Description: A new user starts LibreOffice for the first time and he/she is on their own to figure out what the application has to offer, and what is located where. It would be great if we have a guided tour through the UI where the user goes over the important parts/dialogs of the application like the tools>options dialog, the start center, the sidebar, the language options and many more that I am not aware of. Steps to Reproduce: --- Actual Results: --- Expected Results: Ideally the implementation should show a small tooltip like dialog with a skip and next button, and should guide the user through the components one at a time. It might as well draw custom arrows or pointers to the controls, or nicely designed rectangles around the controls that it explains. I have seen such a guided tour in qtcreator, and many websites too. Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: Yes Additional Info: Version: 24.8.4.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community Build ID: bb3cfa12c7b1bf994ecc5649a80400d06cd71002 CPU threads: 32; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (10.0 build 22631); UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win Locale: en-US (en_US); UI: en-US Calc: CL threaded
Familiar with the concept, many of the AutoDesk products have done this for years. But sounds like a dev mess to try to implement something with acceptable coverage, and then to maintain once operational. Existing online-help [1] and published guides [2] are sufficient. One need just review the Tip-of-the-Day back log for bug 125257 to get a feel for the impact this would have on documentation team to maintain. IMHO -1, and => WF =-ref-= [1] https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/05/new_help.html [2] https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/ multilingual translations, here the en-US landing URLs
A tour of the UI would likely be useful for newbies who have not used a similar app before; and may be useful for people who are switching from a similar app but with somewhat different UI (e.g. MS Office). However - for some people, it would be an annoyance. There would need to be some balancing between noticeability of the option of taking the tour, and ease of dismissing an offer to take the tour. Also, like I said in the design meeting - implementing such a thing might be an interesting "Summer of Code"-style project. About the contents of the tour: This typically involves... * Highlighting/emphasizing areas of the UI which are being described at the moment, and de-emphasizing somewhat the rest of it. * Tour "tooltips" or other gadget which look distinctly _different_ than the actual app UI, so that the user doesn't mistake the tour for the app itself. * Rather than a focus on explicit "Prev/Next" navigation - specific user _actions_ trigger transitions to the next stop on the tour, i.e. the tour tracks what the user types, where the mouse pointer is or what has been clicked, to trigger transitions.
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #1) > Existing online-help [1] and published guides [2] are sufficient. Help is tedious and most people won't be bothered to read it. Many of them are likely to guess what the UI does or just give up on it before actually reading the help. As for the published guide - statistically, users don't know that it even exists. (And I am doubtful more than a few of them would ever "read the book".) But I do agree that this may require some maintenance to keep up-to-date - because changes to the UI would occasionally (often?) mean changes to the tour. So that's an argument against.
I'm afraid such tour is not sufficiently customizable and marketing/design cannot easily add/change features in the presentation. And the envisioned tour would IMO replace the first-start dialog (bug 154593) while other believe it has to comes as an addition (and this results in over-engineering/-design).