51–60 of 149 posts
You might consider encouraging people to write markdown and then generate the final document using pandoc with an msword stylesheet. This is what I did in college because (for some reason) everyone expects word files for everything.
It works really well!
But it won't work with your nontechnical office staff. :(
Takeover more power and then move people to markdown with a sleight of hand. I cannot cope with MS Office anymore. I was in finance 5 years, plenty of Excel work, when I open Excel today I am quickly reminded how painful it is and go back to Python.
Takeover more power and then move people to markdown with a sleight of hand. I cannot cope with MS Office anymore. I was in finance 5 years, plenty of Excel work, when I open Excel today I am quickly reminded how painful it is and go back to Python.
It's not that I think they are inherently bad pieces of software, they're actually all pretty amazing. It's just that after years of using markdown, org-mode and python, I get frustrated by how long it takes to debug a spreadsheet or format a document.
You still have some pains with it, but its better than anything else I have seen for a non technical user.
Something to help is coming in the form of Fluid. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21260005/microsoft-office... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-...
This looks very interesting but I doubt large enterprises will allow it considering the online nature and the inability to secure confidential work on internally hosted systems.
I'd be happier with something that simply allows me to have a github-like workflow where I can propose and justify changes to this or that block of document, and an owner can sanction and merge. This would not touch internal hierarchies (the most sacred element of corporate life) but would improve collaboration.
If Fluid is a step in that direction, it's welcome. Unfortunately to me it looks more like "web-native COM objects" and few people ever liked those.
I mean, this is what Office 365 does - and pretty well: collaboration and versioning.
Versioning is good for restoring backups, it’s hard for seeing changes over time. I recently worked on a word doc with four other collaborators. Someone inserted a footnote. Looking through versions it took me 10 minutes of sifting through the dozens of versions (auto save creates new versions very frequently) to find who and when that section changes. I wish there was a git blame for office. I also wish the old day…
That's exactly what "Track changes" is for.
Something to help is coming in the form of Fluid. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21260005/microsoft-office... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-...
This looks very interesting but I doubt large enterprises will allow it considering the online nature and the inability to secure confidential work on internally hosted systems.