91–100 of 387 posts
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 una…
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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.
Notes has the capability to make anyone love Outlook.
> 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…
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 c…
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
Each localized version stored function names as localized strings!!! So format was not even compatible across the same version.
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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.
Much was due to the ribbon interface, which I liked, which LO doesn't have. My mind reverted to menus via Office 2000 which I cut my teeth on as a new graduate years back.
There are some things I still find odd / bewildering:
Right clicking on a block of text I have the options of both 'Text' and 'Character' which have different options. Neither of the contained options contain vertical alignment choices. Tables just feel a pain, zooming in and out as different cells / borders are clicked. Blah blah blah other small things. For my sins, I like VBA (familiar with, rather than romance).
Familiar is the key. It took a small learning curve, and I'm as productive in it as a modern version of MS Office. Much of the learning curve is having been so familiar with MS Office, sometimes things are just done differently, mainly at the UX Level. Integration for a personal and work based workflow is where Linux leaves Windows in the standing-gates was the game changer for me, and why I put myself through the learning curve.
I do feel LO's UI simply doesn't look beautiful, indeed, I feel it looks ugly. Everything is gray, some icons have shadow, some not. I have the feeling a few hundreds of hours on grouping icons, highlighting contrast in dialogue boxes, would make it a lot less 'tired' looking. Mozilla did it, I am sure LO will, and that may be a small but important tipping point.
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.
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.docx is an open format, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
It's a published format. Open, not so much: to parse .docx properly you've basically got to re-implement Word -- they carefully drafted the standard to make it hard for rival XML processors to work on their files.
I really don't know where you are getting these facts from other than the usual spiel that Microsoft does only evil.
The standards are open, published and free to implement (look for Microsoft open specifications). The documentation is way better than anything else out there.
So LibreOffice obviously reimplemented lotus 123, wordperfect and wordstar did they as well?
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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 "LI…