4 ms·
What is "better" about MS word than google docs? The only reason I see to use word is if you're using files from 1999 that don't work anywhere else. Google doc
by zxcvcxz 11y ago
What is "better" about MS word than google docs? The only reason I see to use word is if you're using files from 1999 that don't work anywhere else.
Google docs is a much simpler system, especially for places like schools because of the "cloud" nature of it. Google docs has all the features the average person needs.
MSWord is for specialty cases, google docs and the open alternatives are for everyone else.
I'm about to earn a masters degree and I've never needed to use MS word. Double spacing, page numbers, and aligning text work in just about every processor. I've rarely received a word document from a professor that used advanced features of word, they're always poorly formatted.
- sp332 11y agoI think you missed the word "online". https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx
- icebraining 11y agoIn my experience, Docs can't even reliably align the cursor with the position between characters (problem described here[1], except my zoom is at 100% already). Thankfully all my documents have very light formatting, so I can just write in Vim and then upload them. [1] http://www.podiohelp.com/google-docs-cursor-misaligned/ http://www.podiohelp.com/google-docs-cursor-misaligned/
- nightpool 11y agoI've seen this happen before, but only very rarely and refreshing would always fix it. Does refreshing not work for you?
- icebraining 11y agoUnfortunately not.
- scholia 11y agoI get this as well, and I have another problem. I usually work in Word but one company wants things in Google Docs. OK, I create the document in Word in Times Roman and paste it into Google Docs.... which converts it into Arial. If I copy something else from the same Word document into the same Google Doc, then Google keeps it in Times. How does that work? Is there a "smart paste" feature I've missed?
- ryanlol 11y agohttps://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms649013(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...
- scholia 11y agoSorry if I'm being thick, but I'm using the same clipboard to paste between the same two documents, so I still don't see why GDocs should interpret them differently.... I can try clearing the clipboard between pastes: would that make a difference?
- MatmaRex 11y agoIt's true that the average user uses maybe 20% of Word's features, and Google Docs have 50% of them. The problem is that each person uses a different 20%. One feature I personally needed and missed was to generate a table of contents with page numbers for each heading. I ended up exporting the doc to Word to do it, and in the process discovered that the exported document had a messed up layout in a few places.
- nightpool 11y agoYeah this is a super common experience among people I talk to. For me, it was not wanting any headers or page numbers on my title page. (I ended up making two separate documents to get around it)
- nightpool 11y agowould like to report that I just used google docs the other day for something where I also needed a title page, and that google now supports this
- LoSboccacc 11y agoTables and images positioning to begin with. Text flow around objects as well. Oh and typography.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoGoogle Docs isn't even in the same league as MS Office. GDocs is basically slow, web-running (I mean that as an insult), glorified Markdown editor that saves your data in an unknown format somewhere you can't access directly. About the "features average person needs" remember that users adapt their workflows to the featuers you give them and make do, not the other way around. Give them more, they'll use more.
- scholia 11y agoIf somebody out there has a reliable way to measure resource consumption in Windows (Mark Russinovich?), I'd be interested in a comparison between (say) a thousand word document in Word and the same document in Google Docs in Chrome. I think you could probably add "resource hungry" to your description of GDocs....
- ryanlol 11y agoThat's probably the case, but does it matter?
- deathanatos 11y agoAny sort of styling control: if there's a particular style I want applied to certain portions, I have to recreate it at each use. God help me if I decide to change it halfway through the document. Orphaning of content: GDocs will very happily strand a section header at the bottom of a page, dropping a page break right between the header and the content. The cursor will occasionally just go where it pleases. Revision history (compared to diffing git commits) is incredibly frustrating. Click on a revision, read the whole doc, repeat… As a sibling says, > Oh and typography.