4 ms·

My office stack: 1. Word, if a lawyer sends me a critical document in review mode it's always Word and I want to be sure that he and the other party gets all m

by bonn1 12y ago

My office stack: 1. Word, if a lawyer sends me a critical document in review mode it's always Word and I want to be sure that he and the other party gets all my additions. Moreover, Word is performant and fully featured. I haven't seen any word processor handling a 600 pages document with over 1,500 footnotes on an 5 years old Macbook Air 11 with such an ease. The Windows version is smoother and faster though. Google Docs for collaboration stuff and really small things since it still doesn't support proper chapter numbering and many other details. 2. For big complex stuff Excel and smaller easy stuff always Google Spreadsheet b/c of the collaboration and great integration in Google Mail. BTW, the online version of Excel (Office 365) is quite nice too and very smooth and has collaboration too. 3. Presentations, clearly Keynote which is not much better than Powerpoint but the UI is more intuitive and everything looks crisper, then Powerpoint but the Windows version. Google Slides is living crap, yes you can do stuff and collaboration is great but it lacks so many features and feels often very cumbersome and tedious to work with. I tried a few times Libre Office/Open Office but the problem is: if you do serious office stuff like important presentations for board, legal documents or the next lawsuit, larger bizcases for new investors—stuff HAS to work and there are too many smaller quirks with all Libre Office apps, if you just play around a bit, yes it is very impressive 'hey an full Office for free!' but the 'free' comes with a price and to get things done under time pressure or your life is in danger this software monolith is so the wrong thing and you instantly switch back to mentioned products. And frankly, always when I use office stuff it's about serious matters, I do not open Word for fun.

cesarb 12y ago
> and to get things done under time pressure [...] you instantly switch back to mentioned products. Doesn't instantly switching to Word/Excel require you to have it installed in the first place? In your case, you already have it bought and installed so it's easy, but that's not always the case.
- bonn1 12y ago
  > but that's not always the case. True and it heavily depends on your profession. My office stack matches my profession, i.e. a designer rather cares about Adobe CS than MS Office and is happy with Google Docs. So, it depends really on what you do.
- jay_kyburz 12y ago
  I was using Google Docs in my business for several years until one day I one day I embarrassed myself point out paragraph numbers were wrong in a contract I was trying to sign. If it can't get them right, what else is it doing wrong. I had to go buy Office for Mac that day.
benbristow 12y ago
If you're looking for a presentation web-app check out Prezi. It's rather nice.
- bonn1 12y ago
  I looked at it, also quite impressive, nice animation stuff, but not always smooth presentation (low frame rate) and the presentation look too gimmicky—people think that you spend 24/7 to build a flashy presentation which doesn't make a good impression in several audiences where you sometimes need a 'dry' 80 pages consultant presentation with tons of charts and footnotes.
lbenes 12y ago
It’s funny you mentioned footnotes as being important to you. When my company was considering upgrading from Office 2003 to 2010, I pushed hard for LibreOffice. When we ran the shared drive folder though the batch converter, we found many more interoperability issue with LibreOffice than competing suites like WPS Office. Broken footnotes/endnotes was a major reoccurring issue. Four years later, and this basic word processing feature is still broken. [1] If they just focused on interoperability, they’d be much more competitive in the business world. [1] https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58521 https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58521
- mikekchar 12y ago
  You may find it interesting to note that pagination for footnotes and endnotes have always been broken in Word (and will probably continue to be broken in the future so as to maintain backward compatibility with pagination in older versions). I used to work at Corel on WordPerfect and this is practically the only reason WordPerfect is still a viable product -- the US DOJ must have correct pagination of footnotes. Your link didn't work for me, so I couldn't see what kind of bugs you are referring to, but there are probably some DOC import bugs that are practically impossible to fix because Word renders things incorrectly in the first place.
  - lbenes 12y ago
    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uJIN57kmO0YJ:https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi%3Fid%3D58521+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uJIN57k... I don’t know what style requirement the DOJ had, but I do know that when the marketing team put a footnote on one page, and LibreOffice moved it on a separate page, they considered it a serious bug. If Word renders a .doc file a certain way, LibreOffice should also render it that way regardless of what the DOJ specifies. WP was a great product. I miss those days of being able to fix most anything with reveal codes.
cgh 12y ago
Just to add an anecdotal datapoint: my wife needed to make a presentation to her faculty and I suggested she use the LibreOffice presentation software since Office wasn't installed on her laptop. She finished all of her slides, went to review them and found LO had deleted all of her images. I was swiftly kicked off my laptop while she recreated her entire presentation in PowerPoint.
- mordocai 12y ago
  Another anecdotal: That type of thing usually happens when you are trying to save as a microsoft format. I've personally not had any of issues when using the open document formats.
  - cgh 12y ago
    Nope, no conversion to MS formats were involved. I recall googling it and it is/was a known issue.
    - grandinj 12y ago
      Yeah, sorry about that. Took us a while to track down. We think we've fixed it in 4.4 (but it was one of those bugs with multiple causes)
      - codygman 12y ago
        Can you give some details and links to bugs involved?
emodendroket 12y ago
Frankly I don't think anything else has the robust automation, footnote, reference management, etc. features that Office has either. It's the emacs of word processors (right down to people constantly complaining about its "bloat").
- scholia 12y ago
  When people complain about bloat, get them to load a blank document in Google Docs and compare the resources used ;-)

