8 ms·

Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. I was helping an elderly rela

Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. I was helping an elderly relative who works as a translator and hasn’t touched a modern version of word in about 5 years. They had a new computer and I got an ms office sub for them. The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch. It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening. It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.

dirkt 3y ago
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. You don't want Google to have data that is used to govern a federal German state.
usr1106 3y ago
Very hard for me to understand why as the owner of a computer you want to put precious data on someone else's computer. Especially someone that has no customer service, a history of killing products with no good options for their users and frequently breaking laws.
vidarh 3y ago
Try editing a 200 page document in Google Docs. Last time I tried I had to give up. I detest MS Office too, and Google Docs is perfectly fine for a whole lot of my use cases, but it's not a complete replacement, and that'll be a problem for a lot of places where some subset of users will need other applications anyway if you pick Google. The "lost" MS Office doc is infuriating, though - have had to help my son with several different variants of that for school over the years, including the reverse, where it's insisted there is no document at the location in the cloud drive it is meant to be, but where it turned out this was because it hadn't been synced from the local drive...
arielcostas 3y ago
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs. > The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch. It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.
acchow 3y ago
Don't the most recent documents appear on the welcome screen when you open MS Word?
- CharlesW 3y ago
  They do, and right below the file names is its path. However, the elderly relative had never opened the file on the new computer/Office install, and likely never had any idea where they'd originally saved the file.
csdreamer7 3y ago
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. My mom had to buy a copy of MS Office. Her university provided free ms office online, but there were certain features missing from it she needed for her papers. I am remembering wrong, but it was annotations? Citations? I do not remember. Libreoffice kinda could do it, but I could not find how online, while MS had it properly documented on their website and so many youtubers making videos on MS Office had it listed on their website. Edit: also found out MS Office can screen record and record her webcam. Very useful for her giving a remote presentation during covid.
- Shorel 3y ago
  Annotations, citations, bibliography management I can understand, even if I use LaTeX for that and consider it a far superior tool. But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists? Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat? That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD
  - skissane 3y ago
    > But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists? OBS is very powerful, but the complexity of its UI can scare non-technical newbies away. MS Office gives you a lot less power, but is much more welcoming when you aren’t technical and this is the first time in your life you’ve ever done it
  - csdreamer7 3y ago
    > But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists? OBS was a lot more complicated. Yes, professional streaming you should use it. She was doing a ph.d in social sciences. She had little desire, or really need, to use it when MS Office did what she wanted out of the box. Screen recorded presentations with powerpoint. > Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat? They did not use teams for chat. They used gsuite for almost everything else. > That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD No, it really is not. > Annotations, citations, bibliography management I can understand, even if I use LaTeX for that and consider it a far superior tool. Really? My mother was struggling to remember how to use a Windows desktop. You really want to suggest learning latex when she had term papers to do for a $60k degree? The required document format was ms word.
karma_pharmer 3y ago
> why, in a world of Google docs The answer is in the first sentence of the article: data sovereignty. Most governments don't want to store their data with a foreign corporation.
jseliger 3y ago
Writing/editing offline, complex formatting, familiarity. I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility. I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.
- xattt 3y ago
  Word and Excel, like Photoshop, are dominant because of their maturity as well as the muscle memory of their users. People were pissed 18 years ago when the Office ribbon was implemented because it broke their workflow. MS might have gussied it up now, but they haven’t dared to reinvent it since.
  - raincole 3y ago
    I honestly still hate office ribbon.
    - alluro2 3y ago
      Same here - there are 1000 options, across 15 tabs, and I have to look through all the icons and labels till I find the one, with active tab and even displayed options changing depending on content selection.... It's a constant battle if you don't spend hours a day in MS apps and develop muscle memory. I do realize that there are probably no ideal UIs for accessing such a breadth of options, and it was a valid attempt, but not really successful, imo. With some adjustment and practice by users, I believe something like Alfred within the app, with smart search and suggestions, would be a quicker and more efficient approach for tool activation. Since there has to be also a good way to discover features without explicitly searching for them, maybe something like the Start menu is the right approach - quick search, but also categories and lists of tools.
      - HKH2 3y ago
        > maybe something like the Start menu is the right approach - quick search, but also categories and lists of tools. Sounds like Google Docs.
Difwif 3y ago
So many microcosms with tech. I'm always reminded here on HN how terrible Office is and why we don't just use Google Docs. I hold this same opinion personally. However I go to other communities (I think the last one I remember was some startup subreddit) and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business. I assume it's just that we prefer the devil we know than the one we don't.
