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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#281

Post by wfunction »

sixbrx wrote: post #156
wfunction wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure: - LibreOffice can't even show the simplest documents correctly on the same computer: http://i.imgur.com/0glr43F.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png - Word takes 2 seconds. It's outright irritating to say the least. - Everything else has lags too. File->Save takes > 2 seconds to show me the dialog. In Word it's instantaneous. - No smooth scroll?? My eyes!!! >___ - No "Styles"?? - The UI just screams "LI…

> 1. Word highlights text word-by-word; I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting. Very often in my documents it simply will not properly recognize the boundaries of what I want to select, and small increments of the mouse produce jumps in the selection that were not intended. I think OO's behavior is a lot better in this respect.

It's possible to disable this in Word by the way.

Except this is the common case, so it makes sense to have it on by default.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#282

Post by wfunction »

tomrod wrote: post #100
wfunction wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure: - LibreOffice can't even show the simplest documents correctly on the same computer: http://i.imgur.com/0glr43F.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png - Word takes 2 seconds. It's outright irritating to say the least. - Everything else has lags too. File->Save takes > 2 seconds to show me the dialog. In Word it's instantaneous. - No smooth scroll?? My eyes!!! >___ - No "Styles"?? - The UI just screams "LI…

The great thing about LibreOffice is that if there is something you don't like about it, you can contribute to the codebase.

Or maybe I can spend my time doing something else and just use something that already works?

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#283

Post by minor_nitwit »

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 :(

Should have gone PDF. The comments in pdfs are some what manageable.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#284

Post by [deleted] »

wfunction wrote: post #280
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…

1. Nope I haven't submitted bug reports, I've just used Word instead. 2. Ah, I think you're right about the missing font, I didn't realize that. I'll get back to you if I find another example, there are a million things I've noticed over time that don't render correctly other than fonts. (EDIT: See my other comment.) 3. Actually, I do have smooth scrolling "enabled", but it doesn't have any effect whatsoever (as of v…

[deleted]

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#285

Post by wfunction »

slacka wrote: post #120
wfunction wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure: - LibreOffice can't even show the simplest documents correctly on the same computer: http://i.imgur.com/0glr43F.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png - Word takes 2 seconds. It's outright irritating to say the least. - Everything else has lags too. File->Save takes > 2 seconds to show me the dialog. In Word it's instantaneous. - No smooth scroll?? My eyes!!! >___ - No "Styles"?? - The UI just screams "LI…

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…

As promised in my ohter comment, here's another example file, this time a .docx:

http://www40.zippyshare.com/v/24126556/file.html

Try opening it in MS Word and compare it with LibreOffice and you'll see why I ran away screaming:

http://i.imgur.com/4tSWXsn.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/3tBLuff.png

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#286

Post by ShirtlessRod »

sounds wrote: post #278
ShirtlessRod wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I had a unique experience, but when I was in grad school (chemical engineering) we exclusively used LaTeX for thesis work. The journals we worked with also required it, if I recall correctly.

You should count your lucky stars if you were able to submit in LaTeX format. It's obviously the best format for journals but they've all stampeded to Word.

Like I said, maybe I was just really lucky, but I never had to deal with Word for grad school. Of course, this was also 9 years ago, so maybe a lot has changed since then. Do journals in the engineering/sciences world really not accept LaTeX anymore?

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#288

Post by ShirtlessRod »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #272
ShirtlessRod wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> avoided using LaTeX because the workflow is _so_ 80's. I've never understood this way of thinking. Either it works or it doesn't work -- the age should have nothing to do with it.

I don't like drawing circuits in LaTeX. Here, a simple circuit example: \item \begin{circuitikz}[american voltages] \draw (0,0) to[battery, l=12V](0,3) to[R, l=$150\Omega$ ](3,3) to[D,l=$D_1$](3,0) to[short](0,0) ; \end{circuitikz} It makes perfectly nice looking circuits, so it passes a definition of "works" but it is an archaic way of describing circuits. if I had to do serious electronics work in that manner, I mi…

I can understand that as a reason. In this case it sounds like there is a newer, more efficient format that has superseded the old one. (I'm no expert in circuits, so I'll take your word for it.)

If some new technique/workflow/whatever is newer and more efficient, then I'm all for it. I just don't like the attitude that "newer == better" that has seemed to become more and more prevalent in recent years. (I'm not saying you were doing that, but the phrasing you used is something I typically see in that situation.)

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#289

Post by akx »

qwerta wrote: post #95
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

I know many people who happily left Excel behind. Each localized version stored function names as localized strings!!! So format was not even compatible across the same version.

Except that the formulas actually get saved in a tokenized form, without the original names, no matter what localization they're in, in the file...

https://github.com/python-excel/xlrd/blob/master/xlrd/formul...

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#290

Post by scholia »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #163
Derbasti wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OOo/LO is a straight forward clone of MS Office. It shares all its design weaknesses and adds some of its own. Except foor freedom, I don't see any reason for using it over MS Office.

I use it for a different reason: no ribbon.

Your loss. Ribbon is a huge advance....
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