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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#181

Post by johnminter »

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.

Over the last couple of years I have migrated my workflow away from MS Office products (Word/Excel/VBA/PowerPoint) to LaTeX, R, Sweave/knitr.

These tools play well with git and make it easy to automate an analysis. I am a strong believer in literate programming - embedding the code in the documentation where feasible. There are case where it is not (long Monte Carlo simulations) but I can at least pull in the results and have the source code that generated them in version control and the report automatically uses the latest version.

Microsoft kept changing VBA and each release would break things. We had third party tools that had locked VBA modules and ours just wouldn't permit processing data in these workbooks.

I can extract all the data with R and am much happier. The Open Source community seems to better support their products than Microsoft. Go figure...

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#182

Post by kabdib »

Since I left MS a year ago, to join a small games company, I've used Microsoft Word only twice; both times, to make signs like

DANGER: ZERO GRAVITY AREA

for the doors of one of the server rooms here. In other words, we don't use Word.

We use Outlook a lot; I can't imagine not using it (there is quite a bit of email traffic, and Outlook is pretty good at scaling). I've also used Excel a fair amount to do analysis and "little database" work.

But Word, PowerPoint, Visio: Nada.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#183

Post by johnminter »

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.

That's where version control helps. Save and commit frequently. It is much easier to go back to just before the problem and insert smaller chunks. Found many an error this way. Selective cutting of sections and stashing them in a text editor works as well.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#184

Post by DanBC »

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)…

> Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need.

That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software.

That is all that most office workers need. So why is Office, a huge piece of software the default?

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#185

Post by johnminter »

SeanDav wrote: post #115
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

Excel is a seriously powerful tool, it is quite frankly amazing what can be done in Excel. I have worked with Excel-based trading systems with tens of thousands of lines of VBA code, controlling systems that trade hundreds of millions of USD. If Excel stopped working today, by tomorrow the stock markets would likely be in a blood bath, such is the ubiquitousness of Excel in that field.

Excel's major problem is the ease in which point/click/copy/paste generates errors. There have been several recent cases where off-by-one cell errors have caused authors issues. This was one part of the Duke scandal (the fraud was much worse, but the Excel was sloppy) and put egg on some Harvard Econ prof's faces - to the delight of the UMASS grad student that found it...

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#186

Post by coryfklein »

DanBC wrote: post #184
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)…

> Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, sing…

s/huge/expensive

Most users don't care so much about the "size" so much as the cost.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#187

Post by thuuuomas »

joosters wrote: post #59

Word is IMO just fine for most uses. It has lots of features and lots of ways of writing and designing documents because users wanted them. You can't blame a product on its users. And note the 'IMO' bit: Why on earth do people think that because they don't like a piece of software, they want to force all the other happy users to stop using it. It's just selfishness and self-importance. The world won't just use the pi…

> The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices.

Choice- singular. The real problem with Word, as highlighted in OP's post, is its longstanding market dominance & attitude of outright hostility towards interoperability.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#188

Post by tanzam75 »

dr_preston wrote: post #145
wfunction wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

I purchased the "Home and Student Edition" for my wife to use on her new MacBook Air. A few months ago she started writing short fiction, which we have since self-published on Kindle. We had to switch to Libre Office, though, because when I contacted Microsoft support and asked them about the "Non-Commercial use" restriction, they told me writing a novel counts as commercial activity.

Home and Business only costs $60 more than Home and Student.

However, I don't think there's a way to upgrade if you buy Home & Student and then discover that you need to do commercial work with it. You have to buy a new license.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#189

Post by tanzam75 »

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 surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. ... Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents.

Microsoft Word is also a styles-based tool, and produces nicely-formatted documents that are consistent with a stylesheet.

The problem is that people don't use the styles.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#190

Post by WinstonOrwell »

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 the book, Winston Smith is brainwashed by a "re-education process" of pervasive intimidation. He is subjected to the persistent threat of a death sentence, and the threat of rats-eating-your-face torture. He's behaviorally lobotomized and broken by coercive psychological manipulation. ...and oh yeah, they take away his QT 3.14 too.

Don't bastardize the message and theme of the book.

  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
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