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  I generally don't see people recommending teams, typically business users seem to prefer zoom while the ones who use teams are forced to because it's bundled with other Microsoft products. Excel on the other hand is still miles better than Sheets for non-trivial use cases and I've seen business users revolt multiple times if you try to force them to use GSuite. To a lesser extent that's also true with Word and to an even lesser extent Outlook. I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom). The interesting one is PowerPoint which I've noticed a lot of power users are migrating to Figma for. Also 10 years ago people would send nasty grams if they couldn't get Visio licenses but Lucidchart seems to have eaten that marketshare.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    >I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom). Uhhh what? I suppose I am a novice video chat user who just uses it to talk to people and share a screen, but I am clearly missing some killer feature. From my perspective, all of the platforms suck for one reason or another. Bad CPU usage, latency, but hey, they have background swapping and fun emojis!
- dietr1ch 3y ago
  I don't think that the decision is being driven by bad company A v/s bad company B, and it's implicitly technical. All of us here probably will know when to jump out of spreadsheets and have some knowledge on how to approach things then, so a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs is fine for us. The problem outside, is that they are somewhat locked on the spreadsheet and have to stick with it, so more advanced features are welcome even though it comes with the price of the so called evil company according to the other group. And is Office really better than Google's Spreadsheets? Idk, I don't care about small differences, but they surely annoy hardcore users, plus no one really got fired for buying IBM
CharlesW 3y ago
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.
- worldsayshi 3y ago
  What features in Office are essential for those users that you don't get from Google? If you're talking about Excel I can imagine there are such features but not so much in other apps.
  - benhurmarcel 3y ago
    Google Docs can't automatically number headings, figures, and tables. It also can't automatically update cross-references ("see Figure 3 in Section 3.4"). Some colleagues have issues because it can't handle very large documents too (above a few hundred pages).
  - ravelfan 3y ago
    I hate Microsoft products in general but Excel is just good. It is not one feature but the whole package as a system. It is basically the opposite of most MS products. There is not one feature that stands out as to why I hate Word, it is the summation of all the little things I hate about it that is the issue.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    I think it's less about feature parity and more that the users have spent tens of thousands of hours in MS office and don't want to relearn all the shortcuts and menus and subtle behaviors -- muscle memory stuff.
    - ishtanbul 3y ago
      All the plugins for excel, word and powerpoint integration. And we have to be able to send attachments with actual files, not links. Law firms and banks are pretty set in their ways here. It has to be office and windows. Google sheets doesn’t remotely compare to excel for serious financial modeling.
layer8 3y ago
Office has become a bit of a UX mess in parts, due to the cloud and web integration, but the overall functionality and integrations are still unmatched. Many people also continue to prefer native applications.
- unsignedint 3y ago
  Their offering strikes a decent balance between the two. The fact that it is a native application really helped me when I traveled internationally, where my connection was spotty at best. I had a minimal slow connection on my phone that I couldn’t tether, and otherwise, I had to offload periodically where Wi-Fi was available from my PC. In places where you can assume to have a strong, always-on connection, they don’t make much difference, but in situations where I can’t count on it, Microsoft’s structure, which can tolerate offline usage, is very useful.
FpUser 3y ago
I use MS Office and Softmaker Office, both native and with perpetual license. Works fine for me. Not sure why would I need online service that can cut me off at any point with no recourse
- bbkane 3y ago
  I use Markdown, with no license. (Usually) Works fine for me. Not sure why I need proprietary file formats only usable by on vendor's software. I'm somewhat joking (obviously MSFT file formats can do a lot more than md if you need that), but I rarely need more complicated documents.
- trelane 3y ago
  > Not sure why would I need online service that can cut me off at any point with no recourse But both of those can cut you off at any point with no recourse. Read the EULA carefully. The only one that can't is LibreOffice.
FdbkHb 3y ago
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. I see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that. Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel) > It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations. > It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on. It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive. You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text. I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud" And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly? Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.
bfrog 3y ago
Microsoft in a nutshell… I swear they offplanered their ux people to the moon where they couldn’t do anything. Or they have no ux people. Or their ux people have no effect.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  They fired all the testers and figured user telemetry could be everything they need.
  - bfrog 3y ago
    Does that include voice to text when users yell at the computer and chuck it at a wall?
xw38011 3y ago
Lots of reasons. Here are some: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-law-school-applicants-should-use-ms-word-google-docs-anna-ivey https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-law-school-applicants-sho...
runeb 3y ago
Some institutions have requirements that files don't leave your computer or network
briHass 3y ago
People always forget about Outlook. Name me a competing desktop app that does integrated calendar, email, todo, and meetings as well as Outlook. Thunderbird is (unfortunately) a joke, and web clients aren't as nice when managing complex folder arrangements and lots of mail.
- redeeman 3y ago
