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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#201

Post by tanzam75 »

skue wrote: post #176

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 m…

> I'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for publishers. ... FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a stylesheet approach. ... It is possible to pop open a style inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought.

How long has it been since you used Word? The styles are now right on the Home tab in the Ribbon. On my monitor, it takes up over half the width of the Ribbon. You don't have to "pop open" anything to use styles, but you do need to open the styles palette to define and change styles.

A publisher could supply a Word template to its authors, and forbid the author to make any other formatting changes. They could also enforce this by opening the styles inspector and checking for any unauthorized formatting.

An author could also apply a different stylesheet to reformat a text to match a different publisher's stylesheet.

Word is a styles-based word processor, internally. If you boldface some text, Word will create a new anonymous style that's simply the existing style, plus boldface. You could even use the styles inspector to change all instances of that anonymous style back to the original style, or to turn it into a named style.

You can use Word like Framemaker (sans frames) if you want. It's just that most people don't.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#202

Post by freyrs3 »

jwr wrote: post #143
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 think you hit a local extremum, so yes, I'd advise you to stay there :-) The day will come when you will need those two figures side-by-side, together with a caption positioned just right. Or a table that spans multiple pages and has multi-column cells. Or, heaven forbid, you will need to submit your bibliography in a byzantine format invented by someone with nothing better to do ("we take pride in the fact that we…

If you don't like Computer Modern it's only a \fontstyle{times} change away. It's humerus that you claim Latex doesn't look good as it's beautiful output is the reason many people put up with it's warts.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#203

Post by oblio »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
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

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.

To have something objectively better - 100% compatibility with Excel + major limitations and bugs fixed + cross platform - more like tens of billions of dollars.

Excel is 28 years old and for its entire lifetime it has been one of the focal points of Microsoft development. It is also the center of one of the biggest cottage industries in the software world + servers as an SDK for probably hundreds of thousands of in-house developers.

I think such an effort is just an order of magnitude smaller than replacing Windows on desktop systems. And that's saying a lot about Excel :)

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#204

Post by asdasf »

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, programming, or any such thing.

He pointed that out. And he pointed out that the industry was still foisting it on him. That is why he wants it to die. This was the summary at the end of the article in fact.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#205

Post by tanzam75 »

pseingatl wrote: post #107
sounds wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Word does not have a "Make it Fit" feature, but it does have a shrink-to-fit feature. You do have to shrink it one page at a time. You start with 13 pages and shrink it to 12, then shrink 12 to 11, etc.

However, the feature has been removed from the default Ribbon UI -- probably because only lawyers were using it. (College students tend to want to expand their documents rather than shrink them.)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2664217

WordPerfect has clung to a niche in law offices because lawyers are inherently conservative. Even then, Word still has a majority share in law offices.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#206

Post by skue »

This is an interesting article and has generated some good discussion, but blaming Word for mixing style sheets and control codes seems off to me.

> Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.

Back in the 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the market leader - not MS Word. And WordPerfect 5.0 supported style sheets when it was released in the 80s, alongside the existing control codes that were already a core feature of WP.[1] Even after it supported WYSIWYG editing, WP still enabled users to Reveal Codes - essentially toggling from WYSIWYG to the underlying markup.

I'm not defending MS Word as a program - I hate it too. I wish WordPerfect or something better had won. But I don't see how Microsoft alone can be blamed for deciding to support both control codes and style sheets.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_li...

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#207

Post by tanzam75 »

AlephGarden wrote: post #161
sounds wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an aspiring mathematician, the thought of not using LaTeX for mathematics frightens me. The thought of using Word for mathematics terrifies me.

> As an aspiring mathematician, the thought of not using LaTeX for mathematics frightens me. The thought of using Word for mathematics terrifies me.

Why? You can type LaTeX into the Word equation editor -- a fact that is little-known in the math community.

The main problem with Word for mathematics is that you cannot automatically number equations! What good is it to type equations if you can't refer to "Equation 7" and have the reference update when a new equation is inserted? That makes it useless for math, physics, theoretical computer science, etc.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#208

Post by cosmie »

ancarda wrote: post #88
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…

+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…

> Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.

Although Excel has since been corrected for this use case[1], it isn't even the right Office tool for the job. That's what they created Access for.

[1]The SQL Server team built PowerPivot for Excel 2010+, which basically imports your data into a SQL db that gets embedded into the Excel file and transparently queried from Excel proper. Runs smooth as butter, and pacifies the Excel purists who refuse to lower themselves into using Access (I've worked with several of said purists).

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#210

Post by asdasf »

eitally wrote: post #134
sliverstorm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

No, not at all like those. Big corps like these: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2013/full_... When someone says "big corp" they do not mean "Jason's Deli".

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