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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#81

Post by InclinedPlane »

It should.

Word's roots reach back to an era when the primary way to share documents was by printing them out. And that heritage is deeply ingrained in so much of it. But that's not the way documents are shared today. I'd be surprised if even 1% of all documents created in Word in 2013 are printed out, yet all of those optimizations and compromises are still there. Unfortunately, not many people have come up with unambiguously superior replacements, yet, so Word continues to hold on to its position of dominance.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#82

Post by Samuel_Michon »

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

> The truly irreplaceable product is Excel.

I’m by no means an Excel power user, but Apple Numbers provides everything I need in a spreadsheet app. I have native Numbers apps on my laptop, desktop, tablet, and phone (but there’s also a web app). Whenever I save a file on one device, it’s automatically added to all the others. A file created on my laptop can be edited on my phone and vice versa. Also, Apple Numbers imports and exports Excel documents. As a result, I haven’t opened Excel in over a year and I doubt I’ll ever buy another upgrade.

Excel may not be replaceable for everyone, especially if you’re using it in a corporate setting, but for me, I have found I can easily do without. I find Apple Numbers to be way more user-friendly and convenient.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#83

Post by claudius »

oinksoft wrote: post #13

Right 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.

Or you could just use LaTeX with the text editor of your choice. Yes, you can write letters in LaTeX, yes, that is easy and yes, it takes me roughly one minute to get a perfectly-formatted simple letter, which is roughly equivalent to the time it took Word to start the last time I tried it (~2008?)

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#84

Post by GuiA »

kijin wrote: post #77

> Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use. Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b)…

> Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.

Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia. Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox from the "how do we get average the user to get features for nerds", and Github from the "how do we get the average non-nerd to use us")

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#85

Post by Nux »

sliverstorm wrote: post #35
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

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

Once dead, Outlook should stay dead. It's absolutely horrible.

Exchange as well.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#86

Post by wfunction »

petit_robert wrote: post #71
wfunction wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I switched several years ago and never looked backed. No problem whatsoever, I produce all my corporate documents with it. Could you explain what it is that scared you so much? I am the one to scream whenever I'm forced into using anything from the post 2003 MS office suites, which is thankfully extremely rare.

Yeah, sure:

- LibreOffice can't even show the simplest documents correctly on the same computer: http://i.imgur.com/0glr43F.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png

- Word takes 2 seconds. It's outright irritating to say the least.

- Everything else has lags too. File->Save takes > 2 seconds to show me the dialog. In Word it's instantaneous.

- No smooth scroll?? My eyes!!! >___- No "Styles"??

- The UI just screams "LINUX", feels freaking hacky, and doesn't feel the way it should. For example:

1. Word highlights text word-by-word; LO does it letter-by-letter. Selections never work the way you intend them the first time.

2. Highlight a piece of text from left to right and then press Left. The cursor is now still on the left-hand side of the previously-highlighted text in Word, but still on the right-hand side in LibreOffice. What the hell???

3. A million other things about the UI doesn't feel normal, e.g. http://i.imgur.com/HM52E9A.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/zTK1zoi.png

I could go on and on, these are just what I found/remembered in a couple minutes of using it again.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#87

Post by pjmlp »

jwr wrote: post #80

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted docum…

FrameMaker and PageMaker?

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#88

Post by ancarda »

jwr wrote: post #80

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted docum…

+1 for Pages. I once sent a .pages document to a friend on Linux. I was genuinely surprised when he could read it. Turns out .pages is actually a zip file, that when extracted, has a PDF inside.

Pages has always scaled fine for me, however Numbers will choke on a gigabyte-sized CSV. I tried to, import the US census data into it. I couldn't get Numbers to work. It crashed every time. Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#89

Post by Ralith »

jwr wrote: post #80

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted docum…

So if I use LaTeX and it gives me the results I want and I don't find myself spending inordinate amounts of time tweaking things, does that make me an intermediate user? I guess I had better stop learning.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#90

Post by wfunction »

kijin wrote: post #77

> Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use. Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b)…

> Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing... Word was designed to help office workers produce business documents

And that's why they released a "Home and Student Edition".

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