  outlook has a gazillion things that are far far more of a joke than those lacks in thunderbird, those are just things people accept because they cant change it, and impose a 1:1 feature/bug requirement on a new thing, or its "not ready"
- maxcoder4 3y ago
  Honest question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I never used Outlook, and I use Thunderbird daily so I wonder what I miss [1]. It also picked up development a bit and got some nice improvements, maybe check it out of you didn't recently. But I'm really curious why is it bad. [1] I'm pretty sure outlook users miss good GPG support, at least.
  - briHass 3y ago
    Supernova has fixed a number of the performance issues with large mailboxes, but that was fairly recent. People steeped in Windows still prefer the sleek/modern UI in Outlook over TB, in my experience, but the biggest benefit in Outlook is just the tight integration in MS/365 land. Calendaring in TB always felt like a bit of an afterthought compared to email, and for personal use, that makes sense. For business, strong calendaring with meetings/shared calendars/availability and the tight link to meetings (Teams)is not done as well anywhere else.
- mairusu 3y ago
  RIP then. https://proton.me/blog/outlook-is-microsofts-new-data-collection-service https://proton.me/blog/outlook-is-microsofts-new-data-collec...
- to11mtm 3y ago
  Ironically, we used thunderbird at at old job, because it was easy to screenshot for QAs instructions on how to check both the HTML and Text versions of sent emails.
wannacboatmovie 3y ago
Among other things, Office comes with support, a word most Googlers can't spell.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  Is the suopprt first or third party?
  - wannacboatmovie 3y ago
    First party of course. MS has gold plated support agreements especially for public sector customers, where you can get a real person on the phone, not at the mercy of some automated Google bullshit. Is it expensive? Yes. But if you're running an entire city as opposed to a small dentist's office, it's likely worth the money.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
The popularity of all these paper emulators seems odd to me. Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?
- datavirtue 3y ago
  I love the question as I'm constantly faced with the absurdity of user-hostile software. It was supposed to be built to help humans. Instead it creates PTSD.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Hmm, maybe the problem is more of a drift towards hostility instead of an inability to move forward.
tombert 3y ago
I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's the same reason I still can't get into IntelliJ. Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in git. I do CAD Modeling with Vim using openSCAD. The keystrokes are just second nature to me, I think in Vim keystrokes now, for better or worse. The IntelliJ Vim plugin is actually very good, but it's not quite perfect, there's subtle, intangible things that I have to adapt to, but are different enough to annoy me. For 99% of people, I think this is more than "good enough", and I still use it when I write Java, but I still am just unable to "like" it. I don't use MS Office, but I suspect that if you've been using it for a long time, even tiny differences that you'd experience with Google Docs would become infuriating.
- stickmunch 3y ago
  I just started down Vim rabbit hole. It's a cult I am more than willing to spend time diving into head first.
  - tombert 3y ago
    I think it's worth it, but just a warning, I'd be skeptical of the claims that some people make, where they act like "learning Vim made me 10x faster at coding!" I do feel like Vim allows me to "translate my intent to the screen" really easily, and I avoid context switching as much, but I doubt it makes me appreciably faster at writing code. It's pretty rare that typing speed or "how fast I can edit" is the blocking factor for writing software.
etempleton 3y ago
There are a ton of very specific pieces of functionality that are built into Microsoft Word that caters to business edge cases. Features that have worked the same way and have not been touched for years for compatability reasons and are not duplicated in other software/services. Word is a bloated mess, but incredibly feature rich.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Office is Final Cut Pro. It is brimming with features and power. But lots of people aren’t working at some corporate office. Mom and Pop can get far with the iMovie option like Google Sheets and Docs. Actually now that I say that… what I want is a LibreOffice equivalent of Google Docs and Sheets and Presentations. Google is the only bad part of my Docs experience.
Daz1 3y ago
Because Google Docs only has 10% of the functionality? Also your anecdote is user error.
to11mtm 3y ago
Yeah these are reasons I had to set up a a VM for my dad while he finally went off Wordperfect 6 to LibreOffice for word docs. It's been interesting to watch because he's happy to embrace better tech but hates dark patterns.
jsmith12673 3y ago
I've had to use Google Sheets a lot recently, and it doesn't hold a candle to excel. There are a lot of basics missing esp. when it comes to charting. But I don't like excel much either. If working with spreadsheets was a bigger part of my day job, I'd switch to excel
midnight2 3y ago
Excel blows Sheets out of the water. Try opening a million row CSV in Sheets.
- petepete 3y ago
  This is a feature few people need.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    Yet it is the status quo expectation. If you offer up an alternative, do not be surprised if people expect it to be comparable in all features.
    - woopwoop24 3y ago
      for the money your governments spend licensing MS products, they could develop libreOffice from scratch in better, faster and nicer looking. Or just pay a few devs or a few hundred to make it better and still pay less in fees every year.
  - midnight2 3y ago
    I doubt it's very uncommon for businesses to work with million+ row worksheets. Personal usage, I'd agree.
ByQuyzzy 3y ago
Google Docs is just flat out terrible. It's also highly insecure - imagine trusting an ad company with your governmental information.
datavirtue 3y ago
Yeah, they got it so fucked up that the average user has no idea where their files are. It is absolutely unbelievable how user hostile it is. Typical software designed for the goals of the creator. The world of computing has truly descended into hell for the average non-technical person.
aporetics 3y ago
Google docs has no dark patterns. All sunshine and roses.
deleted 3y ago
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abirahemmed1 3y ago
[flagged]

