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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#131

Post by seanmcdirmid »

redacted wrote: post #122
Ralith wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love LaTeX, I wrote a physics PhD thesis in it and many papers as well. It works phenomenally well up until the point it doesn't work at all. And when you need to go fix something it is a deep and frustrating rabbit hole in my experience.

The point where something is unfixable in LaTeX is much more complex than the point something is unfixable in Word, where I seem to jump down the rabbit hole on relatively simple documents.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#132

Post by kijin »

wfunction wrote: post #90
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".

Home Edition: "People are familiar with using Office at work, so they'll probably want to use Office as well when it's time to design that Garage Sale flyer."

Student Edition: "Give them Office now at a discount, and they'll keep using (more expensive versions of) Office when they get a real job."

Office is named Office for a reason. Its entire existence revolves around the typical 20th-century white-collar office. All other use cases are secondary.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#133

Post by [deleted] »

iSnow wrote: post #129
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…

No offense, but using git for collaborative writing? That's like using nukes to get rid of mosquitoes. SVN would be a poor but better choice, but you'd rather use stypi, google docs or something like that.

[deleted]

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#134

Post by eitally »

sliverstorm wrote: post #42
nonchalance wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big corps like these: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/customers.htm... ?

As a user in a mixed MS Office + Google Apps + LibreOffice environment, Google's recent work with QuickOffice has been EXTREMELY helpful. My big gripe isn't Excel so much, either, but people who refuse to abandon PowerPoint when all they need to do is create a bullet list.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#135

Post by Ygg2 »

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)…

>At the end of that novel, Winston loved Big Brother. Because he probably realized that no other program

Mostly because he was drugged, physically and psychologically tortured and reduced to his basic instinct and given option to experience its greatest fear or 'love' Big Brother. That's closer to real world than it being the only good option. LibreOffice needs a good compare function, not the whole review shtick.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#136

Post by mathnode »

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)…

Desktop application software for collaborative editing? No way.

Confluence? Twiki? Or equal such centralised documentaiotn and revision service, be it SaaS or locally hosted, Yes.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#137

Post by Joeri »

mathnode wrote: post #136
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)…

Desktop application software for collaborative editing? No way. Confluence? Twiki? Or equal such centralised documentaiotn and revision service, be it SaaS or locally hosted, Yes.

As someone observing and partaking in the process of migrating a large svn repository of word documents into confluence I can tell you that confluence's markup and review functionality (even with add-ons) is a very poor substitute for word. It's still beneficial to do it for the ease of access and the improved searchability and document linking abilities, but it's definitely a trade-off where you lose while you gain.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#138

Post by ancarda »

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.

16 GB. That was enough to load it into RAM, it was a matter of the "right tool for the right job". MySQL handles large datasets easily, probably because it's not trying to display all the thousands of columns x millions of rows at once.

I've found the same to be true for editors. Most text editors have struggled to open large log files (500+ MB) whereas cat can open a file of basically any size.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#139

Post by CrLf »

nawitus wrote: post #128
pasbesoin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What are the limitations of OpenOffice Calc compared to Excel and 10 year old Excel?

Don't know how OO Calc compares to Excel today, but I stopped using it after having an unfixed issue(1) open for a few years that made it impossible to produce a simple line graph with more than about 2000 points without slowing down the program to a halt, whereas Excel didn't even break a sweat.

These are the limitations of Excel alternatives. They look nice on the outside, but fail to understand that users don't use them just for the simple stuff. It is well known that Excel is what really powers many companies, and these are often absurdly complex.

(1) OO Calc insisted on drawing an x-axis label for every single point in a graph, on every redraw.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#140

Post by m_mueller »

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…

I'm an avid user of Pages because of its consistent UI. But it's still lacking a very important feature for the usecases you mentioned: cross referencing and bibliography.

As an aside: Did you know that you can create a halfway decent xhtml from Pages documents by exporting to epub and extracting the embedded documents? I've used that in the past to create a simple database my wife can edit using the tools she knows (Pages) by converting that stuff to an xml db. You can even script all the intermediate steps using AppleScript. As a platform to hack on, OSX can combine the strengths of Unix with the UI scriptability of Windows OLE.

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