Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

geekwire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 108 posts

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#51

Post by jonathanstrange »

amphibian87 wrote: post #28
jen729w wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to…

Why don't you like Word? I think it's still going to be the best for a while, if not only because it's massive. My CS professor says it's the biggest program ever written. It can so so much, like check for passive voice and more subtle grammar things. At the end of the day, the subscription model is off-putting, but "needs to die?" why?

> Why don't you like Word?

Here are my main reasons:

- It does not allow me to make selections where I point my mouse cursor.

- It breaks between versions of itself and intentionally breaks interoperability with nearly all third party software, especially when tables and formulas are involved.

- Formula and math editing and typesetting is abysmal.

- The quality of typesetting is abysmal. I know because I once had to convert an article with formulas written in LaTeX by hand into Word. The editor of the journal was very ashamed of the quality of the result in comparison to the original.

- Images and other boxes inserted into the text almost never work in the intended way. They slip between pages, get the wrong flow around them, cannot be selected, etc.

- It is practically impossible to import documents produced in other tools reliably into Word or reliably export Word documents to be processed with other tools (like e.g. LaTeX). Even pandoc cannot compile to Word files that work reliably enough. Some of the errors that occur are nearly unfixable, e.g. bizarre things strange characters in lines that cannot be erased, stretched and distorted characters.

- Horrible default auto styles.

- Ribbon interface and other user interface problems that make Word one of the most unintuitive pieces of software on earth (many people just don't realize this, because they have been using it for so long and so often)

- relatively expensive

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#52

Post by ci5er »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #47
Elrac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think Excel is great; but not because it's Excel or heavens forbid, because it's a Microsoft product, but because it's a spreadsheet. The ability to throw data in a grid and massage it with operations the average human can understand - that's invaluable. Certainly, Excel is powerful and feature-filled. But 95% or more of what I do in Excel I can also do in Google Sheets or Libre Calc or whatever.

This. All of what I'd ever want to do to a spreadsheet Google Sheets can do, and whatever the 'power' Excel user thinks is a good idea to use Excel for I can do far more easily in R.

You can. G'donya. If you print a report on the result - you're done. Bottoms up, mate. If you are collaborating - the issue isn't tools that you and I might know that may or may not be better than Excel (like R), it's that we've got to share our work with people who may or may not know those tools.

I believe (personally) that Excel almost singularly is a tool that both the adept and novice can use together. And, you know, if you want to spin your twirly six shooter, you can always do a monte carlo simulation in C, print out the results as CSV and import it into Excel for the (I'm sure you would call them) more benighted amongst your co-workers.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#53

Post by brylie »

why_only_15 wrote: post #33
npunt wrote: post #12

Just a quibble but I see this a lot - if you're talking about strategy it's "bottom-up", not "bottoms-up". A bottom-up strategy is something like marketing your tool to users who then bring it into their company for wider adoption. A bottoms-up strategy is drinking until the problem goes away.

you shouldn't discount the power of the second one

As a recovering alcoholic, I can attest that drinking does not resolve life's problems.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#54

Post by reacharavindh »

briandear wrote: post #34
hnzix wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evernote started the trend but Microsoft destroyed them in the same way they killed Netscape; OneNote is free beer and it's deeply integrated with the Office suite. I can scan a whiteboard using MS Lens on my phone and it's instantly available on my laptop in OneNote. Oh and I don't have to convince the SOE nazis to allow install.

I can do the same thing with Apple Notes. And I don’t have to pay Microsoft anything. And it’s all available to iWork. Notes even has document scanning. With Continuity Camera in Mojave, I can take a photo from my iPhone and instantly place it within a Pages document. For power Excel users, Numbers isn’t yet a replacement, but for everything else, the stuff that is built in to MacOS works great and is free while work…

Regardless of what other tools I try, I always end up coming back to Apple Notes for the ease of writing, drag & drop images, easy sharing as PDF, and being able to work on them on the go with iPhone and iPad. Apple's integration got me addicted. The search feature that can search even my sketches - bonus sweetness!

I do wish Apple Notes had some way of making a Kanban board.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#55

Post by otikik »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #40
amphibian87 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you like Word? I think it's still going to be the best for a while, if not only because it's massive. My CS professor says it's the biggest program ever written. It can so so much, like check for passive voice and more subtle grammar things. At the end of the day, the subscription model is off-putting, but "needs to die?" why?

Personally, I like Word, because it has a particular niche - fast WYSIWYG use and mid-sized documents. That is, I can quickly make the exact nice-looking document I need, and print it. Without clunky UX (of Open/LibreOffice), and without it choking on mid-sized documents that's characteristic of GSuite and friends.