dirkt 3y ago

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. You don't want Google to have data that is used to govern a federal German state.

usr1106 3y ago

Very hard for me to understand why as the owner of a computer you want to put precious data on someone else's computer. Especially someone that has no customer service, a history of killing products with no good options for their users and frequently breaking laws.

vidarh 3y ago

Try editing a 200 page document in Google Docs. Last time I tried I had to give up. I detest MS Office too, and Google Docs is perfectly fine for a whole lot of my use cases, but it's not a complete replacement, and that'll be a problem for a lot of places where some subset of users will need other applications anyway if you pick Google. The "lost" MS Office doc is infuriating, though - have had to help my son with several different variants of that for school over the years, including the reverse, where it's insisted there is no document at the location in the cloud drive it is meant to be, but where it turned out this was because it hadn't been synced from the local drive...

arielcostas 3y ago

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs. > The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch. It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.

acchow 3y ago

Don't the most recent documents appear on the welcome screen when you open MS Word?

CharlesW 3y ago
They do, and right below the file names is its path. However, the elderly relative had never opened the file on the new computer/Office install, and likely never had any idea where they'd originally saved the file.

csdreamer7 3y ago

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. My mom had to buy a copy of MS Office. Her university provided free ms office online, but there were certain features missing from it she needed for her papers. I am remembering wrong, but it was annotations? Citations? I do not remember. Libreoffice kinda could do it, but I could not find how online, while MS had it properly documented on their website and so many youtubers making videos on MS Office had it listed on their website. Edit: also found out MS Office can screen record and record her webcam. Very useful for her giving a remote presentation during covid.

