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The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

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Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#91

Post by rusk »

xte wrote: post #90
rusk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try to look for some Emacs demos on YT&c, perhaps you'll discover a different world :-) Ouch. I'm already a fairly proficient Emacs user. I also use vi. I find this kind of zealotry tiresome.

Mh, so you find more comfortable work in a spreadsheet than an org-mode files with tables and optional org-babel block in your preferred language to manipulate data as native data structure if org table formulas are not enough nor comfortable? Personally I think there is no comparison, spreadsheets are normally uncomfortable UI to work with datas that even miller+bc&pipes is far superior... Org bring computation to a…

> you find more comfortable work in a spreadsheet

yes

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#92

Post by matthewmcg »

piker wrote: post #65
jen729w wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to…

> Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. It's not clear you'd find a lot of lawyers (i.e., a class of power small-document-scale Word users) that would agree with this sentiment.

I am an attorney and I use Word exclusively and intensively. And I hate it. All of my colleagues hate it too.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#93

Post by wglb »

matthewmcg wrote: post #92
piker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. It's not clear you'd find a lot of lawyers (i.e., a class of power small-document-scale Word users) that would agree with this sentiment.

I am an attorney and I use Word exclusively and intensively. And I hate it. All of my colleagues hate it too.

What would your preference be?

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#94

Post by Mikeb85 »

ci5er wrote: post #52
Mikeb85 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. All of what I'd ever want to do to a spreadsheet Google Sheets can do, and whatever the 'power' Excel user thinks is a good idea to use Excel for I can do far more easily in R.

You can. G'donya. If you print a report on the result - you're done. Bottoms up, mate. If you are collaborating - the issue isn't tools that you and I might know that may or may not be better than Excel (like R), it's that we've got to share our work with people who may or may not know those tools. I believe (personally) that Excel almost singularly is a tool that both the adept and novice can use together. And, you…

Except times are changing, and maybe we won't see it until baby boomers are all retired, but a lot of younger people are far more adept at using technology and coding is becoming far more popular. In university, we had to learn Python and SQL in a CS for Business introduction course, R for stats, and while we did learn some Excel, for anything related to stats, econ or even finance we used other tools primarily. Just like MS woke up one day to the fact it no longer has a strangle hold on computing, the same will happen to Excel, but maybe in 10 years. There are better tools and the people who cling to Excel are on the way out.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#95

Post by com2kid »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #51
amphibian87 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you like Word? I think it's still going to be the best for a while, if not only because it's massive. My CS professor says it's the biggest program ever written. It can so so much, like check for passive voice and more subtle grammar things. At the end of the day, the subscription model is off-putting, but "needs to die?" why?

> Why don't you like Word? Here are my main reasons: - It does not allow me to make selections where I point my mouse cursor. - It breaks between versions of itself and intentionally breaks interoperability with nearly all third party software, especially when tables and formulas are involved. - Formula and math editing and typesetting is abysmal. - The quality of typesetting is abysmal. I know because I once had to…

> Formula and math editing

Word supports LaTeX for formulas now!

That aside, Word's formula editor is really powerful but it does have a learning curve. I'd say that once learned it is rather nice though.

FWIW Unicode Math, Word's format for doing math input, is a published spec.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#96

Post by com2kid »

Djvacto wrote: post #74

I'd love to have one notebook-type app that works between all my devices, or some combination that lets me have the same or similar content. I loved OneNote back in Uni, though I reached a point where I stopped taking notes (through the fault of the powerpoint teaching method, and my own laziness), and OneNote does seem to be a bit bloat-y when it comes to sync. Stuff like EMACS org-mode (or, preferrably, some kind o…

OneNote's sync has been completely rewritten, if you haven't tried it out in awhile, give it a go. It is much faster now, literal orders of magnitude.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#97

Post by jen729w »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #94
ci5er wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can. G'donya. If you print a report on the result - you're done. Bottoms up, mate. If you are collaborating - the issue isn't tools that you and I might know that may or may not be better than Excel (like R), it's that we've got to share our work with people who may or may not know those tools. I believe (personally) that Excel almost singularly is a tool that both the adept and novice can use together. And, you…

Except times are changing, and maybe we won't see it until baby boomers are all retired, but a lot of younger people are far more adept at using technology and coding is becoming far more popular. In university, we had to learn Python and SQL in a CS for Business introduction course, R for stats, and while we did learn some Excel, for anything related to stats, econ or even finance we used other tools primarily. Just…

I said the same to myself as I looked over my shoulder at the millennials in ~2000. I was sure that the couple of glorious working years I’d had so far – glorious because of the rate I was getting compared to the work I had to do – would soon be over.

It never happened. The millennials, as a whole, don’t sit in front of Python any more than my generation do (I’m 42). And if anything, the number that do is getting lower. At least I had a ZX Spectrum 48+ to hack around with when I was a kid. I had to code to load a game, even if it was just `10 LOAD`! Kids now just hit a button on their iPad.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#98

Post by gnicholas »

gnicholas wrote: post #37
npunt wrote: post #12

Just a quibble but I see this a lot - if you're talking about strategy it's "bottom-up", not "bottoms-up". A bottom-up strategy is something like marketing your tool to users who then bring it into their company for wider adoption. A bottoms-up strategy is drinking until the problem goes away.

I have the same feeling about this, and I've noticed that folks from the UK are more likely to use "bottoms-up" to mean both. I rarely hear it from US-born speakers. Has anyone else noticed this pattern?

Surprised to get downvoted for asking a question to see if others have found the same thing. I'm not passing judgment — I have a background in linguistics and see grammar/usage as descriptive, not prescriptive. I just wondered if usage was different in the UK. Sorry if this was misconstrued as passing judgment, or something else that apparently warrants downvotes.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#99

Post by jen729w »

xte wrote: post #73
glaberficken wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really a solid argument? Haven't you also seen numerous "disasters made" with other platforms / tools / programming languages "including in important institutional and scientific ones"? (no snark intended)

Well, yes but far less... I see Ariane 5 disaster due to an overflow error, but never seen the International monetary found that publish a false study due to an excel calculus bug nor scientific studies with false result due to excel bugs... Spreadsheets IME are environment that really help human error and disguise them well enough... About solidity I can't answer having not enough data, I can only say that I still h…

The IMF error was a problem with the way that the humans had weighted their numbers in Excel. It was a human error. Excel was the tool they used, but it was not the cause of the error.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#100

Post by xte »

jen729w wrote: post #99
xte wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes but far less... I see Ariane 5 disaster due to an overflow error, but never seen the International monetary found that publish a false study due to an excel calculus bug nor scientific studies with false result due to excel bugs... Spreadsheets IME are environment that really help human error and disguise them well enough... About solidity I can't answer having not enough data, I can only say that I still h…

The IMF error was a problem with the way that the humans had weighted their numbers in Excel. It was a human error. Excel was the tool they used, but it was not the cause of the error.

Yes, but it's UI, not as "excel" but as "spreadsheet" certainly help a lot... Try to "debug" a not so small spreadsheet vs a script+tabular data and compare the chances of get erroneous results that does not appear immediately as errors...
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