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There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for. If your corporate application doesn't run with a useful web interface, you probably have other iss

There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for. If your corporate application doesn't run with a useful web interface, you probably have other issues too. Word is an application that puts looks, thousands of mostly useless features and pixel-pushing up front. Excel at least really enables normal people to do some advanced calculations on data but the former still applies. Both are very complex tools mostly hindering any kind of value-added thinking and creativity but give you enough foot-guns and are really "fun" to support if you count Outlook in as well. I mean, how do you program an application that regularly crashes and corrupts the email database? LibreOffice is the same kind of thinking, because it mostly is a copy of the ideas in Word, Excel etc. Actually, when we are at it, Google Docs is more or less as problematic as the other tools. Actually, just opening any of these applications seems a bit overwhelming. Why should you care that the readable font is 11 or 12 px big (it actually isn't that comfortable to read, but ok)? Why should you care that the default font is called Calibri or whatever? This is information and complexity that is shown by default that usually adds exactly nothing to your business. The same is with colours. Why should you want to have the option to select custom colours with two clicks or so when most people choose colours badly? The default colours offered are really not that great either.

macintux 6y ago
You’re arguing against decades of experience to the contrary. I certainly would prefer plain text for most content a business generates, but the market has overwhelmingly voted in the other direction. I believe for some interactions with the U.S. government Word is even mandatory. And it’s effectively mandatory for collaboration with everyone else.
- futuretaint 6y ago
  many industries are dependant on Excel also. entire industries. Accounting, finance etc...
  - kaliszad 6y ago
    You mean the industries, that are liable for most of the initial suffering during the 1930s, 2000s and so on? A case could be made that some of it lead more or less directly to wars. Accounting and finance should know much, much better to use something actually auditable. Pretty much all software in any way associated with those industries that I have seen is at best average by enterprise software quality standards but most is barely useable. In that sense, Excel is probably the better choice. :-)
    - arcturus17 6y ago
      Spreadsheets are insanely versatile and useful. I think if you were to redesign a lot of the things they do as custom apps, you’d end up with poorer version of a spreadsheet, like you’re saying. I’ve experienced this first-hand when building custom business apps. You’re building your UI in React or whatever only to conclude: “Fuck, this is a spreadsheet.”
      - kaliszad 6y ago
        Actually, at OrgPad.com my colleague Pavel (~Paul) is writing a collaborative editor in ClojureScript + re-frame/ Reagent/ React. There is even a very rough video about it (in Czech though) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFJ1zcRjQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFJ1zcRjQY where you can see the current state of work, including the debugger Pavel has written. We will have some basic tables/ spreadsheets in the final version and we plan on having some very cool table calculation abilities later. ;-) So yeah, we thought about it.
        kaliszad 6y ago
        Here is a more technical video in English that was just uploaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVcNmNFzmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVcNmNFzmc
- kaliszad 6y ago
  That people use something and maybe even extract some business value from doing so doesn't necessarily mean the product or the ideas around it are great and cannot be improved upon in various substantial ways. People used to ride horses and cows, people used slaves for manual work instead of inventing and using the steam engine at scale much earlier e.g. in ancient Greece or Rome. I don't mind rich text and I know a bit of typography to avoid some common mistakes but I don't think most users really appreciate a full scale of sizes in pixels for a font or other information not relevant to the content they are producing. Most would be much better of using normal, small, large, very large for presentation or posters or something like that. The absolute values could be set in settings or overwritten somewhere maybe but Word isn't actually meant for designing websites or posters. It does all of those things to some degree but it very much isn't the right tool for the job in those areas and shouldn't be treated like one. Btw. nobody can tell, if the businesses wouldn't be better of using something more robust than Excel even when that would mean actually training people to use a different tool. Most companies probably never train Excel, so even using that is very certainly inefficient. You know, there isn't much