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Love LibreOffice - I've used it and OpenOffice for over 15 years. I've been heartbroken by recent releases, however - the keyboard shortcuts in Calc (and other components) have changed.

This is like breaking my fingers - I'm so much slower now. It's not just that there's a difference - I can adapt to that. It's that they've re-labeled menu entries with duplicate index keys. You can't do some things quickly now (e.g. optimize column widths with Alt-O-M-O, which worked for years).

There's a reason why MS Excel has keyboard shortcuts that make no sense - they match to menu entries from old versions, and they've kept them in so people who have been using it for decades don't have a reason to switch.

Please, LibreOffice developers, make your menu shortcuts sensible again!

4 comments

It's nice to hear that somebody else feels this way, too.

I'm running an older LibreOffice release simply because I won't put up with the hit on my productivity in Calc. I'm not going to waste my effort learning new keyboard shortcuts, particularly when they're key shortcuts that also work in Excel and have kept working there from Excel 2003 - 2016.

An idealistic part of me would love to spend the time to figure out how to stand up a build environment for LibreOffice to fix this myself, but I've got a lot better stuff to do.

Why not use the in application customization to set the shortcuts?

Obviously in general not wanting to bother is a perfectly valid reason, I'm asking in comparison to setting up a build environment.

They could offer keyboard shortcut sets/bundles/profiles/themes that you could switch and revert all at once.

That strikes me as so obvious that I don't understand why this is the case. Could anyone with more knowledge on the matter elaborate?

Because there isn't really many known profile in that field with each a pool of experienced users wanting it, like there is eg in code editor (where most major editor offer a set to mimic vim, emacs, visual studio, ...).

There is only "the norm" and "other random stuff nobody asked for". The norm being the ones used since forever in office and copied by every other office suite since.

And frankly your average office user (John from accounting, Denise from marketing, ...) does not have as much will to learn new shortcuts as devs do. So if devs insist on keeping theirs, it's obviously not even a question for the others.

Really weird move there by libreoffice.

That there aren't many commonly used profiles only makes it easier to ship the few that are used. I guess that 'whatever Libreffice used before' and 'Excel' would cover 90+% of demand.

There even is a precedent: Word used to (maybe still does) ship with optional keybindings for WordPerfect compatibility. I also vaguely remember excel having a set of Lotus-123 keybindings.

Oh wow, blast from the past. I vaguely recall that being able to use WP keybindings was a key reason why my dad's company eventually switched to MOFT Word, despite constantly complaining about it at the same time.

I was pretty young then, so I never completely understood or cared why they went from WordPerfect to MS Office. It had something to do with the Windows version of WP being shit, but Word missing the 'underwater screen', among other things.

All I remember is that after initially being impressed by the full-color fancy pen on the loading screen, I was mostly annoyed at how slow and unstable everything had become with Word. That feeling stayed with me until probably at least Windows XP.

I find it interesting how many of the discussions I have these days really boil down to the same issues that I feel were central to the WP/Word fued: control vs convenience, following the trends vs doing what seems logically optimal (convention over configuration?), as well as the huge shift from keyboard/command-line type interfaces to mouse/windowed environments.

I'll have to pull down this release and look at that option. My recollection from the last time I looked (over a year ago) was that the changes I wanted, mostly which involved changing the pull-down menus and accelerator keys therein, wasn't able to be customized. I'm not using "keyboard shortcuts" so much as operating the pull-down menus very quickly with multi-keypress muscle memory sequences (which Microsoft handled very well as Excel moved to the "Ribbon" interface).

>There's a reason why MS Excel has keyboard shortcuts that make no sense - they match to menu entries from old versions, and they've kept them in so people who have been using it for decades don't have a reason to switch.

Yep. I've been typing "/edr" to delete a row in a spreadsheet for 25 years, and I'm not going to stop now. :-)

That doesn't seem to work in Excel 12.29 for MacOS. Is it a Windows only keystroke?

Just for your info, no better in MS-land, Microsoft broke most shortcuts between Office 2003 and Office 2007, a few got reverted with 2010. Still it's mind blowing how bad shortcuts are nowadays. Instead of Ctrl+<char> one has to type Alt+<char>+<char> and other nonsense for many shortcuts. (Sure system wide shortcuts and a few ones like Ctrl+C still work) But try to paste a text as plain unformatted text, good luck with that.

Interesting observation. I've had the opposite experience. Perhaps it is sbecause I'm not using "shortcuts" but rather am operating the pull-down menus with accelerator keys via muscle-memory. Inserting columns, rows, formatting cells, and many other functions continued to work with the various ALT-x-x combinations that I was used to. I never used any of the CTRL-x variants, except for cut/copy/paste.

The position of CTRL on the keyboard is ideal for shortcuts. CTRL+x is short and can be used with one hand. I guess you started with 2007 or 2010. For me the ribbon related shortcuts are inefficient.

I started w/ Office 95 (well, standalone Excel 4.0, actually). To insert cells I'd type "ALT-E-I". To delete cells "ALT-E-D". Aside from cut/copy/paste and simple text formatting (bold, underline, italic) I've never used the CTRL-x shortcuts. I've always just operated the pull-down menus with their accelerator keys very quickly.

Edit: Ahh-- I re-read your comment. I'm not using the ribbon ALT-x shortcuts. I'm using the accelerator keys from the old pull-down menus. No-- those ribbon "shortcuts" are frustrating to me.

try to paste a text as plain unformatted text, good luck with that.

CTRL-V, release. Press & release the CTRL key, then press T

Or just ctrl+shift+v. Works in most applications but few people are aware of it.

Hmm, doesn't work for me in Office 2016.

It was when they brought that idiotic ribbon in and it was apparently more important to meet the engineering need for implementation elegance (consistent shortcut keys across all the office suite that matched the ribbon click path) than to let users continue to work efficiently. Insert row went from alt->I->R to something I can't even remember now. I hope someone in product management got flogged for that.

I understand you. I loathe the Microsoft Windows guy who translated the shortcuts of MS Office. Ctrl-S does not save my Excel file. I've already lost a lot of work due to this poor soul.