Shorel 3y ago
Annotations, citations, bibliography management I can understand, even if I use LaTeX for that and consider it a far superior tool. But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists? Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat? That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD
- skissane 3y ago
  > But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists? OBS is very powerful, but the complexity of its UI can scare non-technical newbies away. MS Office gives you a lot less power, but is much more welcoming when you aren’t technical and this is the first time in your life you’ve ever done it
- csdreamer7 3y ago
  > But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists? OBS was a lot more complicated. Yes, professional streaming you should use it. She was doing a ph.d in social sciences. She had little desire, or really need, to use it when MS Office did what she wanted out of the box. Screen recorded presentations with powerpoint. > Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat? They did not use teams for chat. They used gsuite for almost everything else. > That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD No, it really is not. > Annotations, citations, bibliography management I can understand, even if I use LaTeX for that and consider it a far superior tool. Really? My mother was struggling to remember how to use a Windows desktop. You really want to suggest learning latex when she had term papers to do for a $60k degree? The required document format was ms word.

karma_pharmer 3y ago

> why, in a world of Google docs The answer is in the first sentence of the article: data sovereignty. Most governments don't want to store their data with a foreign corporation.

jseliger 3y ago

Writing/editing offline, complex formatting, familiarity. I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility. I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.

xattt 3y ago
Word and Excel, like Photoshop, are dominant because of their maturity as well as the muscle memory of their users. People were pissed 18 years ago when the Office ribbon was implemented because it broke their workflow. MS might have gussied it up now, but they haven’t dared to reinvent it since.
- raincole 3y ago
  I honestly still hate office ribbon.
  - alluro2 3y ago
    Same here - there are 1000 options, across 15 tabs, and I have to look through all the icons and labels till I find the one, with active tab and even displayed options changing depending on content selection.... It's a constant battle if you don't spend hours a day in MS apps and develop muscle memory. I do realize that there are probably no ideal UIs for accessing such a breadth of options, and it was a valid attempt, but not really successful, imo. With some adjustment and practice by users, I believe something like Alfred within the app, with smart search and suggestions, would be a quicker and more efficient approach for tool activation. Since there has to be also a good way to discover features without explicitly searching for them, maybe something like the Start menu is the right approach - quick search, but also categories and lists of tools.
    - HKH2 3y ago
      > maybe something like the Start menu is the right approach - quick search, but also categories and lists of tools. Sounds like Google Docs.

Difwif 3y ago

So many microcosms with tech. I'm always reminded here on HN how terrible Office is and why we don't just use Google Docs. I hold this same opinion personally. However I go to other communities (I think the last one I remember was some startup subreddit) and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business. I assume it's just that we prefer the devil we know than the one we don't.

CSMastermind 3y ago
I generally don't see people recommending teams, typically business users seem to prefer zoom while the ones who use teams are forced to because it's bundled with other Microsoft products. Excel on the other hand is still miles better than Sheets for non-trivial use cases and I've seen business users revolt multiple times if you try to force them to use GSuite. To a lesser extent that's also true with Word and to an even lesser extent Outlook. I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom). The interesting one is PowerPoint which I've noticed a lot of power users are migrating to Figma for. Also 10 years ago people would send nasty grams if they couldn't get Visio licenses but Lucidchart seems to have eaten that marketshare.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  >I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom). Uhhh what? I suppose I am a novice video chat user who just uses it to talk to people and share a screen, but I am clearly missing some killer feature. From my perspective, all of the platforms suck for one reason or another. Bad CPU usage, latency, but hey, they have background swapping and fun emojis!
dietr1ch 3y ago
I don't think that the decision is being driven by bad company A v/s bad company B, and it's implicitly technical. All of us here probably will know when to jump out of spreadsheets and have some knowledge on how to approach things then, so a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs is fine for us. The problem outside, is that they are somewhat locked on the spreadsheet and have to stick with it, so more advanced features are welcome even though it comes with the price of the so called evil company according to the other group. And is Office really better than Google's Spreadsheets? Idk, I don't care about small differences, but they surely annoy hardcore users, plus no one really got fired for buying IBM

CharlesW 3y ago

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.

