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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 ove

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.

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.