4 ms·

Is there a real difference between the classic MS office applications, though? You can do spreadsheets in Word and Outlook, have styled text in your Excel docum

by krono 6y ago

Is there a real difference between the classic MS office applications, though? You can do spreadsheets in Word and Outlook, have styled text in your Excel document, add animations to your titles in Word, etc. At this point they can just as wel get rid of the different GUIs facade and instead implement some contextual interaction model (and hopefully they'll include an API so we can generate these documents programatically and don't have to deal with this nth clippy generation :) )

icapybara 6y ago
Might not be from MS, but automating MS Office document generation is a solved problem: https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://www.python-excel.org/ https://www.python-excel.org/ https://python-pptx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://python-pptx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- krono 6y ago
  Yeah this is awesome community work, and I'm honestly thankful for MS having left these works alone. An official solution would be nice though. These open source projects are popular enough to warrant one I'd say!
Closi 6y ago
> Is there a real difference between the classic MS office applications, though? Yes, there absolutely is. You can create a document with styled text in Excel instead of Word, just as you can edit a photo in Paint instead of Photoshop. You can do it, but the two tools have dramatically different capabilities. It's important to think about developing for use-cases otherwise we will end up with overly complex software that aims to be all-things to all-people.
- krono 6y ago
  > overly complex software that aims to be all-things to all-people This is exactly what I believe the current state of the MS Office applications to be. The interface and/or implementation isn't always ideal for the purpose you would generally use a specific app for, but the functionality is there. > dramatically different capabilities Embedding a fully functional Excel spreadsheet is only a few clicks through the ribbon and some frustration away in Outlook, Word, and even PowerPoint.
  - Closi 6y ago
    > Embedding a fully functional Excel spreadsheet is only a few clicks through the ribbon and some frustration away in Outlook, Word, and even PowerPoint. This is effectively opening a reduced version of excel in a very limited way, primarily for embedding one document in another and allowing limited editing. You don’t get the full functionality of the other application. I can see why I would want to change the axis on a graph even after I have pasted it into my email, but why would I want one app to be both my spreadsheet and my email inbox? Are you a user of office suite? I spend about 70% of my work life between excel, PowerPoint and Word and have never once wanted them to be one app, but quite often have wanted better integration.
    - andylynch 5y ago
      Perversely you /can/ use simple formulas (sum,average, etc) natively in Word tables. Thankfully I’ve never come across a document where someone was mad enough to do anything much with it.
andylynch 5y ago
This is what exactly what COM and OLE give you.

by krono 6y ago

icapybara 6y ago

Might not be from MS, but automating MS Office document generation is a solved problem: https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://www.python-excel.org/ https://www.python-excel.org/ https://python-pptx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://python-pptx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

krono 6y ago
Yeah this is awesome community work, and I'm honestly thankful for MS having left these works alone. An official solution would be nice though. These open source projects are popular enough to warrant one I'd say!

Closi 6y ago

> Is there a real difference between the classic MS office applications, though? Yes, there absolutely is. You can create a document with styled text in Excel instead of Word, just as you can edit a photo in Paint instead of Photoshop. You can do it, but the two tools have dramatically different capabilities. It's important to think about developing for use-cases otherwise we will end up with overly complex software that aims to be all-things to all-people.

krono 6y ago
> overly complex software that aims to be all-things to all-people This is exactly what I believe the current state of the MS Office applications to be. The interface and/or implementation isn't always ideal for the purpose you would generally use a specific app for, but the functionality is there. > dramatically different capabilities Embedding a fully functional Excel spreadsheet is only a few clicks through the ribbon and some frustration away in Outlook, Word, and even PowerPoint.
- Closi 6y ago
  > Embedding a fully functional Excel spreadsheet is only a few clicks through the ribbon and some frustration away in Outlook, Word, and even PowerPoint. This is effectively opening a reduced version of excel in a very limited way, primarily for embedding one document in another and allowing limited editing. You don’t get the full functionality of the other application. I can see why I would want to change the axis on a graph even after I have pasted it into my email, but why would I want one app to be both my spreadsheet and my email inbox? Are you a user of office suite? I spend about 70% of my work life between excel, PowerPoint and Word and have never once wanted them to be one app, but quite often have wanted better integration.
  - andylynch 5y ago
    Perversely you /can/ use simple formulas (sum,average, etc) natively in Word tables. Thankfully I’ve never come across a document where someone was mad enough to do anything much with it.

andylynch 5y ago

This is what exactly what COM and OLE give you.