worldsayshi 3y ago
What features in Office are essential for those users that you don't get from Google? If you're talking about Excel I can imagine there are such features but not so much in other apps.
- benhurmarcel 3y ago
  Google Docs can't automatically number headings, figures, and tables. It also can't automatically update cross-references ("see Figure 3 in Section 3.4"). Some colleagues have issues because it can't handle very large documents too (above a few hundred pages).
- ravelfan 3y ago
  I hate Microsoft products in general but Excel is just good. It is not one feature but the whole package as a system. It is basically the opposite of most MS products. There is not one feature that stands out as to why I hate Word, it is the summation of all the little things I hate about it that is the issue.
- pphysch 3y ago
  I think it's less about feature parity and more that the users have spent tens of thousands of hours in MS office and don't want to relearn all the shortcuts and menus and subtle behaviors -- muscle memory stuff.
  - ishtanbul 3y ago
    All the plugins for excel, word and powerpoint integration. And we have to be able to send attachments with actual files, not links. Law firms and banks are pretty set in their ways here. It has to be office and windows. Google sheets doesn’t remotely compare to excel for serious financial modeling.

layer8 3y ago

Office has become a bit of a UX mess in parts, due to the cloud and web integration, but the overall functionality and integrations are still unmatched. Many people also continue to prefer native applications.

unsignedint 3y ago
Their offering strikes a decent balance between the two. The fact that it is a native application really helped me when I traveled internationally, where my connection was spotty at best. I had a minimal slow connection on my phone that I couldn’t tether, and otherwise, I had to offload periodically where Wi-Fi was available from my PC. In places where you can assume to have a strong, always-on connection, they don’t make much difference, but in situations where I can’t count on it, Microsoft’s structure, which can tolerate offline usage, is very useful.

FpUser 3y ago

I use MS Office and Softmaker Office, both native and with perpetual license. Works fine for me. Not sure why would I need online service that can cut me off at any point with no recourse

bbkane 3y ago
I use Markdown, with no license. (Usually) Works fine for me. Not sure why I need proprietary file formats only usable by on vendor's software. I'm somewhat joking (obviously MSFT file formats can do a lot more than md if you need that), but I rarely need more complicated documents.
trelane 3y ago
> Not sure why would I need online service that can cut me off at any point with no recourse But both of those can cut you off at any point with no recourse. Read the EULA carefully. The only one that can't is LibreOffice.

FdbkHb 3y ago

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. I see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that. Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel) > It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations. > It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on. It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive. You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text. I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud" And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly? Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.

bfrog 3y ago

Microsoft in a nutshell… I swear they offplanered their ux people to the moon where they couldn’t do anything. Or they have no ux people. Or their ux people have no effect.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
They fired all the testers and figured user telemetry could be everything they need.
- bfrog 3y ago
  Does that include voice to text when users yell at the computer and chuck it at a wall?

xw38011 3y ago

Lots of reasons. Here are some: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-law-school-applicants-should-use-ms-word-google-docs-anna-ivey https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-law-school-applicants-sho...

runeb 3y ago

Some institutions have requirements that files don't leave your computer or network

briHass 3y ago

People always forget about Outlook. Name me a competing desktop app that does integrated calendar, email, todo, and meetings as well as Outlook. Thunderbird is (unfortunately) a joke, and web clients aren't as nice when managing complex folder arrangements and lots of mail.

redeeman 3y ago
outlook has a gazillion things that are far far more of a joke than those lacks in thunderbird, those are just things people accept because they cant change it, and impose a 1:1 feature/bug requirement on a new thing, or its "not ready"
maxcoder4 3y ago
Honest question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I never used Outlook, and I use Thunderbird daily so I wonder what I miss [1]. It also picked up development a bit and got some nice improvements, maybe check it out of you didn't recently. But I'm really curious why is it bad. [1] I'm pretty sure outlook users miss good GPG support, at least.
- briHass 3y ago
  Supernova has fixed a number of the performance issues with large mailboxes, but that was fairly recent. People steeped in Windows still prefer the sleek/modern UI in Outlook over TB, in my experience, but the biggest benefit in Outlook is just the tight integration in MS/365 land. Calendaring in TB always felt like a bit of an afterthought compared to email, and for personal use, that makes sense. For business, strong calendaring with meetings/shared calendars/availability and the tight link to meetings (Teams)is not done as well anywhere else.
mairusu 3y ago
RIP then. https://proton.me/blog/outlook-is-microsofts-new-data-collection-service https://proton.me/blog/outlook-is-microsofts-new-data-collec...
to11mtm 3y ago
Ironically, we used thunderbird at at old job, because it was easy to screenshot for QAs instructions on how to check both the HTML and Text versions of sent emails.