I would not call it WYSIWYG. Send it to a friend with a slightly different version of Office or Windows, or without the same fonts installed, or with a different locale, or a different printer, and it stops being WYSIWYG.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#56

Post by xte »

Well... Few time ago I discover my "definitive" productivity app: Emacs. In few months it became the center of my IT life. And I still have to see ANY more effective, simple, flexible, pleasure to use modern application that can only compete with at least some aspects of Emacs.

The problem IMO is that in the glory time of IT software was not a business, was a free thing that came with hw and if it was good and flexible people are more willing to buy your iron. Now (not from now) that software became a product commercial need destroy freedom and evolution creating a modern, colorful, limited and limiting digital middle-age that can barely stand like Babel's tower...

IMO sooner or later tower will collapse and the more we wait the more it will hurt.

More about software: our society mostly live on text: laws are text, newspapers are text, books are mostly text, text is the cheapest and effective means of communication we have so if we really want to being productive we need to have something focused on text. Yes, we have also images, videos, audios, but they are still marginal. We have excellent audiobooks, super-nice videos and diagrams/images that communicate something an order of magnitude better than text but they are still hard to make, hard to design, rare, not really flexible etc. so while we have to work on them hard and constantly to better support/integrate our focus must still be on text. For many years to come.

Try only to do most common task without a keyboard and see how unproductive, limited and hard they are even with the best touch UI we have, with all "AI" support possible.

That's a lesson nearly nobody want to learn but that's also the reality we have to face, willing or not.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#57

Post by xte »

jen729w wrote: post #22
SllX wrote: post #3

At this point I look at Word and Excel the same way I look at bash, gcc, grep, sed, awk, et cetera: there is so much iniertia that even when different and arguably better tools come along, it still never truly goes away. A lot of people still use emacs, vim, BBEdit and so on, but a lot of people also use IntelliJ, VSCode and Atom or whatever is in vogue this year. Vim and emacs will never truly go away no matter how…

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to…

Mh, I have sometimes to work with "tabular datas" that seems to fit well with spreadsheets... Before I discover org-mode and Emacs I normally use *sv sources/exports and CLI tools simply because I never being able to be productive or in comfort with ANY spreadsheet I tried. Now I'm in org with tables and babel I never look back.

IMO spreadsheets are a poor and ineffective answer to the miss of a serious desktop database tool with a nice DSL for end users.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#58

Post by xte »

rusk wrote: post #49
jen729w wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to…

My two weapons of choice: Excel for structured data, Emacs for unstructured data.

Why the hell a spreadsheet? Why not use any scripting language you want with org-table/org-babel or with some ORM/driver to access datas?

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#59

Post by xte »

amphibian87 wrote: post #28
jen729w wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to…

Why don't you like Word? I think it's still going to be the best for a while, if not only because it's massive. My CS professor says it's the biggest program ever written. It can so so much, like check for passive voice and more subtle grammar things. At the end of the day, the subscription model is off-putting, but "needs to die?" why?

Well... Because is a complex, utter, inflexible software.

For instance: I need to write a letter, on my desktop I start skeletor (Emacs built-in template solution) with a single keypress, choose the wright template, start writing in pure text, hit C-c C-e and choose the appropriate export format, for instance pdf via LaTeX. In a fraction of time I made a document far superior of any word-processor can ever made, without wasting time in formatting. Same if I have to create slides. Same if I have to mix tabular data, literate stuff like write down a formula or a software procedure and verify it live from the code inside the document etc.

The level of ease, flexibility, simplicity, reusability, integration you can have on text-centric systems you can't even imaging to reach with modern/classic GUIs.

Another example from my personal workflow: sometime I have to put notes in agenda, like TODO: fix xyz etc. I can simply add relevant SCHEDULED or DEADLINE or whatever in the file I'm working on and see it properly in agenda. I can have documents spread on multiple files for many reason but being presented and exported as a single one or vice versa. I can link emails anywhere, export them inside the document etc.

No other IDE, PIM suite, office suite can do the same.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#60

Post by rusk »

xte wrote: post #58
rusk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two weapons of choice: Excel for structured data, Emacs for unstructured data.

Why the hell a spreadsheet? Why not use any scripting language you want with org-table/org-babel or with some ORM/driver to access datas?

Because it's convenient, and I can share.

Not to mention the fact that Excel isn't "just a spreadsheet".

I could go on, but most of the other sibling comments here have expounded enough upon her virtues.

EDIT LOL ORM/driver - because life's too short that's why

Post reply on HN