4 ms·
Every program in the Microsoft Office suite.
by jtdev 6y ago
Every program in the Microsoft Office suite.
- pm3003 6y agoEven OneNote? Outlook/Exchange?
- yread 6y agoCompared to what?
- secfirstmd 6y agoExactly. I'd love something that works better but gave up on Libre/Open officer after sending people's dozens of docs that opened looking a complete mess.
- mr_overalls 6y agoExactly. I love the spirit and motivation behind Office Libre, but Excel and Word just _work_ for most basic tasks and an amazing number of corner cases. Open-source products just don't even come close. The only tools people don't complain about are the ones that no one uses.
- zentiggr 6y agoAt least Libre Writer has sane ways to anchor a picture to a paragraph / section / page. I've lost my 100 hours trying to get Word to consistently place images in technical docs, only to wind up fighting some of the most unpredictable placement calculations I've ever encountered. I want to punch my screen right now just thinking about it.
- benhurmarcel 6y agoI just gave up years ago and put all pictures inline.
- copperx 6y agoThe sad thing is that LaTeX can be quite temperamental with image placement too.
- folbec 6y agoI think one of the big problem of Word is that it is routinely used for things it was not designed for and which are still out of Microsoft target. It's a tool for not too long technical documents, for secretarial work, for basic marketing text, for quick an dirty but decently presented invoices, for writing a resume. It has never been meant for writing novels, for page setting, for writing hundreds of pages of technical documentation, and yet... it is used for that. Everyday. Simply because it's available everywhere.
- copperx 6y agoBut mainly because there are no viable alternatives that are available in multiple platforms, cost less or the same than Word, and do things significantly better. InDesign is infinitely better for typesetting, but you're the learning curve to get something presentable is higher than LaTeX, because you have to know design, and more expensive than Word. LyX is the only tool that comes close to replacing Word. It's free, significantly better typesetting, easy to use, and available in most platforms.
- jtdev 6y agoNot using them. Its amazing what you can accomplish with a plain text editor and your brain. Ever seen a presentation that didn’t rely on PowerPoint? It’s such a refreshing thing to witness. How many Excel “applications” have you used that actually worked as intended consistently and weren’t just a giant time suck that would be better spent building a simple form over data app? Ask yourself this: When was the last time you truly needed MS Office to produce something of value? Not imaginary enterprise “I look busy so I must be getting things done” value... but true value.
- yread 6y agoTell me how you format your PhD thesis in a plain text editor without wasting countless hours on LaTEX? Sure, designers create beautiful presentations outside PowerPoint, but I can grab master slides, plomp down the stuff that I wrote in a plain text file and bam - presentation ready in 10 minutes. Excel - I'm a programmer but even I use Excel for quick data tasks - cleanup, remove duplicates, create histogram and summary, build a pipeline for data where I see intermediate values for every step for every data point. I might be an exception but I sometimes even copy data from an SQL client to Excel to drill into it. Or Access? Entire departments of non-technical people are running on this stuff. If Office didn't provide anything of value nobody would use it.
- jtdev 6y agoPerceived value isn't the same as actual value, especially in the enterprise and academia.
- yellowapple 6y ago> Tell me how you format your PhD thesis in a plain text editor without wasting countless hours on LaTEX? I've never written a thesis (at all, let alone for a PhD), but my impression from people who have is that the academic institution typically already has a LaTeX .sty or template or whatever, so literally all you're doing is writing content (and the minimal amount of markup necessary for document structure). That said, I can see how this might quickly go sideways as soon as you start using TikZ, or if you do indeed have to create your own style (though in the latter case the defaults seem reasonable, and indeed seem common if the numerous academic papers I've read over the years are any indication). I've written my fair share of technical documentation with LaTeX and it can definitely be a rabbit hole, albeit usually a self-inflicted one. And that's definitely true about Excel and Access. Virtually every company has at least one Excel spreadsheet or Access database that's effectively mission-critical, lol.
- PascLeRasc 6y agoGoogle Sheets and Apple Pages/Keynote, for me. They work so much better. I don't have any facts or list of features to back this up, they are just less stressful to use and don't bother me about licenses or corrupt files.