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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#171

Post by thaumasiotes »

slacka wrote: post #120
wfunction wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You raised some great points about the selection UI. Did you file any bug reports for them? For your bad.doc, I think it's a missing font issue. Would you mind posting the file somewhere like Google Docs or Skydrive so we could take a look at it? For the smooth scrolling, you need to enable it under: Tools->Options->Writer->View Unfortunately, it is disabled by default. I love the idea of Free software, use LO at hom…

Exactly what is the etiquette for filing bug reports? I think of bugs as something not working as intended. Pressing left from a selection taking the cursor one space to the left of its rightmost extent, instead of to the leftmost extent, is stupid, but presumably working as intended. Should I file a bug saying OOo doesn't do HTML syntax highlighting? A bug complaining that in all the years I've had it installed (pre-2009, even), it has never mined one bitcoin for me?

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#172

Post by School-Cotton »

polymatter wrote: post #101
batgaijin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well sure, if Excel did X then business wouldn't need another program to do X, and this is true for any value of X.

Your comment is a bit like saying "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals."

Excel was never designed to replace a database and the fact that it can't isn't some evil plot by MS.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#173

Post by School-Cotton »

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…

Since when do mathematicians ever use word for any reason? I believe you're more likely to see published math research written in Crayola markers than in Word.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#174

Post by School-Cotton »

tomrod wrote: post #100
wfunction wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The great thing about LibreOffice is that if there is something you don't like about it, you can contribute to the codebase.

That's very disingenuous. The libreoffice code base is big and complex and hard enough to ramp up on that fixing your personal problems with it would quickly become a full time job, even if you already know all there is to know about programming enterprise software in c++

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#175

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

Ralith wrote: post #89
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.

This just goes to show you the shabby general state of word processing software. I've been looking for something better than OO/Libre/MSWord/etc for years and avoided using LaTeX because the workflow is _so_ 80's. However, having recently decided to give up, and switched to using LaTeX, my worksheets, course notes, exams, and presentations have never looked better, and take about the same time, or less to create. I'll also be able to do things like randomize the order of exam questions and create individual grading keys in a way that makes sense to me.

To be fair, I would advise almost no one to do the same. Something better is needed[1], but I think that most potential competitors know better than to attempt to challenge MS Word.

[1] And, indeed Google Docs is usually passable and offers some advantages.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#176

Post by skue »

I'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for publishers. Back in 1999 I authored a web programming book for O'Reilly. At the time, their technical folks would begrudgingly accept Word files, but they strongly preferred FrameMaker.[1] Some of that probably had to do with the propensity for large Word files to become corrupted, but it's also because FrameMaker helped authors generate documents with much cleaner styling than Word. It's a shame that Adobe let FrameMaker languish.

FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a stylesheet approach. The difference is analogous to creating a web page and declaring styles inline (how most folks use Word) vs. using a stylesheet (how most folks used FrameMaker). It is possible to pop open a style inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought.

Pages also has a style inspector, which is my favorite feature (despite the old-school NeXT-style drawer). For a reason that I can't easily articulate, using styles in Pages feels cleaner than Word and more like using FrameMaker. So if I have to create a large Word document I will typically do so in Pages, then export to Word.

[1] I believe O'Reilly also accepted alternative open source formats such as DocBook and LaTeX. And though these might be great formats, I could never find an editor that I could stand using for more than a few minutes -- let alone the months needed to write a book.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#177

Post by jebblue »

nonchalance wrote: post #22
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.

LO and other openoffice suites are progeny of StarOffice, originally released in 1985. Even with such a long development history, there are deep compatibility issues which make it unacceptable for the "power users" that comprise the most profitable segment of the market. And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100…

>> But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects

Anything I've ever needed any of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice tools to do have worked fine. I don't think it does anyone service to suggest to projects which keep the proprietary Microsoft Office suite alive.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#178

Post by rypskar »

I will not at all say MS Word is perfect, but I still haven’t seen a program that works better for me. Spelling and grammar is not what I am best at, and English is not my first language so I take the help I can get. I have used OpenOffice/LibreOffice and am using Google Docs, but none of them comes close to Word in helping with my spelling and grammar. I did type this comment in Word to get rid of the most obvious errors, and I do even type my master thesis in Word and copy the text to my latex editor for formatting. For me it was worth it to pay for Office instead of using any of the free alternatives.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#179

Post by tszming »

I still have Word 2003 (and Excel 2003) installed on my PC, still very useful when I need it, and it is still my first choice when I need to prepare some serious documents, otherwise, I will use Google Docs. It is quite amazing as they are software written 10 years ago, providing all the features I need as of today.

In general, for office suite, I still can't find any opensource alternatives that can compare with these 10 years old software. Yes, they are proprietary, they are not open, blah blah blah, but when you have used other latest alternatives like LibreOffice (Mac), they even can't make the basic Cmd+F search work as expected [1], can you tolerate? This is the question you need to ask.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#180

Post by pjmlp »

testrun wrote: post #153
pjmlp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never used Notes I imagine. Notes has the capability to make anyone love Outlook.

Notes have the capability to make everyone love the devil.

I used to complain sometimes about Outlook, until our corporation migrated to Notes!

Nowadays I would gladly have it back.

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