5 ms·
I'm a fan of MS Word, I really am. These days though, I find that, as an amateur writer, I prefer simpler tools - markdown or google docs. I think this is a slo
by latch 16y ago
I'm a fan of MS Word, I really am. These days though, I find that, as an amateur writer, I prefer simpler tools - markdown or google docs. I think this is a slow trend they are (or should be) worried about.
For home users, gmail thoroughly beats Outlook.
Excel is a different beast. I don't have much experience with it, but I've seen it used widely at various places of work (medical and financial). I'd say Excel is now their strongest product when it comes to maintaining a stranglehold.
When you consider the price, advances in google docs, gmail and and OpenOffice, I'm not sure Office is really a good value for most folk. They think they need it - that's a dangerous position to be in - selling a product because people think they need it, rather than actually needing it.
- veb 16y agoAgreed. In my opinion, Word is the best app ever to come from Microsoft.
- CountSessine 16y agoReally? What do you like about it? Maybe I'm just prejudiced against WYSIWYG word processors in general, but I've always considered Word a bit of a usability and productivity disaster. What am I missing using LaTeX or Framemaker? Now Excel, on the other hand - the world would just stop working without Excel.
- ZoFreX 16y agoI can't think of a better WYSIWYG editor than Word, and the world obviously needs one, not everyone is going to tackle the learning curve on LaTeX or Framemaker. I'm ok at LaTeX, but I'll use Word for a short job. LaTeX is hard and will trip me up, Word is hard to manage large documents in, so for small pieces of work, Word, for large, LaTeX. And yes, my world would definitely not work without Excel.
- JulianMorrison 16y agoHave you tried LyX? http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/
- foljs 16y ago"""What am I missing using LaTeX""" Non fiddling access to hundreds of Open Type fonts and UTF-8? Trivial visual layout changes of almost every aspect of the text instead of having to write then in a layout language? Integrated spell/grammar checking as you go, word count et al? Non in Word per se, but BETTER algorithms for typesetting in WYSIWYG (unknown to many, InDesign and Quark have progressed A LOT over TeX's algorithms). Interoperability for the basic edited document format (not through pdf, ps, html exports) with 99% percent of the world (excluding some parts of Academia that prefer LaTeX)?
- CountSessine 16y agoSorry - I didn't mean to be too controversial with my post. It's just that I've found that based on the way I think, Word is a big productivity sink for me. I have a harder time concentrating on the business of writing when I'm staring at richly laid-out text and paragraphs. For me at least, I've always found that I can write faster and with fewer mental blocks when writing plain old text in a text editor. I found that in my own experience, it was liberating just focussing on the content of what I was writing, knowing that the whole business of presentation was something that came later. Non fiddling access to hundreds of Open Type fonts and UTF-8? Xetex + \usepackage{fontspec} No fiddling required! Trivial visual layout changes of almost every aspect of the text instead of having to write then in a layout language? Isn't this sort of the problem with WYSIWYG in general, though? That's actually one of the things that I think is cool about Framemaker - it's roughly WYSIWYG, but you can get a bird's-eye view of styles and layout. Being able to accidentally futz up the margins on the third paragraph on the 209th page of a 401 page article and not know it without meticulously re-inspecting the document before it goes to press doesn't seem like a feature to me. Has Word tackled that yet? Can Word give me a nice, hierarchical view of all the paragraph and character styles and margin settings that have been applied to my article? This isn't rhetoric either - I'm genuinely curious. If you tell me that Word has been able to do this since I've last used it, my opinion of Word will be much improved. If you tell me that Word has always been able to do this, I'll feel pretty silly. Integrated spell/grammar checking as you go, word count et al? My text editor does that for me, and I'm not distracted by presentation issues while I type my document. Non in Word per se, but BETTER algorithms for typesetting in WYSIWYG (unknown to many, InDesign and Quark have progressed A LOT over TeX's algorithms). How so? Text flow around images is an issue in TeX - have Quark or InDesign really improved much otherwise? Interoperability for the basic edited document format (not through pdf, ps, html exports) with 99% percent of the world (excluding some parts of Academia that prefer LaTeX)? I think this and ease of use are really Word's big edge over anything else.
- yardie 16y agoI disagree, Excel is the best app ever to come out of Microsoft! :-) I've done entire engineering courses (200 and 300-level) with nothing but Excel. And there are certainly more powerful applications to do maths in but once you get past the simple interface it real is quite powerful.
- jf 16y agoAgreed. A few years back I looked at several other spreadsheet programs and wasn't able to find one that even approached Excel.
- forgotAgain 16y agoAgreed, Excel is an amazing app. It's also Microsoft's strongest hold on businesses. I doubt there is more than a couple percent of businesses that don't depend on Excel in some fashion for their accounting. Every company I've been in has Excel spreadsheets for things like budgets and expense tracking. They were all written long ago and no one is really quite sure how they work.