Why Microsoft Word must die • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#101

Post by polymatter » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:31 AM UTC

batgaijin wrote: post #94

ancarda wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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…

How much ram do you have? Not an excuse for their programmers though.

I always understood it to be a feature of Excel that it couldn't cope with larger datasets.

It means you are forced to consider buying an expense Enterprise SQL license once you are using it in earnest. If it wasn't for Excel chocking on 5million rows I'm convinced most businesses wouldn't bother with databases at all.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#102

Post by AndrewDucker » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:31 AM UTC

I've yet to encounter a better method of tracking changes than the one Word uses. Makes it trivially easy for me to take a document, make a bunch of changes, and then have the originator see exactly what I've done to it.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#103

Post by tracker1 » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:37 AM UTC

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

I would say that Outlook is probably the most unique in the office suite, though feel it really should be spun off and bundled with Exchange again, which is where it really shines. Outlook + Lync are a pretty impressive combination.

Word, Excel, Powerpoint all have viable alternatives in LibreOffice. I also really like OneNote as well. The biggest reason I don't use the MS products more, is that I happen to run Mac, Windows and Linux regularly on my different computers. More of my development work is now targeting Linux than Windows, which leaves me less tied to it.

I'd also like to see the Office org split out, and let free to target non-MS platforms more.. would love a better Office solution for Android. And, I'm sure iPad users would appreciate it too.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#104

Post by pseingatl » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:38 AM UTC

wfunction wrote: post #56

primelens wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to NeoOffice several years ago and currently use LibreOffice. Wrote my dissertation on it. And this despite having access to MS-Office for free through a university license.

Cool! What do you like more about it than MS Office?

Export to LaTex, for one.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#105

Post by pjmorris » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:41 AM UTC

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

I'm inclined to believe you're right. I once worked in a large actuarial shop that did a great deal of its own custom software (they had over 100 developers). Excel was the primary tool used by the actuaries.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#106

Post by kleiba » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:42 AM UTC

daned wrote: post #93

GuiA wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Couldn't agree with you more. My SO is a PhD candidate and she doesn't know what she's missing when it comes to collaborative version control. They spend a lot of time sending around modified office docs.

Well, some people claim that tar balls and patches are a much superior source control management system than CVS. So you could say that unless you want every Joe User to master git, sending around modified office docs might not be the worst of solutions.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#107

Post by pseingatl » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:43 AM UTC

sounds wrote: post #15

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…

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 rese…

Wordperfect still is very popular in law offices. Lawyers love the "make it fit" feature, which word doesn't have. Lawyers are always trying to put 17 ounces into a 16 ounce glass.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#108

Post by VMG » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:44 AM UTC

worse is better

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#109

Post by pseingatl » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:47 AM UTC

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.

Wordperfect? Depends on what you're trying to do. Writeroom/Darkroom and clones. Pages. Scrivener. Final Draft. Celtx. Write (myownapp) etc. (no affiliation with any of these)

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#110

Post by r0muald » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:48 AM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #84

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…

Version control in Word (and pretty much any WYSIWYG editor) is fundamentally broken. I can't recall how many days of work I lost just because 1 out of 15 co-authors was not able to use it and fucked up everyone's text. And normally there's just 1 out of 15 that IS able to use it. If you're authoring papers on your own, heh, you could just be using pen and paper.