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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#221

Post by tomrod »

School-Cotton wrote: post #174
tomrod wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's very disingenuous. The libreoffice code base is big and complex and hard enough to ramp up on that fixing your personal problems with it would quickly become a full time job, even if you already know all there is to know about programming enterprise software in c++

That depends on what you're trying to fix.

Add a nonlinear solver to calc? Sure.

Add a fill function into draw? _Maybe_ a two-month after-hours project.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#222

Post by YeahKIA »

asdasf wrote: post #204
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. He pointed that out. And he pointed out that the industry was still foisting it on him. That is why he wants it to die. This was the summary at the end of the article in fact.

Curious what kind of foisting. I'm sure people might have preferred things in word format. Its just a matter of convenience. But I doubt its foisted. I've seen PDF files to be as annoyingly common particularly in academia. I hate it but I get around by just saving my document as PDF and move on. He's just being overly dramatic.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#223

Post by YeahKIA »

mathnode wrote: post #136
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)…

Desktop application software for collaborative editing? No way. Confluence? Twiki? Or equal such centralised documentaiotn and revision service, be it SaaS or locally hosted, Yes.

Wait. What? Have you tried collaboration with a Word before saying this? I make my living collaborating on documents in Word. Which part of it did you have a problem with? I have found only OneNote to be any better than Word but alas it lacks a bunch of Word features.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#224

Post by walshemj »

eitally wrote: post #134
sliverstorm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big Corp doesn't want its trade secrets on Google's servers, and phones don't have enough interface real estate to contain the full functionality. They work best as satellite devices, in my experience.

Big corps like these: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/customers.htm... ? As a user in a mixed MS Office + Google Apps + LibreOffice environment, Google's recent work with QuickOffice has been EXTREMELY helpful. My big gripe isn't Excel so much, either, but people who refuse to abandon PowerPoint when all they need to do is create a bullet list.

All those examples seem to be SME's or lifestyle companies a really big corp may well employ more developers than Google has employees.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#225

Post by walshemj »

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)…

The problem is that Publishers still tend to recruit Oxbridge first eng lit grads whose computer knowledge is probably about the same as Jenn from the IT Crowd.

Unfortunately as Publishing is now having to deal with online and electronic it means they are not best placed to deal with the changes.

And book publishers have sclerotic processes (makes teh Laudry service seem slick and efficient) to take a book from delivery to publication and extra month or so playing with word is't going to make much difference

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#226

Post by pea »

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…

That's actually what we are doing @ Kivo.com :p

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#227

Post by joosters »

thuuuomas wrote: post #187
joosters wrote: post #59

Word is IMO just fine for most uses. It has lots of features and lots of ways of writing and designing documents because users wanted them. You can't blame a product on its users. And note the 'IMO' bit: Why on earth do people think that because they don't like a piece of software, they want to force all the other happy users to stop using it. It's just selfishness and self-importance. The world won't just use the pi…

> The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices. Choice- singular. The real problem with Word, as highlighted in OP's post, is its longstanding market dominance & attitude of outright hostility towards interoperability.

Just read the rest of the comments, there are plenty of alternatives. The author isn't complaining about a lack of choices, either. Instead, he is moaning that other people have made a different choice from him.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#228

Post by [deleted] »

ancarda wrote: post #88
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…

+1 for Pages. I once sent a .pages document to a friend on Linux. I was genuinely surprised when he could read it. Turns out .pages is actually a zip file, that when extracted, has a PDF inside. Pages has always scaled fine for me, however Numbers will choke on a gigabyte-sized CSV. I tried to, import the US census data into it. I couldn't get Numbers to work. It crashed every time. Microsoft Excel could just about c…

[deleted]

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#229

Post by primelens »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #63
primelens wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried it because I wanted to try free (as in freedom) software and never felt the need to switch back as it did everything I required of a WYSIWYG word processor. I guess I have just gotten so used to it now that when I use Word/Excel etc (mostly briefly on someone else's computer) I get all confused about their new panel based menu system. The point is not that they are better but that they are a suitable replacem…

The Ribbon is almost seven years old now.

And that's how long I've been MS-free :-).

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#230

Post by ChuckMcM »

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)…

"Call me again when it gets the Review function right. 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."

I suspect this is the ultimate longevity of Word. Retraining is a real pain. So the only way to kill Word is by a thousand cuts. One of those cuts seems to be Google's documents. A number of non-technical folks can now send me a document in Google Docs so I don't have to switch from my Linux desktop to something else to access it, and Google has done a reasonable job of auto importing Word.

So domain specific solutions, with "good enough" import/export may be the solution.

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