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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#251

Post by flogic »

johnminter wrote: post #185
SeanDav wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That sloppiness is also it's core strength. It allows people without training to slice and dice data. The process is almost never pretty but they're "free" to compute.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#252

Post by pstuart »

crazygringo wrote: post #193
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 came here to say the same thing. The first time I opened up Pages, I was amazed by its relative simplicity and elegance. It actually reminds me a lot of what Word 4.0 was like for the Mac, way back in 1990. I use it for all my personal things, and then Google Docs for business things. So I don't know why the original article suggests competition is dead -- unfortunately Pages is not cross-platform, but Google Docs…

Version 4.0 on the Mac was probably its zenith. And it fit on 2 floppies, IIRC.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#253

Post by keithpeter »

MarcScott wrote: post #239

In my school I'm trying my best to push students away from using Word. If they're making quick notes, I ask them to do it in a text editor. If they're presenting work for review I ask them to write it in markdown. This is only for my CompSci classes, but it's a start. My next mission is to break the stranglehold that PowerPoint has on my students.

"If they're presenting work for review I ask them to write it in markdown."

Perhaps a git repository to track feedback and changes?

Do they need to use diagrams or images at all?

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#255

Post by SeanDav »

Perseids wrote: post #149
SeanDav wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is also amazing what can be done programming in brainfuck. That something is powerful enough to do the job does not mean that it is a good tool to do the job.

Excel is used extensively in the financial and trading fields because for many situations (predominantly RAD and prototyping) it IS the best tool for the job. We are talking about companies with serious amounts of cash to throw around at anything that gives them the slightest edge and with some of the smartest people to work for them. They use Excel because for many situations there is nothing better.

Of course the particular use case I mentioned was probably pushing Excel right to the edge of the envelope and the company was actively developing a .NET replacement for it because everyone recognized this. I have no idea how that turned out but I can say that the Excel system was very impressive and very functional.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#256

Post by revelation »

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.

I think LaTeX simply doesn't live up to its promise. Yes, its a big improvement over Word, but I still find myself manually adding \newpages, rewriting paragraphs and shuffling text around because figures are placed in completely awkward places or you have pages with just one line of text and a sea of white.

That is in addition to the horrors you unleash once something stops working and you need to dig deeper. dvi2pdf..

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#257

Post by Lagged2Death »

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.

Then indeed, its influence over those fields should be allowed to wane.

LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right.

I was required to use the Review feature as a sort of half-assed collaborative editing system for tech specs on a couple of projects around 2008-2010. I found it to be a buggy, work-destroying trap of a feature. Things would actually have gone more smoothly for my project Microsoft had never implemented this feature.

I haven't tried any similar features in LibreOffice. If it doesn't do anything totally crazy (like randomly duplicating blocks of text in odd places) it's probably better.

I read an interview with some high-muckety-muck in the MS Office group years ago. He actually said, in response to a question about features vs. bug fixes, that he was sure users preferred new features to bug fixes for old ones. That features got people excited and no one really cared if they lost a little work every few hours.

He didn't say he'd asked any users. He was just sure.

I wish I could link to it, but I don't recall where I read it.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#259

Post by mcgwiz »

Ygg2 wrote: post #135
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.

One way or another, you have to achieve product-market fit.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#260

Post by tarre »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #158
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…

Yes, but it only works when you use word. Yours sincerely, a graduate student whose thesis is written in LaTeX and then converted to RTF and then hand edited so his supervisor(s) can give him comments. I sent them a link to my github repository, but they never took me up on my offer :(

Did you try to send them just the pdf-file? That worked for me.
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