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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#291

Post by GoodIntentions »

School-Cotton wrote: post #172
polymatter wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always understood it to be a feature of Excel that it couldn't cope with larger datasets. It means you are forced to consider buying an expense Enterprise SQL license once you are using it in earnest. If it wasn't for Excel chocking on 5million rows I'm convinced most businesses wouldn't bother with databases at all.

Well sure, if Excel did X then business wouldn't need another program to do X, and this is true for any value of X. Your comment is a bit like saying "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals." Excel was never designed to replace a database and the fact that it can't isn't some evil plot by MS.

>> "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals."

This part is tongue in cheek, but true. There are businesses out there, where excel is used for everything, including many things it should never be used for. Seriously powerful app. Seriously (ab)used.

I don't hate Excel, but I hate the "craplications" hare-brained power users create.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#292

Post by GhotiFish »

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…

because words dominance pushes its acceptance. You using it is pushing it on your neighbours. It is a small push, but many hands move mountains.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#293

Post by scott_s »

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.

I have always used source control for papers I write in groups - it's just assumed we're going to use source control. The only discussion is which one. I've used cvs, svn, git and mercurial when writing papers. Our papers are written in Latex. We often commit raw data and benchmark source code to the repository too.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#294

Post by davidgerard »

blowski wrote: post #277
Lagged2Death wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

Yep. This is why Excel is actually a really good spreadsheet: the people who approve the purchase are in fact the people using it - the bosses and the accountants.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#295

Post by stcredzero »

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 probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory.

Basically, you pulled this out of your butt because it hit the right notes and because it fit the preconceived notions of the readership of HN. WYSIWYG word processing was actually pioneered at Xerox PARC and MS Word has a direct lineage from there. Fitting the office correspondence conventions of the time was the obvious place to start. In a world that still operates off of paper, this is what makes sense at first.

Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory are a direct result of the deliberate crippling of the Smalltalk runtime model that Java was based on. The very small and minimalist Smalltalk runtime model was another product of Xerox PARC, BTW.

Back in the day, even Java was one of these subversive back-door hacker/engineer things management wasn't hip enough to be a part of. (Unless you were one of the even hipper folks into Smalltalk, Dylan, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, what have you, in which case, you knew better than to fall for Java.)

Heck even SQL, Fortran, and COBOL were the new hip thing back in the day. (Even if that came with corporate backing.)

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#296

Post by davidgerard »

nawitus wrote: post #128
pasbesoin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been over a decade since I was a regular, daily Excel user ("power user", frankly). I still, today, haven't seen anything that matches what Excel was already back then. It has its quirks. It's also damned powerful and optimized. (I guess that's including its program-ability and the ability to interface it with external functionality via Win32 et al. I remember, for example, referencing IE 4, then 5, in order to…

What are the limitations of OpenOffice Calc compared to Excel and 10 year old Excel?

Shitty cell storage model - it models sheets as individual cells rather than as columns. This makes everything fat and sloooow. Kohei Yoshida is fixing this for LibreOffice, and Calc should get much faster in 4.2. Not as fast as Excel.

LO Basic is not VBA. This is important when people's stuff is written in VBA.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#297

Post by davidgerard »

kfk wrote: post #123
SeanDav wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is a seriously powerful tool, it is quite frankly amazing what can be done in Excel. I have worked with Excel-based trading systems with tens of thousands of lines of VBA code, controlling systems that trade hundreds of millions of USD. If Excel stopped working today, by tomorrow the stock markets would likely be in a blood bath, such is the ubiquitousness of Excel in that field.

I have worked with Excel-based trading systems with tens of thousands of lines of VBA code Having worked with some VBA myself, this sounds like a very, very, scary statement.

It is a scary statement, and it is true, and I have friends who write VBA handling millions of pounds, and they concur that you and I should be scared.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#298

Post by rbanffy »

triton wrote: post #270
rbanffy wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are decent COTS tools to handle it Of course there are - Microsoft's ecosystem is huge. And tools can use Office as a library > output rendering is consistent That's not a format problem > It's also better documented Now that's just wrong. It's more extensively documented (the spec is an impressive stack when printed) but there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code. If yo…

there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code That's even more horse shit and a poor excuse if there ever was one for not documenting something properly. The source code by nature covers a subset of the standard as it can't cover every logical edge case and it isn't verified. At least the documentation is the verification source. Not only that, I've delved into the LibreOffice sour…

I think you are not paying attention. In addition to the documentation you found confusing, ODF comes with a reference implementation. While sometimes the LibreOffice source code can be daunting, especially if you are not that a good coder, it's runnable and evidently usable. I'm not advocating not writing documentation (I take great pains not only to document my code but to also provide comprehensive tests for it).

I don't know what kind of code you do, but your lack of faith in the clarity of your code and your tests as a form of documentation is disturbing. I hope your clients can't identify you from your comments.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#299

Post by rbanffy »

cdcarter wrote: post #268
rbanffy wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are decent COTS tools to handle it Of course there are - Microsoft's ecosystem is huge. And tools can use Office as a library > output rendering is consistent That's not a format problem > It's also better documented Now that's just wrong. It's more extensively documented (the spec is an impressive stack when printed) but there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code. If yo…

> but there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source code That's so false. A great example is the history of different Ruby interpreters. The code to MRI was useful, but RubySpec changed the landscape.

I wouldn't consider a codebase acceptable unless it includes comprehensive tests. Tests can serve and validate a spec.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#300

Post by Samuel_Michon »

MAGZine wrote: post #246
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. I’m by no means an Excel power user, but Apple Numbers provides everything I need in a spreadsheet app. I have native Numbers apps on my laptop, desktop, tablet, and phone (but there’s also a web app). Whenever I save a file on one device, it’s automatically added to all the others. A file created on my laptop can be edited on my phone and vice versa. Also, Apple Numbers im…

So Numbers is a good, platform-locked spreadsheet editor for simple uses? Dropbox+Excel seems like it would do the same thing, but even with more flexibility (including version control, document sharing) and supporting even more platforms. I don't think you can ever consider spreadsheet software to be 'user friendly'. They're spreadsheets.

> Numbers is a good, platform-locked spreadsheet editor for simple uses?

Numbers is not just a spreadsheet editor, it’s a full-fledged spreadsheet creator. Its features are sufficient for all but the most demanding users.

> Dropbox+Excel seems like it would do the same thing

For me, it doesn’t. Just using Dropbox and my stock OS (and providing I don’t use Numbers), I can view Excel files on my phone and tablet but I cann’t create or edit them. I still need to use a third party app and Microsoft doesn’t have an appealing Excel offering for mobile platforms.

> even with more flexibility (including version control, document sharing)

Numbers has version control and document sharing.

> supporting even more platforms.

Numbers is available as native apps for iOS media players, phones, and tablets. There’s also a native app for OS X. For Windows, Linux, and every other platform that can run a modern web browser, there’s a very capable web app, available for free.

Excel is available as native app for Windows and OS X. For Windows Phone it has a very bare-bones app, the Android and iOS versions are a disgrace.

> I don't think you can ever consider spreadsheet software to be 'user friendly'.

Maybe you should try Numbers, especially on a mobile device, and then compare it to Excel.

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