wannacboatmovie 3y ago

Among other things, Office comes with support, a word most Googlers can't spell.

saalweachter 3y ago
Is the suopprt first or third party?
- wannacboatmovie 3y ago
  First party of course. MS has gold plated support agreements especially for public sector customers, where you can get a real person on the phone, not at the mercy of some automated Google bullshit. Is it expensive? Yes. But if you're running an entire city as opposed to a small dentist's office, it's likely worth the money.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

The popularity of all these paper emulators seems odd to me. Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?

datavirtue 3y ago
I love the question as I'm constantly faced with the absurdity of user-hostile software. It was supposed to be built to help humans. Instead it creates PTSD.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Hmm, maybe the problem is more of a drift towards hostility instead of an inability to move forward.

tombert 3y ago

I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's the same reason I still can't get into IntelliJ. Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in git. I do CAD Modeling with Vim using openSCAD. The keystrokes are just second nature to me, I think in Vim keystrokes now, for better or worse. The IntelliJ Vim plugin is actually very good, but it's not quite perfect, there's subtle, intangible things that I have to adapt to, but are different enough to annoy me. For 99% of people, I think this is more than "good enough", and I still use it when I write Java, but I still am just unable to "like" it. I don't use MS Office, but I suspect that if you've been using it for a long time, even tiny differences that you'd experience with Google Docs would become infuriating.

stickmunch 3y ago
I just started down Vim rabbit hole. It's a cult I am more than willing to spend time diving into head first.
- tombert 3y ago
  I think it's worth it, but just a warning, I'd be skeptical of the claims that some people make, where they act like "learning Vim made me 10x faster at coding!" I do feel like Vim allows me to "translate my intent to the screen" really easily, and I avoid context switching as much, but I doubt it makes me appreciably faster at writing code. It's pretty rare that typing speed or "how fast I can edit" is the blocking factor for writing software.

etempleton 3y ago

There are a ton of very specific pieces of functionality that are built into Microsoft Word that caters to business edge cases. Features that have worked the same way and have not been touched for years for compatability reasons and are not duplicated in other software/services. Word is a bloated mess, but incredibly feature rich.

Waterluvian 3y ago
Office is Final Cut Pro. It is brimming with features and power. But lots of people aren’t working at some corporate office. Mom and Pop can get far with the iMovie option like Google Sheets and Docs. Actually now that I say that… what I want is a LibreOffice equivalent of Google Docs and Sheets and Presentations. Google is the only bad part of my Docs experience.

Daz1 3y ago

Because Google Docs only has 10% of the functionality? Also your anecdote is user error.

to11mtm 3y ago

Yeah these are reasons I had to set up a a VM for my dad while he finally went off Wordperfect 6 to LibreOffice for word docs. It's been interesting to watch because he's happy to embrace better tech but hates dark patterns.

jsmith12673 3y ago

I've had to use Google Sheets a lot recently, and it doesn't hold a candle to excel. There are a lot of basics missing esp. when it comes to charting. But I don't like excel much either. If working with spreadsheets was a bigger part of my day job, I'd switch to excel

midnight2 3y ago

Excel blows Sheets out of the water. Try opening a million row CSV in Sheets.

petepete 3y ago
This is a feature few people need.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Yet it is the status quo expectation. If you offer up an alternative, do not be surprised if people expect it to be comparable in all features.
  - woopwoop24 3y ago
    for the money your governments spend licensing MS products, they could develop libreOffice from scratch in better, faster and nicer looking. Or just pay a few devs or a few hundred to make it better and still pay less in fees every year.
- midnight2 3y ago
  I doubt it's very uncommon for businesses to work with million+ row worksheets. Personal usage, I'd agree.

ByQuyzzy 3y ago

Google Docs is just flat out terrible. It's also highly insecure - imagine trusting an ad company with your governmental information.

datavirtue 3y ago

Yeah, they got it so fucked up that the average user has no idea where their files are. It is absolutely unbelievable how user hostile it is. Typical software designed for the goals of the creator. The world of computing has truly descended into hell for the average non-technical person.

aporetics 3y ago

Google docs has no dark patterns. All sunshine and roses.

deleted 3y ago

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abirahemmed1 3y ago

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