Why Microsoft Word must die • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#41

Post by MaulingMonkey » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:00 AM UTC

wfunction wrote: post #10

nonchalance wrote: post #3

The 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?

At home? False premise: It has replaced Word (for me.)

That it has not for everyone or as a whole doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest. There are plenty of reasons to use Word. Aside from the fact that it's solid itself, it also has a metric ton of inertia. Those using it already have the license or pirated copy, already know it, have legacy documents using it, and are generally otherwise are left with very little reason to switch to something merely because it's a "solid alternative."

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#42

Post by sliverstorm » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:01 AM UTC

nonchalance wrote: post #40

sliverstorm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook may not be irreplaceable , but from what I've seen nobody has come close to making its replacement.

It's really difficult to say whether the replacement for outlook will be a piece of software for the desktop, a web-based solution a la gmail/google calendar, or a powerful iPhone/android/bb app

Big Corp doesn't want its trade secrets on Google's servers, and phones don't have enough interface real estate to contain the full functionality. They work best as satellite devices, in my experience.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#43

Post by icu » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:16 AM UTC

willvarfar wrote: post #21

My experience with libreoffice scripting was painful: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/makin...

I agree that trying to force open source alternatives on your workflow after using Microsoft Office for a long time can be difficult. I tried to switch from Microsoft Office to the other open source alternatives and while I did like Open Office, I found I couldn't use it beyond 'average' tasks. As soon as I needed advanced analysis I had to go back to Excel. I find that switching between R and Excel 2013 works well for me. Also I feel that Microsoft has done a good job with Office 2013 and I like what they've done with PowerPoint animations on the ribbon. Frankly though Office is expensive so if you need the features not available in open source alternatives you've just got to pay.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#44

Post by wfunction » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:19 AM UTC

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #41

wfunction wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

At home? False premise: It has replaced Word (for me.) That it has not for everyone or as a whole doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest. There are plenty of reasons to use Word. Aside from the fact that it's solid itself, it also has a metric ton of inertia. Those using it already have the license or pirated copy, already know it, have legacy documents using it, and are generally otherwise are left with very litt…

I know I tried to switch to LibreOffice for a few weeks and then ran back screaming. I know some others who have done the same.

I haven't yet met a single person who is happier with OOo/LO than with Word; if that's true for you you're the first such person I've heard of.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#45

Post by rtfeldman » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:22 AM UTC

I came to similar conclusions but didn't like Scrivener, so I scratched my own itch instead. The result is http://dreamwriterapp.com - it only works in Chrome, but it can handle 100,000+ word novels without performance tanking like it does in Google Docs.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#46

Post by mikro2nd » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:24 AM UTC

Long have I said, " Word processors are to words as food processors are to food,"

The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting. This might be fine for the odd office memo, but is ill suited to almost anything else.

That said, word processors are nothing compared to the hell that is writing comments on a touch screen with a predictive text algorithm that refuses to swear!

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#47

Post by primelens » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:30 AM UTC

LibreOffice is fighting the good fight and for most things it's a great substitute for word.

But I've always wondered what would happen if something like Latex were to become truly user friendly - I mean pre-compiled distributions that are easy to download and work without tweaking, relatively good wysiwyg viewers and a less obtuse maze of packages.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#48

Post by fauigerzigerk » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:31 AM UTC

zerovox wrote: post #4

I 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…

> It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style [...]

One problem with Word is exactly that it is very difficult to get anything remotely consistent out of it. Even people who are very knowledgeable and smart are unable to use that hodgepodge of completely intransparent styling features correctly. Anything involving numbering and bullets tends to be broken as well.

There's no way a publisher gets a consistently styled document from an author. I don't believe that for a second. I'm absolutely certain that publishers have an army of interns who fix the jumbled mess they're receiving from authors.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#49

Post by 6cxs2hd6 » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:32 AM UTC

> Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.

Replace "Word" with "HTML". Now is it still the abominable dichotomy the OP is claiming?

Although I think Word sucks in many ways, letting users combine style sheet and local formatting doesn't seem like the Original Sin from which all evil flowed.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#50

Post by unsignedint » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 7:34 AM UTC

telephonetemp wrote: post #8

Government forms served as Word documents with complex table-based formatting and "fields" made out of underscores are truly the worst. They are sadly ubiquitous throughout Eastern Europe, much like mathematics typeset using Word and MathType.

I can't go into so much detail about it, but some companies I had to deal with had a form that was MS Word. ("More than 50 pages of check list" which used one of those fields, in which I had to check mark each one of them.)

They had MS Word and PDF version of it, which PDF version wasn't even fillable form. Somehow those forms are a real pain to work with. One time, I just printed out the entire thing out of the PDF and just hand-checked them, and another time, I've used Preview app on Mac to check those by annotation. Either way, they were very annoying...