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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#261

Post by alok-g »

telephonetemp wrote: post #16
dkuebric wrote: post #2

Monopoly or not, it's the only wsywyg text editor I've ever found truly usable. I now prefer Google docs for convenience but it's not quite there yet for composition/edit experience. Hoping for more good alternatives, if anyone has suggestions.

LyX isn't WYSIWYG but rather WYSIWYM (the "M" stands for "mean"), but I found it the most usable visual editor for word processing. Edit: Why the downvote?

My key issue with Lyx has been that the document interface is not in fully human format. References and tags show up as fields visible to the user. To create a cross-reference, user must insert tags at the target location first (Microsoft Word keeps track of headings, captions, etc. by itself for cross-referencing). Also, hyperlinks are not clickable (the last time I checked).

Edit: I did not downvote, and cannot explain why you got them.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#262

Post by Nux »

CrLf wrote: post #141
Nux wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once dead, Outlook should stay dead. It's absolutely horrible. Exchange as well.

What are your issues with Exchange? Actually, it was Exchange (at least since 2007SP1) that made me start thinking that it was actually possible for Microsoft to produce extremely reliable software.

My issues with Exchange? Let's see:

- it's an overblown, over-engineered piece of shit designed to give "IT managers" and their secretaties a boner and suck them into Microsoft's vendor lock-in hellish groupware who still thinks we're in the 90s (fuck sharepoint, too while we're at it!)

- requires big resources to work faster than a snail (fuck sharepoint again!)

- to deploy it you need to also deploy more microsoft dinosaurs such as AD 2020 with CRAPFIX 9887622 running on Windows NonStandard Edition SP4 (no less!)

- to use more than 10 mailboxes you need a cluster of 10 microsoft certified hardware servers, double it if you want it in 64bit

- the webmail interface (which I had been forced to use in the past because I was using Linux) is ridiculous usability wise, sluggish, multi-message operations are very slow, the filters are a joke compared to procmail or maildrop; .forward does not exist

- some poor bastards confuse it with a proper MTA and leave it facing the internetz directly, most serious deployments I've seen run a nix based installation (qmail, postfix) in front of it and firewall the hell out of it because you can't have it exposed to a network

- sometimes when it breaks not even highly microsoft trained monkeys can fix it unless they sacrifice a couple of chickens to the voodoo gods

- if you want to count on certain mail standards (other than Microsoft's that is) you're pretty much on your own: imap support is shit, exporting to anything other that random m$ tech is not supported

The list could go on and on. That's what I think of Microsoft's "reliable software".

Needless to say, I'll pick e.g. Thunderbird any day over it, although I'm using more and more console based clients nowadays (such as cone or lumail).

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#264

Post by tod222 »

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...

> This was one part of the Duke scandal (the fraud was much worse, but the Excel was sloppy)…

Apparently a reference to Former Duke Cancer Researcher Anil Potti. [1][2]

> …put egg on some Harvard Econ prof's faces - to the delight of the UMASS grad student that found it...

Likely referring to the Reinhart/Rogoff spreadsheet error discovered by Thomas Herndon. [3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/13/anil-potti-duke-can...

[3] http://chronicle.com/article/UMass-Graduate-Student-Talks/13...

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#265

Post by mturmon »

revelation wrote: post #256
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 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. dvi2pd…

There are about 5 parameters that adjust latex's pickiness when doing page layout with figures. Things like proportion of the page taken up by a figure. Tweak these and these problems should mostly go away. You may still need to move a figure ahead of a block of ordinary text (only do it at the final edit!) but you won't be tearing your hair out.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#266

Post by cdcarter »

EliRivers wrote: post #111
AndrewDucker wrote: post #102

I've yet to encounter a better method of tracking changes than the one Word uses. Makes it trivially easy for me to take a document, make a bunch of changes, and then have the originator see exactly what I've done to it.

I've found a better method to be creating documents in plain text with some suitable formatting markup, and then apply a diff tool such as meld to see changes made. The way word does it, if I recall, involves sort of mashing the two versions together (or rather, having the change data saved with the document), with red font and strikethrough and so forth used to indicate changes, which is far harder to follow than wh…

Word can do a side-by-side diff.

And really, a lot of business people are more comfortable with the mashed up version. We don't say we red-line a contract because Word presents it that way. Red-lining has worked that way for years prior.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#267

Post by cnvogel »

tanzam75 wrote: post #207
AlephGarden wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

You can number equations. Just put a {SEQ Equation} field right of it, play with the half-broken styles/tables/tabs until it's sitting at the proper position. You'll be able to reference it with the usual cross-referencing tools.

On my particular version of Word I'll have to insert a "Caption" using the fscking-stupid-ribbon UI once and create a new counter "Equation" first, else you'll not be able to select a "Equation" in other parts of the dreaded UI.

Unfortunately, while the Eq. editor might understand LaTeX perfectly, nevertheless it will randomly thrash the font size and type whenever my colleague opens/edits/saves the document (at least the "new" font editor, the older "embedded OLE object" editor was broken in different ways).

And yes, I loathe Word and it's bastard cousins from the MS-Office-Suite with a passion and sometimes raging hate. Unfortunately there are things that money-earning demands to be made in those applications :-(

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#268

Post by cdcarter »

rbanffy wrote: post #248
triton wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a load or horse shit (excuse my French). I've worked with both ODF and OOXML extensively as we write document templating software and I'll pick OOXML over ODF any say. It's less quirky, there are decent COTS tools to handle it and the output rendering is consistent regardless of which tool you pick to do the rendering. It's also better documented and way more intuitive. I really don't know where you a…

> there are decent COTS tools to handle it Of course there are - Microsoft's ecosystem is huge. And tools can use Office as a library > output rendering is consistent That's not a format problem > It's also better documented Now that's just wrong. It's more extensively documented (the spec is an impressive stack when printed) but there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code. If yo…

> but there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code

That's so false. A great example is the history of different Ruby interpreters. The code to MRI was useful, but RubySpec changed the landscape.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#269

Post by oblio »

normloman wrote: post #197
serge2k wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe, just maybe, it could be that word is actually a market leader in terms of features and interface.

Have you ever been involved in buying software for a company? In my experience, nobody compares the features of different word processing software. In fact, nobody even mentions competing software, as if Word was the only choice.

Now they don't. But they did in the 80s and 90s and guess what, Office won, because it was the best choice. And it's not like they didn't have commercial competitors who couldn't keep up with Microsoft bribes^Wlobbying :)

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#270

Post by triton »

rbanffy wrote: post #248
triton wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a load or horse shit (excuse my French). I've worked with both ODF and OOXML extensively as we write document templating software and I'll pick OOXML over ODF any say. It's less quirky, there are decent COTS tools to handle it and the output rendering is consistent regardless of which tool you pick to do the rendering. It's also better documented and way more intuitive. I really don't know where you a…

> there are decent COTS tools to handle it Of course there are - Microsoft's ecosystem is huge. And tools can use Office as a library > output rendering is consistent That's not a format problem > It's also better documented Now that's just wrong. It's more extensively documented (the spec is an impressive stack when printed) but there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code. If yo…

there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code

That's even more horse shit and a poor excuse if there ever was one for not documenting something properly.

The source code by nature covers a subset of the standard as it can't cover every logical edge case and it isn't verified. At least the documentation is the verification source.

Not only that, I've delved into the LibreOffice source code and it's horrible, convoluted and a rats nest from hell.

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