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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#211

Post by sammyo »

bentoner wrote: post #151
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…

Our startup takes a third approach: automatically detect when one document is a new version of another, so that software can take care of the version control, while the humans can go on being human. We're bringing version control to people who collaborate by email, starting with Gmail. All people have to do is exchange drafts by email (like normal!), and we infer the history, as if they've been using git. We're looki…

This looks quite interesting and quite topical to a discussion I had just yesterday during an interview. I almost clicked the installer but hesitated. A link that discusses the impact and especially any issues if/when your product was uninstalled would be reassuring.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#212

Post by skue »

tanzam75 wrote: post #201
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…

I still use Word regularly, and yes there are styles in the ribbon, along with a panel which can be opened as well. But the ribbon only shows six styles (until you pop it open), it doesn't do a good job of warning when you have overridden a style, and it confusingly mixes default styles with user-defined styles.

There are a couple other big fundamental differences with how Word supports styles:

1. Copy/paste behavior. If you copy formatted text into a Word document, it brings the styles with it. If you pull a lot of styled content into your document (including HTML), you must constantly work to restyle the imported content. FrameMaker (IIRC) helps you remap the pasted text to existing document styles.

2. Character styles in Word have always seemed like neglected step-children relative to paragraph styles. Both FrameMaker and Pages treat character styles as full peers of paragraph styles and give them separate picker lists.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#213

Post by tanzam75 »

psn wrote: post #150

"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident " They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hard…

Indeed, disk transfer speed mattered a great deal in the early days. People used to save all their data to floppy disks, and use their hard disks only to load programs.

Say you had a large document of 600 KB size. Floppy drives wrote at 45 KB/second. Imagine waiting 13 seconds for your file to save out. You might save less often -- which means that you ran a correspondingly higher risk of losing data.

The .DOC file is a binary format so that it could contain document "sections," with pointers between the sections. This is what made "Fast Save" possible. If you only made a small change to an enormous document, Word would simply append the changes, and then change the pointers in the rest of the document.

Instead of waiting 13 seconds, you'd get the save in under a second.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#214

Post by [deleted] »

r0muald wrote: post #110
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#215

Post by tanzam75 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #57
raverbashing wrote: post #51

(about stylesheets and codes) "Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there." No. That's the "developers" point of view (and a false dichotomy) Word is focused on the user. If the user wants to italicise one letter, it's OK to let him do it. Sometimes it's a requirement Of course, the problem with Word is that you can't debug the mess it creates when it doesn't work the way y…

You can italicize one letter with styles. It's not a requirement to have two completely different methods of doing so.

Imagine looking for a style every time you needed to italicize a letter. Body text, italicized. Header, italicized. Subtitle, italicized.

Why not let the user italicize, and then let Word itself find the style? Because that's what happens behind the scenes. If you italicize some Header 2 text, Word will create a new style "Header 2 + Italics." If you italicize some more Header 2 text, Word will reuse the existing style.

You can actually open the styles palette and decide to change all "Header 2 + Italics" to be boldface instead of italicized.

Word is a styles-based word processor internally. All the ad-hoc formatting you do gets turned into an anonymous style.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#216

Post by protomyth »

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 get the feeling some of the design for Pages came from Pages by Pages for NeXTSTEP. It was a style-based editor and quite nice.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#217

Post by Too »

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.

I can not think of any scenario where svn would be preferable over a distributed vcs such as git or mercurial. They can both be used exactly the same way as svn if you feel for it but come with tons of other benefits. I even think there's less friction to start with for non techincal people because you are always working in "everything always checked out"-mode and there is no need for a common server. Just let them edit in peace and when you want to merge then pull from their local repo.

I don't know the state of visual tools for git but tortoisehg for mercurial is quite easy to get started with.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#218

Post by Dylan16807 »

tanzam75 wrote: post #215
Dylan16807 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can italicize one letter with styles. It's not a requirement to have two completely different methods of doing so.

Imagine looking for a style every time you needed to italicize a letter. Body text, italicized. Header, italicized. Subtitle, italicized. Why not let the user italicize, and then let Word itself find the style? Because that's what happens behind the scenes. If you italicize some Header 2 text, Word will create a new style "Header 2 + Italics." If you italicize some more Header 2 text, Word will reuse the existing sty…

Sounds like a UI problem then, rather than a core logic problem.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#219

Post by Ethan_Mick »

My personal annoyance with Word is how terrible it works on a Mac. There are simply things I expect any text box to do (including this one that I am typing in to post this). Things like:

1: If I highlight text with my cursor and mouse, and I scroll using my trackpad (MacBook Air), I expect the text to be highlighted with the scrolling. Word fails at this. 2: I expect different my basic OS X commands to work, ctrl+e, go to end of line, ctrl+a, front of line, etc. These don't work in Word. 3: Scrolling is not smooth, typing is not smooth, and many other small annoyances.

I understand that OS X isn't nearly as big as Windows for a market, but I would love it if the software crafted for it wasn't so bad.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#220

Post by slacka »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #171
slacka wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's called a feature request. If you think bitcoin mining falls under the scope an office suite, please do us all a favor and stay away from their bug tracker.
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