Why Microsoft Word must die • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#271

Post by triton » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 8:49 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #242

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…

Last time I checked not even Microsoft Office implemented the version of OOXML they forced through ISO which somewhat undermines your point. http://adjb.net/post/Microsoft-Fails-the-Standards-Test.aspx Note that post isn't written by some random GNU fanatic, but one of the key figures involved in the standardization. "The simple validators developed by me (Office-o-tron) and by Jesper Lund Stocholm (ISO/IEC 29500 Val…

This was 3 years, a beta, an entire office version and numerous service packs ago...

Not only that it complied to transitional schema at the time.

Office 2013 supports full strict compliance. Office 2010 can read strict and write transitional.

Transitional will be deprecated when Office 2010 is EOL (2020).

Get your facts right.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#272

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:03 PM UTC

ShirtlessRod wrote: post #241

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just goes to show you the shabby general state of word processing software. I've been looking for something better than OO/Libre/MSWord/etc for years and avoided using LaTeX because the workflow is _so_ 80's. However, having recently decided to give up, and switched to using LaTeX, my worksheets, course notes, exams, and presentations have never looked better, and take about the same time, or less to create. I'l…

> 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 might not bother. Yes, I can include drawings created by other software, and do so for more complex circuits.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#273

Post by srikrishnan » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:07 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #130

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…

Actually, that's what I was trying to say. Word's review functions appear as pretty colored bubbles and a bunch of icons on the Ribbon. It's easy enough even for Humanities professors to use on a daily basis, despite the fact that as a VCS, it's strictly inferior to something like git. Actually, I think it's popular precisely because it ain't git. Most professors who are fluent in Word's review functions would be hop…

Totally agree that word's review functions are really simple. Which is why even all legal/contract documents are exchanged back and forth between companies in Word today. The hassle is that its done over email - sending versions of attachments back and forth. Nice naming convention helps, but there are definitely better solutions to do the same online today.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#274

Post by HillRat » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

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…

Yeah, our creative writing tool (backspacr.com) uses versioning at the scene/subchapter level, and it's definitely nontrivial to present diff and merge tools to end users. We're working through customer stories right now to try and do discovery on just this issue.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#275

Post by singingfish » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:11 PM UTC

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.

that's a dumb thing to say. It's reasonably frequent that the best tool for a job is one that scales from the smallest possible use case (individual) to the largest, smoothly and without hassle. Git fits this criterion. SVN is a real pain by comparison.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#276

Post by teleclimber » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:14 PM UTC

mikro2nd wrote: post #46

Long have I said, " Word processors are to words as food processors are to food," The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting. This might be fine for the odd office memo, but is ill suited to almost anything else. That said, word processors are nothing compared to the hell that is writing comments on a touch screen with a predictive text algorithm that r…

> The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting.

I completely agree. Software developers and even physical product developers have (or attempt to have) development workflows that separate the content creation from the style.

There is a good reason for that: it is far easier to focus on these things separately than all at once.

You would think Word and other tools for writers would adopt the same ideas in an effort to make their users more productive.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#277

Post by blowski » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:21 PM UTC

Lagged2Death wrote: post #257

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. Then indeed, its influence over those fields should be allowed to wane. LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right. I was required to use the Review feature as a sort of half-assed collaborative editing system for tech specs on a couple of projects around 2008-2010. I found it to be a bug…

> he was sure users preferred new features to bug fixes for old ones

He's probably right (if you think of users as being the person who approves the payment). I can't imagine the CFO at a Fortune 500 company approving a few million dollars to be spent on bug fixes. The obvious question would be "why did we pay for defective software in the first place?".

So perhaps one side effect of the subscription model will be less buggy software, since the business model relies more on keeping users than getting them to upgrade.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#278

Post by sounds » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:28 PM UTC

ShirtlessRod wrote: post #245

sounds wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing this is the exceptional case misses his point, I think. He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct. In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament: "the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems." Some examples: ∙ Hard science rese…

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.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#279

Post by claudius » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:33 PM UTC

pseingatl wrote: post #112

claudius wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could just use LaTeX with the text editor of your choice. Yes, you can write letters in LaTeX, yes, that is easy and yes, it takes me roughly one minute to get a perfectly-formatted simple letter, which is roughly equivalent to the time it took Word to start the last time I tried it (~2008?)

If you're going to work in LaTex you might want to use Lyx. Otherwise, working in a LaTex compiler is full of problems. Texshop is forgiving, but where is the Zoom view feature? Other compilers simply halt without letting you know why. As a word processor, Lyx is not bad at all. Exporting from Word to LaTex is not easy.

If you’re new to LaTeX, I presume that Lyx might be a good start, but personally I prefer AUCTex with standard Emacs – the zoom feature being in my PDF viewer (evince-gtk for simplicity).

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#280

Post by wfunction » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:59 PM UTC

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…

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 version 4.0.0.3).