word processing applications.
NeoOffice and OpenOffice both look pretty much the same, except for the icons in the toolbar. The result is this:
No offence to the developers, who are doing a great job (especially considering these productivity suites are freeware), but that looks ugly. It looked fine ten years ago on Windows 98 and Mac OS Classic. It even seemed acceptable on Mac OS X 10.1 and on the first Windows XP computers. Today, however, it’s no longer viable as an interface.
To illustrate how one of my pet peeves, Microsoft Office, has evolved on the Mac, let’s look at the interface of Word 2004:
image from here
And now, Word 2008, after changing the background image to a beautiful wood pattern:
The interface has become much more pleasant, notably because you can change the otherwise ugly and boring background image (I’ll add that you can’t change the background image in Neo/OpenOffice – in NeoOffice, you can change the colour, but that doesn’t help much), and as such, it isn’t sore on the eyes. It doesn’t distract as much (though there are elements in Word 2008 which distract me a whole lot more than in 2004, but that’s another problem).
Now, the ultimate word processing interface across which I have come is that of Pages ’08:
Pages happens to be the fastest loading application of the four mentioned. This can be understood in the case of NeoOffice and OpenOffice, because they are “all-in-one” productivity suites, whereas iWork ’08 and Microsoft Office 2008 contain separate applications for the different kinds of work.
Still, all in all, I find it much nicer to use: faster, more elegant, easier, …
The biggest shortcoming of Pages, in my experience, is its lack of a good table of contents (because it doesn’t support tiered numbers in the table of contents, i.e. the “I”, “II” and so on disappear).
But feature shortcomings don’t bother me as much as interface shortcomings and speed.
I hate opening Word, because it’s so slow and because its user interface contains way too many things (why can’t you disable the “ribbon gallery”, for example?).
I hate opening NeoOffice and OpenOffice, because they look so outdated. I don’t want to use them or discover their amazing features, because they don’t feel like the right tool.
User interface is important. To me, at least.
Now… if only I could get a productivity suite with the features of NeoOffice/OpenOffice and the speed and interface of iWork…
22 December 2008 at 17:19
In the short time that I played around with NeoOffice, I was disgusted by its user interface (as you were) and at the abysmal loading times that it presented. Loading the program took ages, the program itself was slow at times, and it was far too easy to launch parts of the suite that I didn’t need, further bogging down the program. Slow, slow, slow.
My machine isn’t slow, by any stretch of the mind, with a 1.25 GHz G4 processor and 1.25 GB of RAM. OS X is meant to give users as broad a range of usable programs as possible, meaning that many modern day programs can still run on 500 MHz G4 computers. Whether or not this was intentional is beside the point, since now we always expect such a high standard from all (or most) of the programs we use on a day to day basis. NeoOffice doesn’t meet this standard. It’s really a shame, because the only program that I do know that meets these standards is iWork, and from what I hear, it doesn’t have full support of the .doc files that Word uses, which I need for assignments at my school. I could be wrong, but it seems that M$ has dominated office suites in all areas of software.
22 December 2008 at 17:41
Actually, Pages has great .doc support.
The main “exporting to .doc” problem I’ve noticed is that sometimes, text can end up being 1 point smaller than it’s supposed to be (I’ve only encountered that with section headings though).
Importing .doc changes the layout more so than when exporting from Pages to .doc, though.
There’s also a slight problem that I encounter for all my lecture notes, because in Pages, I have “Notes of Peter Craddock” in the middle of the footer, and in the right-hand corner of the footer, the page number. The resulting .doc doesn’t copy over that layout, and puts the whole text to the right. Afterwards, you just have to tweak a little.
In my experience, it’s just easier to do the work in Pages (a non-frustrating program, especially when compared to Word), and then export to .doc and check in Word what it looks like. But you could choose to rely solely on iWork.
22 December 2008 at 23:30
For now, I’ve got Word 2008 on a Windows machine and have to rely on it. It’s frustrating that I still have to use M$ products when I’ve got a Mac of my own. If I ever do decide to buy some office suite software for my Mac, it’ll probably have to be Word 2004/08, since I know it much better than iWork (I’ve never so much as touched it in my life) and it would afford some more peace of mind, since at my school, if the formatting in a document is screwed up, don’t chalk it up to the computer gods, because it’s all your fault, and it’s your grade that will suffer.