4 ms·

Does your city council's housing dept really need any WP functionality that wasn't in Wordpad or Windows 3.1 Write?

anigbrowl 14y ago
You know, it probably does. When they produce reports, they need to be able to do things like footnotes, tables of contents, indices; incorporate maps and graphics, and scale or otherwise make them print-ready; use a variety of different layouts and templates to make information accessible to the public; expand or modify historical reports and datasheets (ie, load files that were produced at least within the last 10 years, if not 20); and possibly produce these documents in a variety of different languages and/or formats. In terms of single documents used for correspondence, they likely need things like mail merge, change tracking, multiple authorship (housing departments deal with a lot of legal issues, from evictions to liability to real estate transfer) and so on. You're falling into a classic developer trap of not being interested in other people's jobs, and thus assuming that the jobs don't need uch int he way of technology. It's the same mindset that leads people to suggest using emacs for everything -because that's what the developer uses all day; or doing everything at a shell prompt - despite the obvious market preference for GUIs; or that everybody should learn to code - though most people clearly prefer not to. One might as well suggest that developers should just stop piddling about with software and learn to build their own hardware instead of pursuing the massively wasteful path of general-purpose computing.
- excuse-me 14y ago
  Not a developer - I'm a project manager in a high tech industry. A lot of my time is dealing with reports and projects where somebody decided that they didn't quite like how a title of a table was formatted and so made their own "fixes" which looked ok on their machine. Or they couldn't understand some remote object linking functionality so they converted the spreadsheet into an image and embedded that. I suspect a lot of companies, and certainly most goverment offices, would be more efficient if the people who write pretty much standard letters to customers/claimants didn't have the same MS-office install as somebody editing 10,000 page technical reports for an Airbus A380. You can (or at least we used to) customize the menus/toolbars for Word to make a simplified version for secretaries that were really happier with typewriters.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Yup, I daily have to deal with Office documents that have 'pointless' formatting. A good set of templates with formatting protected could save so much time. That goes for Open/Libre Office as much as MS Office. LibreOffice has mathematical formula editing that I find much more congenial than that currently provided in MS Office 2010. (Yes I know LaTex but I'm talking casual use of simple formulas here).

You know, it probably does. When they produce reports, they need to be able to do things like footnotes, tables of contents, indices; incorporate maps and graphics, and scale or otherwise make them print-ready; use a variety of different layouts and templates to make information accessible to the public; expand or modify historical reports and datasheets (ie, load files that were produced at least within the last 10 years, if not 20); and possibly produce these documents in a variety of different languages and/or formats. In terms of single documents used for correspondence, they likely need things like mail merge, change tracking, multiple authorship (housing departments deal with a lot of legal issues, from evictions to liability to real estate transfer) and so on. You're falling into a classic developer trap of not being interested in other people's jobs, and thus assuming that the jobs don't need uch int he way of technology. It's the same mindset that leads people to suggest using emacs for everything -because that's what the developer uses all day; or doing everything at a shell prompt - despite the obvious market preference for GUIs; or that everybody should learn to code - though most people clearly prefer not to. One might as well suggest that developers should just stop piddling about with software and learn to build their own hardware instead of pursuing the massively wasteful path of general-purpose computing.

excuse-me 14y ago
Not a developer - I'm a project manager in a high tech industry. A lot of my time is dealing with reports and projects where somebody decided that they didn't quite like how a title of a table was formatted and so made their own "fixes" which looked ok on their machine. Or they couldn't understand some remote object linking functionality so they converted the spreadsheet into an image and embedded that. I suspect a lot of companies, and certainly most goverment offices, would be more efficient if the people who write pretty much standard letters to customers/claimants didn't have the same MS-office install as somebody editing 10,000 page technical reports for an Airbus A380. You can (or at least we used to) customize the menus/toolbars for Word to make a simplified version for secretaries that were really happier with typewriters.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Yup, I daily have to deal with Office documents that have 'pointless' formatting. A good set of templates with formatting protected could save so much time. That goes for Open/Libre Office as much as MS Office. LibreOffice has mathematical formula editing that I find much more congenial than that currently provided in MS Office 2010. (Yes I know LaTex but I'm talking casual use of simple formulas here).