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I know this is in a different league..but I wrote Foundations of Programming in Word, and then The Little MongoDB Book in Markdown + Textile (in Textmate). Writ
by latch 15y ago
I know this is in a different league..but I wrote Foundations of Programming in Word, and then The Little MongoDB Book in Markdown + Textile (in Textmate). Writing in Markdown was a much more liberating experience as it was much quicker and let me focus more on the content rather than the document.
I've always really liked Word, it's a great product, but for 99% of people it just does way too much and is thus way too expensive. Office is worse...gmail is better than outlook, anything is better than powerpoint or access.
My last two jobs have shown me that Excel is really what you need to kill if you want to break the Office stronghold.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoI really hope markdown is developed enough to take off, or someone develops something similar on firmer ground (since there's a lot of ambiguity in the definition). Whenever I use word or to a lesser extent mediawiki I feel like a lot of my effort is wasted in fiddling around just to get the formatting right. Sometimes this is bad enough to break my flow and significantly affect productivity. Overall I feel as though the fiddling tax with markdown is only a small increment, maybe say 5 or 10% of total effort on average.
- atsaloli 15y agoasciidoc http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ very little markup (high signal to "tag" ratio) can produce all sorts of output (HTML and PDF, for example) I use the asciidoc -> docbook -> latex -> pdf chain for the most part. Very flexible -- you can tweak things at the docbook or latex level if you really want to, but mostly it just works. Good stuff.
- mahmud 15y agoThat's excellent! Thanks for the pointer.
- adimitrov 15y agoI love John MacFarlane's extension of Markdown: [pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) This, and the fact that gitit is really good, and has math support (which I desperately need,) are the reasons I'm considering finding a hosting solution for happstack and moving all my stuff there…
- dereg 15y agoYou're right about Excel. It is the corporate behemoth that may never be slayed. I'm thinking of getting a Mac, but can the Mac version of Excel do keyboard shortcuts like on Windows? (E.g. "alt, o, h, r" to rename a sheet, or "alt, i, w" to insert a sheet). From my experience, it doesn't. Losing shortcuts would put a heavy drag on my productivity.
- 2arrs2ells 15y agoExcel is 99% of the reason I run virtualized windows.
- pstephens 15y agoExcel's basic math errors are 99% of the reason I do my stats with python.
- Volpe 15y agoCare to elaborate?
- tedunangst 15y agohttp://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2007/09/25...
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoThat's not a math error, that's a display error. I'm no fan of Office, but that would not be a reason to fear Excel's ability to calculate correctly.
- nitrogen 15y agoDuring the whole OOXML debacle, there were many examples discovered of ambiguous or flat-out wrong behavior in various versions of Excel over the years, the kind of wrong behavior that could easily have altered the outcome of financial transactions that were managed using spreadsheets. You can probably find some if you hunt for them on Groklaw. I seem to remember one related to a date basis parameter, so that might be a good first keyword set to try.
- gruseom 15y agoMy last two jobs have shown me that Excel is really what you need to kill if you want to break the Office stronghold. May I ask what specifically you think an Excel-killer would need to do to succeed? And why you think the web-based spreadsheets haven't been able to do it so far?
- latch 15y agoI worked in medical and banking...these industries seem to run on Excel. Performance is an issue, and the amount of "legacy" code running in macros/vba is staggering. You are talking about thousands of excel spreadsheet which is each like it's own little application.
- kenjackson 15y agoI recall talking to someone at MS about .NET 4.0 and I asked what were the big scenarios -- and I was surprised to hear that Office programmability was one of the top scenarios. He didn't know exact numbers, but he said that there may be more lines of .NET Office code (VSTO and VBA) than ASP.NET. Go and ask your random analyst friend if they know VBA, and you'd be surprised how many know it (and with it know things like dynamic typing, implicit arguments, event handlers, etc..).
- c1sc0 15y agoEver tried to copy/paste > 1000 records in e.g. Google docs?
- gruseom 15y agoSo, performance and scalability. Anything else?
- latch 15y agoJust another super important point about this, you are talking about two industries who, for the most part, haven't bought into the public cloud yet. I'm not gonna say "most", because, I really don't know, but I'd bet that most (oopps!) of these companies have firewalls that block google docs and the likes. Their idea of "cloud" is to run virtualization on their own servers in their own data centers and call it a day. There's huge security (mostly made up), regulatory (mostly made up) reasons for them not to move to the cloud.
- kenjackson 15y agoHow does Markdown compare to LaTex? I wrote in LaTex most of my career and only the past 10 years with Word. I generally liked LaTex, except I didn't like the fact that the doc I edited was not the doc distributed (dvi, pdf, ps). But its hard to beat the typesetting in LaTex. Oddly, I find PowerPoint to be a great app. In fact, if I need to quickly draw something, I'm more likely to do it in PowerPoint than Illustrator or Design or anything. Why do standard drawing programs suck so much at doing quick sketches (at least for people like me who can't draw)?
- paxswill 15y agoIn my experience, Markdown is easier for just words and for things eventually going online. But as soon as I need tables, references, non-trivial layout and especially equations, I pull out LaTeX.
- Derbasti 15y agoMarkdown compiles to a subset of HTML, whereas LaTeX is able to express pretty much anything that can possibly be put in pages of PDF. As such, Markdown is very clean and focused. You can figure out all features of Markdown in a few minutes. As you know, LaTeX can be excruciatingly complex but astonishingly powerful
- chrishenn 15y agoMarkdown focuses on getting anything that isn't content out of the way. LaTeX defines it, rather explicitly. I use both. I used to use LaTeX for everything, but I realized I didn't really need the power. Now I use Markdown, and have a custom style sheet for the html it creates (for printing, using the awesome Marked.app).
- radarsat1 15y agoIf you use pandoc to convert your markdown to tex, it will pass through any TeX commands embedded in the document, so you can get the best of both worlds.
- dorian-graph 15y agoWhy Markdown AND Textile? I like both and use Textile often as Textpattern is my CMS of choice and I'm curious why you would use both?
- latch 15y agoi meant markdown and LaTex, but I got confused ;)
- dorian-graph 15y agoOh, haha.
- Terretta 15y agoNote: Scrivener supports Markdown.