Bug 137265 - Selectable User Profiles
Summary: Selectable User Profiles
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LibreOffice (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: needsUXEval, topicUI
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2020-10-05 12:44 UTC by Eric Baird
Modified: 2020-10-12 12:03 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

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Description Eric Baird 2020-10-05 12:44:57 UTC
LibreOffice has an "Options: User Data" page where the user can fill in their personal details (name, address, company, position), and have them saved into documents (or into any exported PDFs) by default.

Unfortunately, it only supports one user! 

This doesn't reflect people's complicated modern lives. If you use a machine for work, and have all documents automatically flagged as being official company documents, and a family member uses LO on the machine for homework or a poster, then their documents will again be flagged as official company documents. 

If someone else wants to use your copy of LO, you have to remember to go into the user page and manually blank everything out, and when they've finished, go back and put everything back in place. 

Even if you're the only person who uses the machine, nowadays lots of people have different online personas and roles (paid work, volunteering, hobbies, family), and with the CVID-19 pandemic, we now have (millions?) of people finding themselves unexpectedly working from home, and maybe half those people achieving this using their own personal electronic devices. We need a simple way to allow someone to distinguish whether they are using LO to edit a document in the role of ObamaPOTUS, or TrekFan99, or ProudDad1961.

We need LO to be able to cope with multiple profiles, and to be able to show some sort of obvious user-interface button or dropdown box that displays at a glance which profile an instance of an LO program is currently working in (to avoid awful, potentially job-losing mistakes), and to allow us to quickly click on that UI element to switch to a different user. 

[*] Once LO has multiple profiles, some users may find profiles a useful way to switch between blocks of default settings for other purposes. If they are multilingual, they may have one profile with default English dictionaries and another for German defaults. 

[*] For home workers, it /might/ also be useful to include the option of having (very basic) password protection for some profiles (e.g. work profile). But not if it delays the implementation of the other features. 

[*] Different themes and customisation settings per user profile could give a valuable visual "cue" to indicate a window's current user. Someone may prefer to work on "Work" documents with a muted "dark" colour-scheme, but edit "family" documents for their kids using larger default fonts and a more brightly coloured pastel user-interface.  

[*] It would also be useful for LO to remember separate "Recent Documents" lists for each profile, so if I open Writer and switch it to "Work" mode, I only see the list of documents recently saved using the "Work" user profile. 

Some other programs already have multi-user support: for instance the Firefox "About:Profiles" page lets me launch different browser windows for different purposes (Work, Project Research and  and Leisure), and have them open at the same time, each with different settings, colour schemes and browser histories. 


I think implementing multi-user support might be a nice COVID-related gesture, to let TDF tell people who are now having to work from home that other people understand their new problems, and are working to try to make things a little better for them.
Comment 1 Mike Kaganski 2020-10-05 13:35:31 UTC
There is - and always was - support for multiple LibreOffice user profiles [1], with command line option -env:UserInstallation=file:///path/to/profile to choose one [2].

LibreOffice is not a browser. One may create shortcuts for using multiple profiles as needed. That was always possible, and having fancy UI for this is IMO out of scope of this office suite.

WONTFIX IMO.

[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/UserProfile
[2] https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/start_parameters.html
Comment 2 V Stuart Foote 2020-10-05 16:57:35 UTC
IMHO => WF as well

trivial to set a variable with profile path other than the default found in the bootstrap.ini launcher configuration (e.g. Windows C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\Pprogram) which holds the stanza"

UserInstallation=$SYSUSERCONFIG/LibreOffice/4

On Windows builds the sys variable $SYSUSERCONFIG is APPDATA\Roaming. You can specify another directory in %APPDATA or, elsewhere in the Windows user account. 

To do so, simply modify a copy of the LibreOffice desktop shortcut. Modifying the launcher's 'Target:' field with parameters to alter the default 4

-env:UserInstallation=$SYSUSERCONFIG/LibreOffice/profile2

or pick a different location

 -env:UserInstallation="file:///C:/Users/<username>/LibreOffice/profile2"
Comment 3 Eric Baird 2020-10-12 12:03:16 UTC
Thanks VSF ... I'm trying this out, and it does seem to be working. 

But it's still not the same as having proper nameable profiles, or being able to see which named profile in use on each window.  

Also, remember that for maybe >95% of normal "Office" software users, the phrase "trivially easy" and "command line" are mutually exclusive. If a feature has no user-interface support, then it's not marketable, and a lot of people will assume ... even if they manage to discover that it exists ... that it's probably undeveloped, untested, unsupported, and/or unstable. 

It would have been nice to be able to make a gesture of support to all the people now having to work from home due to COVID ... one of the nice things about large software projects is that each little upstream increase in user-friendliness makes millions of people's lives a little better. But whatever.