business value in Excel macros with viruses in them or macros nobody understands - so maybe what they calculate isn't even correct in some or all cases. Excel is great for some things, but for many things it is used in practise it is actually quite bad. E.g. some people write working hours in Excel. There are much better apps just for that. You could have Google or Microsoft Forms, that are much easier and more robust. The data can then be used as well in a spreadsheet or imported into a DB. Unfortunately, Word and Excel (and Outlook) have developed their own gravity field in many industries and so the (very low) local maxima cannot be escaped (somewhat easily). Having a government use anything as a stamp of approval does it a bit of disservice. If we would rely on current governments for innovation, we could just as well return to the caves directly. More seriously, if by collaboration you mean sending people word documents by email named final-assessment-v2-final.doc (because docx hasn't really arrived in many places and people suck at useable version control) then I am with you. Everyone else (including you probably) just writes the text into the email directly or uses something actually collaborative (for example Google Docs). The real final version is produced, after a consensus has been reached using more efficient communication channels. The state of affairs is the market for pretty much everything currently is in a bubble. The US governments debt is more than twice the total amount of gold mined during the whole of human history (https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-much-gold https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...) if a tonne of gold is roughly worth 60 Mio. USD. We haven't improved the working efficiency since the end of 90s much if you are frank. I wouldn't be so sure the market is a good measure of a products absolute quality actually.
breakfastduck 6y ago
> There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for. You can't be serious. There's not much businesses need excel for?
- kaliszad 6y ago
  Do they need table calculation or do they need Excel specifically? I am not saying, Excel isn't useful in any case. I am saying, it is very far from a good solution in many, many cases and state concrete examples.
  - matwood 6y ago
    Everyone only uses 10 features from Excel, the problem is that those 10 features are different for every user. Anytime someone says users don't need Excel or it can be easily replicated by some other tool, they likely haven't spent much time with Excel or users.
    - kaliszad 6y ago
      Well, I have used Excel extensively so I know its warts very well. You can use Excel right but in my experience anytime I have seen even quite capable people working with Excel, nobody in that work setting would exactly describe it as fun. I know at least one person, who really uses Excel very proficiently and maybe even have something approaching fun while doing it. But he is literally teaching Excel to other people. I have done 30 hours in his course and learned quite a bit.
      - breakfastduck 6y ago
        Being unfun to use != being useless to the business
ericd 6y ago
As far as I can tell, the legal world still runs completely on Word redlining/track changes. Also, Excel almost literally runs many businesses. As long as those are true, I'm not sure you can say "there just isn't much you really need eg. Word for", unless you're never on the business side. If you deal with the people who use them, you probably also want to use them to avoid headaches. Network effects are a bitch. If you're only ever slinging code, sure, congrats, you may never need to use either. Note, I'm not arguing that either is good.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
You'd be shocked how dependent office staff can be on obscure MS Office features that I, a systems engineer, has literally never heard of and couldn't imagine someone needed. Heck, this year I watched someone struggle to find and license a third party add-on just to do a mail merge on Google Workspace.
- kaliszad 6y ago
  I know, I have seen it first hand. It was lots of wasted time for very little value pretty much every time I have seen it. I hope you have a better experience. Most of the time, actually stepping back a bit and thinking about the problem at hand for a minute can save many hours of tedious work. E.g. keeping track of hours worked - probably just use Toggl and export a CSV at the end of a month or something - much better UX overall than a form in Excel that you have to print out. Doing project planing in anything from Excel, over SharePoint, OneNote, Outlook Calendar etc. was always extra hassle in my experience. Everything kind of works but not really, you avoid doing changes, because it is very tedious. I have seen all the enterprise "Export to Excel" web interfaces that are usually so bad, you cannot get anything done without the Export/ Import feature. I mean, Export/ Import is great but maybe you should just have na API and/or a useable web interface. There of course, Excel/ Spreadsheet is a temporary saviour but you should think about why do you have to use such a bad software system at all!

