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I find modern Office impossible to be productive with. Editing charts in Excel is a particular frustration having to dig into a few submenus to do something bas

by knolan 5y ago

I find modern Office impossible to be productive with. Editing charts in Excel is a particular frustration having to dig into a few submenus to do something basic like change the style of a marker. Manipulating data ranges is nowhere as intuitive as it was in Office 2000. I don’t do any real work with Office anymore. If I need a Doc file I’ll export from Pages, even Numbers is generally better than excel for simple tasks and Keynote is much better than PowerPoint. These data it’s much faster to fire up Matlab or Python can get actual work done.

ido 5y ago
I use google docs and although it’s free it’s actually much quicker to use than modern office (for me at least - maybe because the interface is more similar to 90s office!)
gigglesupstairs 5y ago
I’ve found Numbers to be basically unusable on iPad. May be because some stuff works differently as compared to excel but its features are literally buried inside icon based interface which is a huge bummer. Should give it a go on Mac, may be it’s better there.
- ascagnel_ 5y ago
  It's not really any better -- while I haven't dug in too deeply, the current macOS versions are basically the iPad versions running in a window with a mouse pointer.
- knolan 5y ago
  Don’t get me wrong, Numbers isn’t great. It just better than Excel for the simple stuff I would want to do in a spreadsheet.
deergomoo 5y ago
As someone who spends most of his time in a text editor and only needs to use word processing/spreadsheets very occasionally, Office is absolutely torturous. Everything that's not achievable with a single click feels like it requires navigation through at least three modal sub-windows. It probably doesn't help that I'm mostly Mac-based, considering Microsoft have decided that things like selecting text and drag and drop should work differently to literally every other piece of software I use.

by knolan 5y ago

ido 5y ago

I use google docs and although it’s free it’s actually much quicker to use than modern office (for me at least - maybe because the interface is more similar to 90s office!)

gigglesupstairs 5y ago

I’ve found Numbers to be basically unusable on iPad. May be because some stuff works differently as compared to excel but its features are literally buried inside icon based interface which is a huge bummer. Should give it a go on Mac, may be it’s better there.

ascagnel_ 5y ago
It's not really any better -- while I haven't dug in too deeply, the current macOS versions are basically the iPad versions running in a window with a mouse pointer.
knolan 5y ago
Don’t get me wrong, Numbers isn’t great. It just better than Excel for the simple stuff I would want to do in a spreadsheet.

deergomoo 5y ago

As someone who spends most of his time in a text editor and only needs to use word processing/spreadsheets very occasionally, Office is absolutely torturous. Everything that's not achievable with a single click feels like it requires navigation through at least three modal sub-windows. It probably doesn't help that I'm mostly Mac-based, considering Microsoft have decided that things like selecting text and drag and drop should work differently to literally every other piece of software I use.