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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#151

Post by bentoner »

GuiA wrote: post #84
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)…

> 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 looking for beta testers:

https://draftable.com

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#153

Post by testrun »

pjmlp wrote: post #92
Nux wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You never used Notes I imagine. Notes has the capability to make anyone love Outlook.

Notes have the capability to make everyone love the devil.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#154

Post by Steuard »

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.

Wow, do I disagree. I use version control (hg) for solo writing, and I'd love to use it for collaboration if I didn't think it would be an uphill slog to convince my coauthors to learn it too.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#155

Post by EternalLight »

ancarda wrote: post #138
batgaijin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much ram do you have? Not an excuse for their programmers though.

16 GB. That was enough to load it into RAM, it was a matter of the "right tool for the right job". MySQL handles large datasets easily, probably because it's not trying to display all the thousands of columns x millions of rows at once. I've found the same to be true for editors. Most text editors have struggled to open large log files (500+ MB) whereas cat can open a file of basically any size.

I've had a similar experience with editors, good old vim and less works but most other editors will crash or become unusable as log sizes increase.

Of cause, for parsing logs a few well thought out awk commands combined with sed, sort, unique and other *nix utilities usually beats everything else in my experience.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#156

Post by sixbrx »

wfunction wrote: post #86
petit_robert wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched several years ago and never looked backed. No problem whatsoever, I produce all my corporate documents with it. Could you explain what it is that scared you so much? I am the one to scream whenever I'm forced into using anything from the post 2003 MS office suites, which is thankfully extremely rare.

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.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#157

Post by ghaff »

cstross wrote: post #28
objclxt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many authors do already do this. I'm not sure if Charles Stross is complaining about having to write in Word, or simply use a workflow where Word is the end output for the author. The latter makes more sense as a complaint than the former, because I know many published authors (writing runs in the family) who use tools like Scrivener to write and then send it on to their agents / publishers as an exported .doc withou…

Publisher's workflow now insists on copy editors using Word with change tracking to mark up submitted manuscripts. The author then gets a copy of the marked-up MS to check. Which means having to use at least a tool compatible with MS change tracking on .doc files. So I'm blissfully Word-free until I hit "compile" in Scrivener ... but after the output file (RTF) goes to the publisher it comes back to me as a Word docu…

And, honestly, for my last book I did pretty much the same thing even though I wasn't using an actual publisher. I did however have to send my ms to a copy editor and I also--at some point--had to get into some semblance of layout (for which I used Pages; my needs were pretty simple).

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#158

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

GuiA wrote: post #84
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)…

> 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 :(

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#159

Post by agumonkey »

redacted wrote: post #119
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 physics research: a pile of printed documents Collaboration in physics research: hand-written notes on margins of said pile The issue with git etc is that everyone involved has to understand how it works and accept and appreciate the benefits over the system outlined above (which works quite well for papers with few authors). If even one author doesn't care, you cannot implement the system. And goo…

HoTT authors said that distributed version control helped a lot (for both productivity/creativity and spirit of scientific openness)

http://math.andrej.com/2013/06/20/the-hott-book/

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#160

Post by unsignedint »

dr_preston wrote: post #145
wfunction wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing... Word was designed to help office workers produce business documents And that's why they released a "Home and Student Edition".

I purchased the "Home and Student Edition" for my wife to use on her new MacBook Air. A few months ago she started writing short fiction, which we have since self-published on Kindle. We had to switch to Libre Office, though, because when I contacted Microsoft support and asked them about the "Non-Commercial use" restriction, they told me writing a novel counts as commercial activity.

Which it really confuses me as "Home" part. I can't think of so much case that full fledged WP useful in home context other than writing a letter maybe...
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