try libreoffice.
Why Microsoft Word must die
11–20 of 387 posts
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#12The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
I absolutely agree. And while I hate VBA, it makes excel that much more powerful. It even makes up for some of the bugs in excel such as absolute references from a different workbook doesn't transpose using the built in transpose function. However, using the built in copy / paste formula functionality, it works fine. In this case, a simple macro which takes 5 mins to write will resolve this otherwise annoying bug.
Although the most annoying thing about Excel is actually the users who insist on using it like a database...
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#13Right now the word processor choices are Word or open-source Word clone, so I don't see the point for the end user. I use Libre/NeoOffice, but it's no easier to use than Word. I'd like to see a word processor more like old ClarisWorks/AppleWorks.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#14I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of writers were less technically savvy, happiest writing in Word, or simply wouldn't know how to write in any other format. It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style and ability, and only have to deal with converting one format into a final publication. I do feel that this is one of those cases where…
Many authors do already do this. I'm not sure if Charles Stross is complaining about having to write in Word, or simply use a workflow where Word is the end output for the author. The latter makes more sense as a complaint than the former, because I know many published authors (writing runs in the family) who use tools like Scrivener to write and then send it on to their agents / publishers as an exported .doc without any problems.
It could be worse, at least he's not writing scripts (which generally mandate you to use Final Draft)...
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#15I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of writers were less technically savvy, happiest writing in Word, or simply wouldn't know how to write in any other format. It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style and ability, and only have to deal with converting one format into a final publication. I do feel that this is one of those cases where…
Arguing this is the exceptional case misses his point, I think.
He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct.
In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament: "the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems."
Some examples:
∙ Hard science research are the poster child where "Word slave labor" happens daily
∙ Math research, fortunately there's a lot the web can do but still the Word drudgery
∙ Engineering research
∙ Self-published and indie writers (Scrivener definitely has made a splash)
∙ Law
Who cares? Well, if you want to make a lot of money, these people would throw their money at you if you could ease their pain a little bit.
The publishers get a lot of bad press for other things they do (like Aaron Schwartz), but they're still wrong about MS Word being a publishing platform.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#16Monopoly or not, it's the only wsywyg text editor I've ever found truly usable. I now prefer Google docs for convenience but it's not quite there yet for composition/edit experience. Hoping for more good alternatives, if anyone has suggestions.
LyX isn't WYSIWYG but rather WYSIWYM (the "M" stands for "mean"), but I found it the most usable visual editor for word processing.
Edit: Why the downvote?
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#17The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
> there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite Are you sure? Does it not strike you as odd that OpenOffice/LibreOffice still haven't managed to replace Word?
I really think that has to do with Microsoft's lock-in strategy and the fact that people only "know" Office in the corporate space.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#18The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.
$100K is one developer-year... I would expect it to cost at least a hundred times that.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#19The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
It's been over a decade since I was a regular, daily Excel user ("power user", frankly). I still, today, haven't seen anything that matches what Excel was already back then.
It has its quirks. It's also damned powerful and optimized.
(I guess that's including its program-ability and the ability to interface it with external functionality via Win32 et al. I remember, for example, referencing IE 4, then 5, in order to "add" regex's to it via VBA scripting. Actually, as I recall that was actually Windows Scripting Host; installing the relevant version of IE at that time in turn caused WSH to also be installed.)
P.S. I was not number crunching during the Lotus heydays. I gather its products had some features that were unparalleled for their time and that Excel may never have fully matched.
P.P.S. As for quirks, I remember one bit of oddity emanating from a formatting function that an older programmer associated with a Fortran convention, when I happened to describe it to him.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#20I think MS Word is fine; they just need to use an open standard document format.