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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#351

Post by Karunamon »

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.

Wow. I always thought that the only restriction of the Home/Student edition was that it didn't come with Access or Outlook.

They prohibit you from making money with it? That blows my mind. Not only is it completely unenforceable (the PR backlash from Microsoft doing an enforced license audit of the likely purchaser of that version would be immense), it's completely pointless. Again, the products are differentiated by what they lack.

I wonder if the Microsoft legal department counts creating lemonade stand or yard sale signage to be "commercial use"...

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#352

Post by bediger4000 »

YeahKIA wrote: post #222
asdasf wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I assure you that "Word" is foisted on people who otherwise wouldn't touch it. It's foisted in many, many ways, from project managers who ask for "a word version", to software process methodologies whose official templates are in "Word" to requirement tracking systems that demand "Word" versions of every single document, because the tracking system produces "Word" docs.

I don't think most people distinguish "Word" docs from any printed doc, except those sophisticated enough to use "Excel" to produce columnar-format data ("Word" tables are hard to do and sucky looking).

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#353

Post by el_muchacho »

wfunction wrote: post #312
kijin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home Edition: "People are familiar with using Office at work, so they'll probably want to use Office as well when it's time to design that Garage Sale flyer." Student Edition: "Give them Office now at a discount, and they'll keep using (more expensive versions of) Office when they get a real job." Office is named Office for a reason. Its entire existence revolves around the typical 20th-century white-collar office. A…

Instead of being cynical, maybe consider the fact that students find it easier to type essays with Word than with other products, so Microsoft gave them a discount so they could afford it? Win-win. Just a thought.

Between Word and Wordperfect, the latter was the better product. But Word was easier to use for simple documents.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#354

Post by bentoner »

monksy wrote: post #350
bentoner wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the delay: busy weekend. I added a FAQ https://draftable.com/gmail/faq with the answer to your question (and more), but I'll answer here too: We don't modify the data in your Gmail account, so if you try Draftable, then uninstall it, your Gmail account won't be altered. Furthermore, if you disable Draftable before uninstalling it, we'll delete our index and revoke our access to your account.

Why use Draftable when you can use google docs? That keeps version history automatically.

Sure. If everyone you deal with uses Google Docs, then you don't need Draftable.

It's meant for people who exchange documents by email.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#355

Post by read »

kijin wrote: post #335
lallysingh wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're absurdly underestimating people. A diff is a bunch of lines removed, and lines added. That's a pretty damn natural representation. As for git's complexity, it's all in its completely opaque display of its internal state. A chain of deltas - diffs - isn't complicated. It's all git's (perverse) desire to follow the exact-same command-line interface as cat and awk, when neither contain persistent state.

It's not the concept of a diff that baffles ordinary people. It's (a) the lack of an intuitive interface, and (b) poor integration with natural languages, that make most VCS's difficult to use in the context of a word processor. Word shows pretty bubbles next to sections that have been edited. The bubbles are color-coded so it's easy to tell who did what. The edits can be accepted, rejected, or further modified with…

I liked what https://draftin.com did around version control.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#356

Post by porker »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #175
Ralith wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I use LaTeX and it gives me the results I want and I don't find myself spending inordinate amounts of time tweaking things, does that make me an intermediate user? I guess I had better stop learning.

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…

Has no one here tried Lyx? http://www.lyx.org/

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#357

Post by lttlrck »

DennisP wrote: post #342
raverbashing wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem there is having 15 co-authors. Really And if some of them can't use it, teach them. And revert to the previously non-fucked up version (it's on someone's email by the name of Article_1_fixed_2_corrections_10_10.docx)

If our collaboration tools can't handle a mere 15 collaborators, we need better tools.

Can 15 people sitting in the same room with a single editor effectively collaborate on a single document?

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#358

Post by stcredzero »

pjmlp wrote: post #323
stcredzero wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 PAR…

> 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. Actually, they are a consequence how easy Java allows to write such type of code and how enterprise architects design software. I have seen En…

Whichever the case, the gp poster still pulled the alleged causation out of his/her butt for no other justification than that it feels "truthy."

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#360

Post by iSnow »

phaer wrote: post #333
iSnow wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can not think of any scenario where svn would be preferable over a distributed vcs such as git or mercurial. After forgetting to push after commit and then dropping your laptop, you'll know.

What? The result would be exactly the same, right? You don't have your unpushed commit if your laptop is broken, neither with svn nor with git. The only difference is that you still can use your local git repository if your server burns down, but you can't do that with svn.

>The result would be exactly the same, right?

Nope, like regularfry rightly pointed out.

>The only difference is that you still can use your local git repository if your server burns down, but you can't do that with svn. Even then I can `svn relocate`.

Look, I am not defending SVN for software development, I am a happy git camper. But git for technical writing is simply the wrong tool for the wrong job.

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