by bonn1 12y ago

cesarb 12y ago

> and to get things done under time pressure [...] you instantly switch back to mentioned products. Doesn't instantly switching to Word/Excel require you to have it installed in the first place? In your case, you already have it bought and installed so it's easy, but that's not always the case.

bonn1 12y ago
> but that's not always the case. True and it heavily depends on your profession. My office stack matches my profession, i.e. a designer rather cares about Adobe CS than MS Office and is happy with Google Docs. So, it depends really on what you do.
jay_kyburz 12y ago
I was using Google Docs in my business for several years until one day I one day I embarrassed myself point out paragraph numbers were wrong in a contract I was trying to sign. If it can't get them right, what else is it doing wrong. I had to go buy Office for Mac that day.

benbristow 12y ago

If you're looking for a presentation web-app check out Prezi. It's rather nice.

bonn1 12y ago
I looked at it, also quite impressive, nice animation stuff, but not always smooth presentation (low frame rate) and the presentation look too gimmicky—people think that you spend 24/7 to build a flashy presentation which doesn't make a good impression in several audiences where you sometimes need a 'dry' 80 pages consultant presentation with tons of charts and footnotes.

lbenes 12y ago

It’s funny you mentioned footnotes as being important to you. When my company was considering upgrading from Office 2003 to 2010, I pushed hard for LibreOffice. When we ran the shared drive folder though the batch converter, we found many more interoperability issue with LibreOffice than competing suites like WPS Office. Broken footnotes/endnotes was a major reoccurring issue. Four years later, and this basic word processing feature is still broken. [1] If they just focused on interoperability, they’d be much more competitive in the business world. [1] https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58521 https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58521

mikekchar 12y ago
You may find it interesting to note that pagination for footnotes and endnotes have always been broken in Word (and will probably continue to be broken in the future so as to maintain backward compatibility with pagination in older versions). I used to work at Corel on WordPerfect and this is practically the only reason WordPerfect is still a viable product -- the US DOJ must have correct pagination of footnotes. Your link didn't work for me, so I couldn't see what kind of bugs you are referring to, but there are probably some DOC import bugs that are practically impossible to fix because Word renders things incorrectly in the first place.
- lbenes 12y ago
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uJIN57kmO0YJ:https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi%3Fid%3D58521+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uJIN57k... I don’t know what style requirement the DOJ had, but I do know that when the marketing team put a footnote on one page, and LibreOffice moved it on a separate page, they considered it a serious bug. If Word renders a .doc file a certain way, LibreOffice should also render it that way regardless of what the DOJ specifies. WP was a great product. I miss those days of being able to fix most anything with reveal codes.

cgh 12y ago

Just to add an anecdotal datapoint: my wife needed to make a presentation to her faculty and I suggested she use the LibreOffice presentation software since Office wasn't installed on her laptop. She finished all of her slides, went to review them and found LO had deleted all of her images. I was swiftly kicked off my laptop while she recreated her entire presentation in PowerPoint.

mordocai 12y ago
Another anecdotal: That type of thing usually happens when you are trying to save as a microsoft format. I've personally not had any of issues when using the open document formats.
- cgh 12y ago
  Nope, no conversion to MS formats were involved. I recall googling it and it is/was a known issue.
  - grandinj 12y ago
    Yeah, sorry about that. Took us a while to track down. We think we've fixed it in 4.4 (but it was one of those bugs with multiple causes)
    - codygman 12y ago
      Can you give some details and links to bugs involved?

emodendroket 12y ago

Frankly I don't think anything else has the robust automation, footnote, reference management, etc. features that Office has either. It's the emacs of word processors (right down to people constantly complaining about its "bloat").

scholia 12y ago
When people complain about bloat, get them to load a blank document in Google Docs and compare the resources used ;-)