macintux 6y ago

You’re arguing against decades of experience to the contrary. I certainly would prefer plain text for most content a business generates, but the market has overwhelmingly voted in the other direction. I believe for some interactions with the U.S. government Word is even mandatory. And it’s effectively mandatory for collaboration with everyone else.

futuretaint 6y ago
many industries are dependant on Excel also. entire industries. Accounting, finance etc...
- kaliszad 6y ago
  You mean the industries, that are liable for most of the initial suffering during the 1930s, 2000s and so on? A case could be made that some of it lead more or less directly to wars. Accounting and finance should know much, much better to use something actually auditable. Pretty much all software in any way associated with those industries that I have seen is at best average by enterprise software quality standards but most is barely useable. In that sense, Excel is probably the better choice. :-)
  - arcturus17 6y ago
    Spreadsheets are insanely versatile and useful. I think if you were to redesign a lot of the things they do as custom apps, you’d end up with poorer version of a spreadsheet, like you’re saying. I’ve experienced this first-hand when building custom business apps. You’re building your UI in React or whatever only to conclude: “Fuck, this is a spreadsheet.”
    - kaliszad 6y ago
      Actually, at OrgPad.com my colleague Pavel (~Paul) is writing a collaborative editor in ClojureScript + re-frame/ Reagent/ React. There is even a very rough video about it (in Czech though) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFJ1zcRjQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFJ1zcRjQY where you can see the current state of work, including the debugger Pavel has written. We will have some basic tables/ spreadsheets in the final version and we plan on having some very cool table calculation abilities later. ;-) So yeah, we thought about it.
      - kaliszad 6y ago
        Here is a more technical video in English that was just uploaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVcNmNFzmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVcNmNFzmc
kaliszad 6y ago
That people use something and maybe even extract some business value from doing so doesn't necessarily mean the product or the ideas around it are great and cannot be improved upon in various substantial ways. People used to ride horses and cows, people used slaves for manual work instead of inventing and using the steam engine at scale much earlier e.g. in ancient Greece or Rome. I don't mind rich text and I know a bit of typography to avoid some common mistakes but I don't think most users really appreciate a full scale of sizes in pixels for a font or other information not relevant to the content they are producing. Most would be much better of using normal, small, large, very large for presentation or posters or something like that. The absolute values could be set in settings or overwritten somewhere maybe but Word isn't actually meant for designing websites or posters. It does all of those things to some degree but it very much isn't the right tool for the job in those areas and shouldn't be treated like one. Btw. nobody can tell, if the businesses wouldn't be better of using something more robust than Excel even when that would mean actually training people to use a different tool. Most companies probably never train Excel, so even using that is very certainly inefficient. You know, there isn't much business value in Excel macros with viruses in them or macros nobody understands - so maybe what they calculate isn't even correct in some or all cases. Excel is great for some things, but for many things it is used in practise it is actually quite bad. E.g. some people write working hours in Excel. There are much better apps just for that. You could have Google or Microsoft Forms, that are much easier and more robust. The data can then be used as well in a spreadsheet or imported into a DB. Unfortunately, Word and Excel (and Outlook) have developed their own gravity field in many industries and so the (very low) local maxima cannot be escaped (somewhat easily). Having a government use anything as a stamp of approval does it a bit of disservice. If we would rely on current governments for innovation, we could just as well return to the caves directly. More seriously, if by collaboration you mean sending people word documents by email named final-assessment-v2-final.doc (because docx hasn't really arrived in many places and people suck at useable version control) then I am with you. Everyone else (including you probably) just writes the text into the email directly or uses something actually collaborative (for example Google Docs). The real final version is produced, after a consensus has been reached using more efficient communication channels. The state of affairs is the market for pretty much everything currently is in a bubble. The US governments debt is more than twice the total amount of gold mined during the whole of human history (https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-much-gold https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...) if a tonne of gold is roughly worth 60 Mio. USD. We haven't improved the working efficiency since the end of 90s much if you are frank. I wouldn't be so sure the market is a good measure of a products absolute quality actually.

breakfastduck 6y ago

> There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for. You can't be serious. There's not much businesses need excel for?

kaliszad 6y ago
Do they need table calculation or do they need Excel specifically? I am not saying, Excel isn't useful in any case. I am saying, it is very far from a good solution in many, many cases and state concrete examples.
- matwood 6y ago
  Everyone only uses 10 features from Excel, the problem is that those 10 features are different for every user. Anytime someone says users don't need Excel or it can be easily replicated by some other tool, they likely haven't spent much time with Excel or users.
  - kaliszad 6y ago
    Well, I have used Excel extensively so I know its warts very well. You can use Excel right but in my experience anytime I have seen even quite capable people working with Excel, nobody in that work setting would exactly describe it as fun. I know at least one person, who really uses Excel very proficiently and maybe even have something approaching fun while doing it. But he is literally teaching Excel to other people. I have done 30 hours in his course and learned quite a bit.
    - breakfastduck 6y ago
      Being unfun to use != being useless to the business

ericd 6y ago

As far as I can tell, the legal world still runs completely on Word redlining/track changes. Also, Excel almost literally runs many businesses. As long as those are true, I'm not sure you can say "there just isn't much you really need eg. Word for", unless you're never on the business side. If you deal with the people who use them, you probably also want to use them to avoid headaches. Network effects are a bitch. If you're only ever slinging code, sure, congrats, you may never need to use either. Note, I'm not arguing that either is good.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

You'd be shocked how dependent office staff can be on obscure MS Office features that I, a systems engineer, has literally never heard of and couldn't imagine someone needed. Heck, this year I watched someone struggle to find and license a third party add-on just to do a mail merge on Google Workspace.

kaliszad 6y ago
I know, I have seen it first hand. It was lots of wasted time for very little value pretty much every time I have seen it. I hope you have a better experience. Most of the time, actually stepping back a bit and thinking about the problem at hand for a minute can save many hours of tedious work. E.g. keeping track of hours worked - probably just use Toggl and export a CSV at the end of a month or something - much better UX overall than a form in Excel that you have to print out. Doing project planing in anything from Excel, over SharePoint, OneNote, Outlook Calendar etc. was always extra hassle in my experience. Everything kind of works but not really, you avoid doing changes, because it is very tedious. I have seen all the enterprise "Export to Excel" web interfaces that are usually so bad, you cannot get anything done without the Export/ Import feature. I mean, Export/ Import is great but maybe you should just have na API and/or a useable web interface. There of course, Excel/ Spreadsheet is a temporary saviour but you should think about why do you have to use such a bad software system at all!