Cloud collaboration features. About half of the documents and sheets I create on a daily basis are for sharing with clients and friends. There’s a UX aspect and one of network effects.
LO feels like it's from the 90's - the UI feels outdated and hard to use. It's probably great as a regular user, but I have probably only three 10 minute sessions per year of use. At least half of that time is spent hunting for some feature that I know where to locate in Google Sheets or Excel.
I use it just because it's default on my Ubuntu machine for some file types, and would use it more if I found it more effective.
Try the latest releases, and maybe try switching themes. We have quite an active UI design team, but for every person like you who hates the "old" look, there is another person that hates the "new" looks.
<shrug> what is a team to do ? :-)
Also come hang out on the #libreoffice IRC channel if you need help.
I'm the kind of user who probably wouldn't switch themes or ask for help on IRC - I'd just find another way to solve the issue I have at hand right now.
To cater for users like me, you need to do user studies (watch a user try to complete a task, and time how long it takes them). Then adjust the software to minimize that time.
There are a lot of users like me, but each user isn't super valuable - we're the ones who would fire up LO Writer, type "Party Next Tuesday", set the font size big, hit print, then close without saving. Then don't open LO again for a few weeks.
You may decide I'm not the type of user LO is designed for, and that's a perfectly valid choice, especially for an opensource project with limited resources.
We're in the process of doing that - our design team periodically moves things around, and tries to do that. But as you note, we have very limited resources, so a lot of the design teams suggestions get parked.
We're also fighting the usual battles
- people for whom the "old" way is perfect and they hate change
- people for whom anything other than 100% the same as Microsoft is wrong
But feel free to log issues in our bugtracker if you have concrete suggestions.
