MS Office (specifically Excel) is not a shitty product. There's a reason why it has a larger monopoly with finance types Wall Street than Google does with search. Power users can quickly build powerful financial models with it.
Doing complex modelling in Excel is not a good idea. There is no way to do proper software engineering, so bugs are common and hard to find. For examples, see http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm
Microsoft Office (by the way 2016 is a pretty solid software suite) is not thriving because of institutional knowledge. Office is great because users in most business settings can quickly pick up any of its applications (learn how to use it) and apply the same learnings to the rest of the suite, personal knowledge with a small learning curve. Also, tools like Excel are malleable and useable for most users in a compan…
> Office is great because users in most business settings can quickly pick up any of its applications My experience is that 'users in business settings' absolutely refuse to consider any alternatives, mainly because of two 'fear factors': 1.) "Everyone else in my industry uses Microsoft Office products so I must as well" 2.) (Usually unstated explicitly) "Learning an alternative is going to cost me time and money and…
LibreOffice doesn't support stuff Office does; Latex and InDesign are intended for different purposes.
Word certainly is, at least on OS X. Within an hour of my first time using it in a decade last week, I caused it to beachball for five minutes straight by clicking a single button (select all text of a given style). It then took me over an hour to figure out why my TOC entries had no spacing between their numbers and titles (hint: it wasn't the spacing setting), and another hour to figure out why, after I "fixed" the…
In defense of Word: The vast majority of people don't realize just how massive Word is in terms of it's feature set and it's complexity, Word is a fully furnished publishing program and most people treat it like a rich text editor. I still have and use it irregularly for a few things, but if you just need to edit text with formatting, use TextEdit. Using Word to type up a memo is like using a jet engine to cook a TV…
I completely agree. Word is like the Emacs of natural language documents.
It was very well made. It's easy to use and yet but also has great features and shortcuts for power users. There's lots of genius little features not available elsewhere, like grouping columns or formulas over columns or rows (e.g. sum(A:A)). I often abused it with 50mb spreadsheets (a bad practice fyi) and it could often take it. The version I used rarely crashed. For most software I use, I see lots of things that n…
Let's start a list: Opening a csv triggers a full recalc even if your calcs are on manual. That's absurd given that csv files by definition have no formulas Come on Microsoft. 18 years without updating the scripting abilities. Can't we have a .net version of VBA?? And NO JAVASCRIPT. The fx button still opens a tiny old non resizable windows with a broken search feature, which is impractical if you have hundreds of UD…
It's not the exact same as VBA macro extensibility, but you can do some pretty interesting stuff with it - build task panes, build embedded charts that leverage web content, etc.
Let's start a list: Opening a csv triggers a full recalc even if your calcs are on manual. That's absurd given that csv files by definition have no formulas Come on Microsoft. 18 years without updating the scripting abilities. Can't we have a .net version of VBA?? And NO JAVASCRIPT. The fx button still opens a tiny old non resizable windows with a broken search feature, which is impractical if you have hundreds of UD…
They've had an HTML / JS Add-in model for a few years now: http://dev.office.com/getting-started/addins?product=excel It's not the exact same as VBA macro extensibility, but you can do some pretty interesting stuff with it - build task panes, build embedded charts that leverage web content, etc.
Swapping VBA for javascript is not exactly an upgrade. But you can't do any in-session scripting or UDF so that's of very limited use.
And for automation I would rather use .net + ExcelDNA than javascript.
I can understand why they went the javascript route but that's clearly hearing developers, not users.
I think perhaps the writer is using some cognitive dissonance to unfairly dismiss the market leaders as being "shitty". Any time I have used OpenTable (as a user) it has been a really great experience. It does exactly what you expect it to do, and it's always a very smooth experience. OpenTable has been around since 1998, so I imagine they are the market leader because they were the first to market and their product…
My experiences with it are that it is extremely shitty. I often go to it to see if there are any tables at my desired time, and if there are, I manually call the place and book the reservation directly. Whenever I go to it, it tries to push a bunch of unrelated crap to me. No, I don't want to get daily emails about this restaurant I'm eating at once while on vacation. (Does anyone want that?) The UI is horrible and confusing. I avoid it if possible, and only grudgingly use it when I don't have another choice (near wifi, but no cell signal, for example).
While we are all going off-topic, I'd like to see a "collapse thread" feature on HN. Quite often the comments page is dominated by a tangential discussion as seen here.
I agree, the author picked a really bad example(Office) to make his otherwise good point. Office certainly isn't a shitty product compared to its competition. You can use browser extensions like hckrnews or 'Hacker news enhancement suite' to collapse comments. http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions