> Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use.
Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b) in conformance with whatever formatting and workflow requirements their employer already had in place. Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory.
Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need. Bonus points if it also helps clueless parents design their daughter's birthday party flyer in pink and purple Comic Sans, but I don't think MS really cares because that market is miniscule compared to Big Business.
> I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother.
At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER> Because he probably realized that no other program but Big Biz MS Word would fit the use cases that it was designed for. LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.
> Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.
Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia. Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox from the "how do we get average the user to get features for nerds", and Github from the "how do we get the average non-nerd to use us")
Word's review functions appear as pretty colored bubbles and a bunch of icons on the Ribbon. It's easy enough even for Humanities professors to use on a daily basis, despite the fact that as a VCS, it's strictly inferior to something like git. Actually, I think it's popular precisely because it ain't git. Most professors who are fluent in Word's review functions would be hopelessly lost when faced with a Dropbox conflict, let alone merging git repos.
Our startup takes a third approach: automatically detect when one document is a new version of another, so that software can take care of the version control, while the humans can go on being human.
We're bringing version control to people who collaborate by email, starting with Gmail. All people have to do is exchange drafts by email (like normal!), and we infer the history, as if they've been using git.
Version control in physics research: a pile of printed documents
Collaboration in physics research: hand-written notes on margins of said pile
The issue with git etc is that everyone involved has to understand how it works and accept and appreciate the benefits over the system outlined above (which works quite well for papers with few authors). If even one author doesn't care, you cannot implement the system. And good luck getting professors to care about things that aren't research or funding.
Version control in Word (and pretty much any WYSIWYG editor) is fundamentally broken. I can't recall how many days of work I lost just because 1 out of 15 co-authors was not able to use it and fucked up everyone's text. And normally there's just 1 out of 15 that IS able to use it. If you're authoring papers on your own, heh, you could just be using pen and paper.
Yours sincerely, a graduate student whose thesis is written in LaTeX and then converted to RTF and then hand edited so his supervisor(s) can give him comments.
I sent them a link to my github repository, but they never took me up on my offer :(
Couldn't agree with you more. My SO is a PhD candidate and she doesn't know what she's missing when it comes to collaborative version control. They spend a lot of time sending around modified office docs.
No offense, but using git for collaborative writing? That's like using nukes to get rid of mosquitoes. SVN would be a poor but better choice, but you'd rather use stypi, google docs or something like that.
Yeah, our creative writing tool (backspacr.com) uses versioning at the scene/subchapter level, and it's definitely nontrivial to present diff and merge tools to end users. We're working through customer stories right now to try and do discovery on just this issue.
>At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER> Because he probably realized that no other program
Mostly because he was drugged, physically and psychologically tortured and reduced to his basic instinct and given option to experience its greatest fear or 'love' Big Brother. That's closer to real world than it being the only good option. LibreOffice needs a good compare function, not the whole review shtick.
> Mostly because he was drugged, physically and psychologically tortured and reduced to his basic instinct and given option to experience its greatest fear or 'love' Big Brother.
> Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory.
Basically, you pulled this out of your butt because it hit the right notes and because it fit the preconceived notions of the readership of HN. WYSIWYG word processing was actually pioneered at Xerox PARC and MS Word has a direct lineage from there. Fitting the office correspondence conventions of the time was the obvious place to start. In a world that still operates off of paper, this is what makes sense at first.
Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory are a direct result of the deliberate crippling of the Smalltalk runtime model that Java was based on. The very small and minimalist Smalltalk runtime model was another product of Xerox PARC, BTW.
Back in the day, even Java was one of these subversive back-door hacker/engineer things management wasn't hip enough to be a part of. (Unless you were one of the even hipper folks into Smalltalk, Dylan, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, what have you, in which case, you knew better than to fall for Java.)
Heck even SQL, Fortran, and COBOL were the new hip thing back in the day. (Even if that came with corporate backing.)
> Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory are a direct result of the deliberate crippling of the Smalltalk runtime model that Java was based on. The very small and minimalist Smalltalk runtime model was another product of Xerox PARC, BTW.
Actually, they are a consequence how easy Java allows to write such type of code and how enterprise architects design software.
I have seen EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory examples in the enterprise done in lots of languages.
The same way there are developers that write FORTRAN in any language, there are those that make Skyscrapper designs in any language.
Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing.
Then indeed, its influence over those fields should be allowed to wane.
LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right.
I was required to use the Review feature as a sort of half-assed collaborative editing system for tech specs on a couple of projects around 2008-2010. I found it to be a buggy, work-destroying trap of a feature. Things would actually have gone more smoothly for my project Microsoft had never implemented this feature.
I haven't tried any similar features in LibreOffice. If it doesn't do anything totally crazy (like randomly duplicating blocks of text in odd places) it's probably better.
I read an interview with some high-muckety-muck in the MS Office group years ago. He actually said, in response to a question about features vs. bug fixes, that he was sure users preferred new features to bug fixes for old ones. That features got people excited and no one really cared if they lost a little work every few hours.
He didn't say he'd asked any users. He was just sure.
I wish I could link to it, but I don't recall where I read it.
> he was sure users preferred new features to bug fixes for old ones
He's probably right (if you think of users as being the person who approves the payment). I can't imagine the CFO at a Fortune 500 company approving a few million dollars to be spent on bug fixes. The obvious question would be "why did we pay for defective software in the first place?".
So perhaps one side effect of the subscription model will be less buggy software, since the business model relies more on keeping users than getting them to upgrade.
At the end of the book, Winston Smith is brainwashed by a "re-education process" of pervasive intimidation. He is subjected to the persistent threat of a death sentence, and the threat of rats-eating-your-face torture. He's behaviorally lobotomized and broken by coercive psychological manipulation. ...and oh yeah, they take away his QT 3.14 too.</SPOILER>
Don't bastardize the message and theme of the book.
> Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need.
That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software.
That is all that most office workers need. So why is Office, a huge piece of software the default?
>"That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software.
That is all that most office workers need. So why is Office, a huge piece of software the default?"
Abiword's grammar checker is not nearly as good as Word's. That is specially in non-english laguanges. Also I would add to that list all the templates and design that Word brings out-of-box.
I am a weird case because I use Abiword at work and Office at home. And at least for short documents (10 pages max.) the experience on Word is just more enjoyable to me.
"That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software."
LOL seriously? Look everybody, v2 even has footnotes and -gasp- tables! And they are 'very powerful' tables, too, because you can even merge cells (in a 'non-modal dialog', no less!)
"Call me again when it gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress."
I suspect this is the ultimate longevity of Word. Retraining is a real pain. So the only way to kill Word is by a thousand cuts. One of those cuts seems to be Google's documents. A number of non-technical folks can now send me a document in Google Docs so I don't have to switch from my Linux desktop to something else to access it, and Google has done a reasonable job of auto importing Word.
So domain specific solutions, with "good enough" import/export may be the solution.
The problem is that Publishers still tend to recruit Oxbridge first eng lit grads whose computer knowledge is probably about the same as Jenn from the IT Crowd.
Unfortunately as Publishing is now having to deal with online and electronic it means they are not best placed to deal with the changes.
And book publishers have sclerotic processes (makes teh Laudry service seem slick and efficient) to take a book from delivery to publication and extra month or so playing with word is't going to make much difference
Home Edition: "People are familiar with using Office at work, so they'll probably want to use Office as well when it's time to design that Garage Sale flyer."
Student Edition: "Give them Office now at a discount, and they'll keep using (more expensive versions of) Office when they get a real job."
Office is named Office for a reason. Its entire existence revolves around the typical 20th-century white-collar office. All other use cases are secondary.
I purchased the "Home and Student Edition" for my wife to use on her new MacBook Air. A few months ago she started writing short fiction, which we have since self-published on Kindle. We had to switch to Libre Office, though, because when I contacted Microsoft support and asked them about the "Non-Commercial use" restriction, they told me writing a novel counts as commercial activity.
As someone observing and partaking in the process of migrating a large svn repository of word documents into confluence I can tell you that confluence's markup and review functionality (even with add-ons) is a very poor substitute for word. It's still beneficial to do it for the ease of access and the improved searchability and document linking abilities, but it's definitely a trade-off where you lose while you gain.
Wait. What? Have you tried collaboration with a Word before saying this? I make my living collaborating on documents in Word. Which part of it did you have a problem with? I have found only OneNote to be any better than Word but alas it lacks a bunch of Word features.
I just finished writing a lengthy grant application where the humanities professor used Word and I used LibreOffice. We used the review functionality and I didn't even know there was supposed to be a problem. Though, I don't really do more than touch the surface with word processor programs because I don't personally like them very much.
>Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing.
He pointed that out. And he pointed out that the industry was still foisting it on him. That is why he wants it to die. This was the summary at the end of the article in fact.
Curious what kind of foisting. I'm sure people might have preferred things in word format. Its just a matter of convenience. But I doubt its foisted. I've seen PDF files to be as annoyingly common particularly in academia. I hate it but I get around by just saving my document as PDF and move on. He's just being overly dramatic.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with.
I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents.
I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working fast than new features.
And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking things for no good reason.
> I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. ... Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents.
Microsoft Word is also a styles-based tool, and produces nicely-formatted documents that are consistent with a stylesheet.
I tried doing that in Word once, it's nowhere near the solid foundation that actual style sheets provide (thinking of CSS/HTML here).
I only needed to style H1, H2, P, EM and possibly A (they don't have those names in Word, but you get the point). That's probably the simplest document structures you can have for a task that reasonably makes use of styles.
The biggest problem was, those styles are like liquid, slipping between your fingers as you work with them. You do one thing to the text and suddenly you find yourself in a style that's "adapted" from a style you've already defined, I think I've even encountered a new hybrid style between two of my user-defined ones. And then there's of course the "built in" paragraph and heading styles, occasionally thrown into the mix as well.
The point is, this is not at all like an actual style sheet based way of working, such as with CSS/HTML. You could get the above result by using (bad) code such as <h2><p><em>OOPS</em></p></h2>, you'd also get a mix of three styles. But the thing is, in Word, all these new hybrid styles got added to the style sheet!
So get this, I wrote part of a document, decided (as long as I have to do this in Word ..) I'd use style sheets, made the styles, continued writing on the document and the existing styles changed as I moved bits of text around.
Not having exactly that happen, is one of the main reasons to have a strict separation of content and style in the first place, is it not?
I'm sorry but, I don't think Word actually supports "styles". It's got some stuff that kind of looks like styles, but once you actually try to use it, it'll just waste your time at exactly those moments where you'd expect a proper styles system to save you time.
At some point I had finished the content and I decided to make the H2 a bit bigger font. With styles that should be the easiest thing right? Haha! Right. That's when you get to see all the adapted styles that suddenly appeared in your H2's markup, and they don't change along. So instead of just changing your styles, you are going to have to edit your document content anyway.
The whole experience was very, very messy. In hindsight I'd have preferred to keep the "style sheet" in my head and apply all the markup manually, like most people do, instead of relying on the program to take care of this for me, but wasting my time instead. No wonder that's the route most people seem to take.
(disclaimer: this experience was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now and styles are actually styles and don't change while editing your content, and are in fact either applied to some part of the content or not, and not somewhere in between)
I'm an avid user of Pages because of its consistent UI. But it's still lacking a very important feature for the usecases you mentioned: cross referencing and bibliography.
As an aside: Did you know that you can create a halfway decent xhtml from Pages documents by exporting to epub and extracting the embedded documents? I've used that in the past to create a simple database my wife can edit using the tools she knows (Pages) by converting that stuff to an xml db. You can even script all the intermediate steps using AppleScript. As a platform to hack on, OSX can combine the strengths of Unix with the UI scriptability of Windows OLE.
+1 for Pages. I once sent a .pages document to a friend on Linux. I was genuinely surprised when he could read it. Turns out .pages is actually a zip file, that when extracted, has a PDF inside.
Pages has always scaled fine for me, however Numbers will choke on a gigabyte-sized CSV. I tried to, import the US census data into it. I couldn't get Numbers to work. It crashed every time. Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.
> Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.
Although Excel has since been corrected for this use case[1], it isn't even the right Office tool for the job. That's what they created Access for.
[1]The SQL Server team built PowerPivot for Excel 2010+, which basically imports your data into a SQL db that gets embedded into the Excel file and transparently queried from Excel proper. Runs smooth as butter, and pacifies the Excel purists who refuse to lower themselves into using Access (I've worked with several of said purists).
So if I use LaTeX and it gives me the results I want and I don't find myself spending inordinate amounts of time tweaking things, does that make me an intermediate user? I guess I had better stop learning.
I think you hit a local extremum, so yes, I'd advise you to stay there :-)
The day will come when you will need those two figures side-by-side, together with a caption positioned just right. Or a table that spans multiple pages and has multi-column cells. Or, heaven forbid, you will need to submit your bibliography in a byzantine format invented by someone with nothing better to do ("we take pride in the fact that we place a period after author's names").
LaTeX also has another problem: even if you know it, getting from a document.tex file with 0 bytes to a document that looks good takes much longer than it should. By "looks good" I mean doesn't use Computer Modern, and overall doesn't look like a thesis from the 70s.
This just goes to show you the shabby general state of word processing software. I've been looking for something better than OO/Libre/MSWord/etc for years and avoided using LaTeX because the workflow is _so_ 80's. However, having recently decided to give up, and switched to using LaTeX, my worksheets, course notes, exams, and presentations have never looked better, and take about the same time, or less to create. I'll also be able to do things like randomize the order of exam questions and create individual grading keys in a way that makes sense to me.
To be fair, I would advise almost no one to do the same. Something better is needed[1], but I think that most potential competitors know better than to attempt to challenge MS Word.
[1] And, indeed Google Docs is usually passable and offers some advantages.
I love LaTeX, I wrote a physics PhD thesis in it and many papers as well. It works phenomenally well up until the point it doesn't work at all. And when you need to go fix something it is a deep and frustrating rabbit hole in my experience.
I think LaTeX simply doesn't live up to its promise. Yes, its a big improvement over Word, but I still find myself manually adding \newpages, rewriting paragraphs and shuffling text around because figures are placed in completely awkward places or you have pages with just one line of text and a sea of white.
That is in addition to the horrors you unleash once something stops working and you need to dig deeper. dvi2pdf..
Over the last couple of years I have migrated my workflow away from MS Office products (Word/Excel/VBA/PowerPoint) to LaTeX, R, Sweave/knitr.
These tools play well with git and make it easy to automate an analysis. I am a strong believer in literate programming - embedding the code in the documentation where feasible. There are case where it is not (long Monte Carlo simulations) but I can at least pull in the results and have the source code that generated them in version control and the report automatically uses the latest version.
Microsoft kept changing VBA and each release would break things. We had third party tools that had locked VBA modules and ours just wouldn't permit processing data in these workbooks.
I can extract all the data with R and am much happier. The Open Source community seems to better support their products than Microsoft. Go figure...
I came here to say the same thing. The first time I opened up Pages, I was amazed by its relative simplicity and elegance. It actually reminds me a lot of what Word 4.0 was like for the Mac, way back in 1990. I use it for all my personal things, and then Google Docs for business things.
So I don't know why the original article suggests competition is dead -- unfortunately Pages is not cross-platform, but Google Docs is certainly a worthy, simpler competitor (though perhaps too simple).
The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
It's been over a decade since I was a regular, daily Excel user ("power user", frankly). I still, today, haven't seen anything that matches what Excel was already back then.
It has its quirks. It's also damned powerful and optimized.
(I guess that's including its program-ability and the ability to interface it with external functionality via Win32 et al. I remember, for example, referencing IE 4, then 5, in order to "add" regex's to it via VBA scripting. Actually, as I recall that was actually Windows Scripting Host; installing the relevant version of IE at that time in turn caused WSH to also be installed.)
P.S. I was not number crunching during the Lotus heydays. I gather its products had some features that were unparalleled for their time and that Excel may never have fully matched.
P.P.S. As for quirks, I remember one bit of oddity emanating from a formatting function that an older programmer associated with a Fortran convention, when I happened to describe it to him.
I’m by no means an Excel power user, but Apple Numbers provides everything I need in a spreadsheet app. I have native Numbers apps on my laptop, desktop, tablet, and phone (but there’s also a web app). Whenever I save a file on one device, it’s automatically added to all the others. A file created on my laptop can be edited on my phone and vice versa. Also, Apple Numbers imports and exports Excel documents. As a result, I haven’t opened Excel in over a year and I doubt I’ll ever buy another upgrade.
Excel may not be replaceable for everyone, especially if you’re using it in a corporate setting, but for me, I have found I can easily do without. I find Apple Numbers to be way more user-friendly and convenient.
So Numbers is a good, platform-locked spreadsheet editor for simple uses?
Dropbox+Excel seems like it would do the same thing, but even with more flexibility (including version control, document sharing) and supporting even more platforms.
I don't think you can ever consider spreadsheet software to be 'user friendly'. They're spreadsheets.
Excel is a seriously powerful tool, it is quite frankly amazing what can be done in Excel.
I have worked with Excel-based trading systems with tens of thousands of lines of VBA code, controlling systems that trade hundreds of millions of USD.
If Excel stopped working today, by tomorrow the stock markets would likely be in a blood bath, such is the ubiquitousness of Excel in that field.
Excel's major problem is the ease in which point/click/copy/paste generates errors. There have been several recent cases where off-by-one cell errors have caused authors issues. This was one part of the Duke scandal (the fraud was much worse, but the Excel was sloppy) and put egg on some Harvard Econ prof's faces - to the delight of the UMASS grad student that found it...
How many other software products have entire groups and conferences dedicated to tracking and mitigating the problems they cause? http://www.eusprig.org/
Having problems is not the operative issue. It's userbase. All software has problems; Excel is one of the projects that has a large enough userbase that you can schedule conferences about its problems.
P.S. "EDA" is of course more than one tool, but it's close to the right scope and what jumps to mind right now.
It's really difficult to say whether the replacement for outlook will be a piece of software for the desktop, a web-based solution a la gmail/google calendar, or a powerful iPhone/android/bb app
I absolutely agree. And while I hate VBA, it makes excel that much more powerful. It even makes up for some of the bugs in excel such as absolute references from a different workbook doesn't transpose using the built in transpose function. However, using the built in copy / paste formula functionality, it works fine. In this case, a simple macro which takes 5 mins to write will resolve this otherwise annoying bug.
Although the most annoying thing about Excel is actually the users who insist on using it like a database...
OOo/LO is a straight forward clone of MS Office. It shares all its design weaknesses and adds some of its own. Except foor freedom, I don't see any reason for using it over MS Office.
At home? False premise: It has replaced Word (for me.)
That it has not for everyone or as a whole doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest. There are plenty of reasons to use Word. Aside from the fact that it's solid itself, it also has a metric ton of inertia. Those using it already have the license or pirated copy, already know it, have legacy documents using it, and are generally otherwise are left with very little reason to switch to something merely because it's a "solid alternative."
How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.
LO and other openoffice suites are progeny of StarOffice, originally released in 1985. Even with such a long development history, there are deep compatibility issues which make it unacceptable for the "power users" that comprise the most profitable segment of the market.
And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100+ page specs (some exceeding 500 pages) needed to properly parse excel files. An incomplete list (which you can find by searching for the keyword):
But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects (I'm sure I am missing some really good libraries here, so don't consider this a comprehensive list):
To have something objectively better - 100% compatibility with Excel + major limitations and bugs fixed + cross platform - more like tens of billions of dollars.
Excel is 28 years old and for its entire lifetime it has been one of the focal points of Microsoft development. It is also the center of one of the biggest cottage industries in the software world + servers as an SDK for probably hundreds of thousands of in-house developers.
I think such an effort is just an order of magnitude smaller than replacing Windows on desktop systems. And that's saying a lot about Excel :)
"How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K?"
That is one full time developer for a year, not counting any project management etc. If we say that so far, there has been spend 1000 man years on Open/Libre Office (I'm just making that number up, it has been under development for decades and probably with more than 20 devs working on it, so it's probably more, but let's say 1000, and not even count all the project management / user feedback / documentation work etc); then still you're saying that bringing Libre Office to the level of MS Office is within 0.1 resp 1 % of completion. I hope I don't need to argue how that is prima facie nonsense.
And what happens when you do? Pay them again to keep maintaining the code base? Problem is few products can find a sustainable business model around open source.
So true. Excel can now be seen as some sort of platform rather just some number handling software. There is a real lock in when hundreds to thousands of lines of scripting and data bindings have been written to manage often critical parts of someone's business.
I wonder if there will ever be a shift to a future incarnation of hypercard, or some other mainstream oriented 'programming' platform that would displace Excel.
I'm inclined to believe you're right. I once worked in a large actuarial shop that did a great deal of its own custom software (they had over 100 developers). Excel was the primary tool used by the actuaries.
I would say that Outlook is probably the most unique in the office suite, though feel it really should be spun off and bundled with Exchange again, which is where it really shines. Outlook + Lync are a pretty impressive combination.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint all have viable alternatives in LibreOffice. I also really like OneNote as well. The biggest reason I don't use the MS products more, is that I happen to run Mac, Windows and Linux regularly on my different computers. More of my development work is now targeting Linux than Windows, which leaves me less tied to it.
I'd also like to see the Office org split out, and let free to target non-MS platforms more.. would love a better Office solution for Android. And, I'm sure iPad users would appreciate it too.
Yes, it has quirks! Yet I'll choose Excel over Word when I have a choice (e.g. lists, things in tables). Word is generally frustrating. Excel is generally a good experience.
> Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.
Replace "Word" with "HTML". Now is it still the abominable dichotomy the OP is claiming?
Although I think Word sucks in many ways, letting users combine style sheet and local formatting doesn't seem like the Original Sin from which all evil flowed.
"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident "
They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.
Indeed, disk transfer speed mattered a great deal in the early days. People used to save all their data to floppy disks, and use their hard disks only to load programs.
Say you had a large document of 600 KB size. Floppy drives wrote at 45 KB/second. Imagine waiting 13 seconds for your file to save out. You might save less often -- which means that you ran a correspondingly higher risk of losing data.
The .DOC file is a binary format so that it could contain document "sections," with pointers between the sections. This is what made "Fast Save" possible. If you only made a small change to an enormous document, Word would simply append the changes, and then change the pointers in the rest of the document.
Instead of waiting 13 seconds, you'd get the save in under a second.
Word is IMO just fine for most uses. It has lots of features and lots of ways of writing and designing documents because users wanted them. You can't blame a product on its users.
And note the 'IMO' bit: Why on earth do people think that because they don't like a piece of software, they want to force all the other happy users to stop using it. It's just selfishness and self-importance. The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices.
> The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices.
Choice- singular. The real problem with Word, as highlighted in OP's post, is its longstanding market dominance & attitude of outright hostility towards interoperability.
Just read the rest of the comments, there are plenty of alternatives. The author isn't complaining about a lack of choices, either. Instead, he is moaning that other people have made a different choice from him.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of writers were less technically savvy, happiest writing in Word, or simply wouldn't know how to write in any other format. It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style and ability, and only have to deal with converting one format into a final publication.
I do feel that this is one of those cases where you should be able to write in the way you feel best for you, and if the publisher insist on having the final document in a word format, it should be straightforward to convert your chosen representation to theirs. It's hard to say without knowing precisely how the publisher expects the file to be formatted, but if it's fairly straightforward, there are libraries that will write to doc files for you, or there are open formats that MS Word already knows how to convert into .doc files that you could target instead.
Arguing this is the exceptional case misses his point, I think.
He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct.
In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament: "the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems."
Some examples:
∙ Hard science research are the poster child where "Word slave labor" happens daily
∙ Math research, fortunately there's a lot the web can do but still the Word drudgery
∙ Engineering research
∙ Self-published and indie writers (Scrivener definitely has made a splash)
∙ Law
Who cares? Well, if you want to make a lot of money, these people would throw their money at you if you could ease their pain a little bit.
The publishers get a lot of bad press for other things they do (like Aaron Schwartz), but they're still wrong about MS Word being a publishing platform.
Wordperfect still is very popular in law offices. Lawyers love the "make it fit" feature, which word doesn't have. Lawyers are always trying to put 17 ounces into a 16 ounce glass.
Maybe I had a unique experience, but when I was in grad school (chemical engineering) we exclusively used LaTeX for thesis work. The journals we worked with also required it, if I recall correctly.
Since when do mathematicians ever use word for any reason? I believe you're more likely to see published math research written in Crayola markers than in Word.
Many authors do already do this. I'm not sure if Charles Stross is complaining about having to write in Word, or simply use a workflow where Word is the end output for the author. The latter makes more sense as a complaint than the former, because I know many published authors (writing runs in the family) who use tools like Scrivener to write and then send it on to their agents / publishers as an exported .doc without any problems.
It could be worse, at least he's not writing scripts (which generally mandate you to use Final Draft)...
Publisher's workflow now insists on copy editors using Word with change tracking to mark up submitted manuscripts. The author then gets a copy of the marked-up MS to check. Which means having to use at least a tool compatible with MS change tracking on .doc files. So I'm blissfully Word-free until I hit "compile" in Scrivener ... but after the output file (RTF) goes to the publisher it comes back to me as a Word document with tracked changes and I have to dive into the turbid depths once more.
> It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style [...]
One problem with Word is exactly that it is very difficult to get anything remotely consistent out of it. Even people who are very knowledgeable and smart are unable to use that hodgepodge of completely intransparent styling features correctly. Anything involving numbering and bullets tends to be broken as well.
There's no way a publisher gets a consistently styled document from an author. I don't believe that for a second. I'm absolutely certain that publishers have an army of interns who fix the jumbled mess they're receiving from authors.
Ah, this is me being misleading, I didn't mean the styling of the document was important(well, until it gets sent to publication, where I am sure you're right about the interns), I really meant the ability and tools to edit/review/track changes and highlight/annotate sections they want changed.
Imagine looking for a style every time you needed to italicize a letter. Body text, italicized. Header, italicized. Subtitle, italicized.
Why not let the user italicize, and then let Word itself find the style? Because that's what happens behind the scenes. If you italicize some Header 2 text, Word will create a new style "Header 2 + Italics." If you italicize some more Header 2 text, Word will reuse the existing style.
You can actually open the styles palette and decide to change all "Header 2 + Italics" to be boldface instead of italicized.
Word is a styles-based word processor internally. All the ad-hoc formatting you do gets turned into an anonymous style.
Readit News
Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b) in conformance with whatever formatting and workflow requirements their employer already had in place. Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory.
Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need. Bonus points if it also helps clueless parents design their daughter's birthday party flyer in pink and purple Comic Sans, but I don't think MS really cares because that market is miniscule compared to Big Business.
> I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother.
At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER> Because he probably realized that no other program but Big Biz MS Word would fit the use cases that it was designed for. LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.
Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia. Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox from the "how do we get average the user to get features for nerds", and Github from the "how do we get the average non-nerd to use us")
Word's review functions appear as pretty colored bubbles and a bunch of icons on the Ribbon. It's easy enough even for Humanities professors to use on a daily basis, despite the fact that as a VCS, it's strictly inferior to something like git. Actually, I think it's popular precisely because it ain't git. Most professors who are fluent in Word's review functions would be hopelessly lost when faced with a Dropbox conflict, let alone merging git repos.
We're bringing version control to people who collaborate by email, starting with Gmail. All people have to do is exchange drafts by email (like normal!), and we infer the history, as if they've been using git.
We're looking for beta testers:
https://draftable.com
Collaboration in physics research: hand-written notes on margins of said pile
The issue with git etc is that everyone involved has to understand how it works and accept and appreciate the benefits over the system outlined above (which works quite well for papers with few authors). If even one author doesn't care, you cannot implement the system. And good luck getting professors to care about things that aren't research or funding.
Yours sincerely, a graduate student whose thesis is written in LaTeX and then converted to RTF and then hand edited so his supervisor(s) can give him comments.
I sent them a link to my github repository, but they never took me up on my offer :(
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Mostly because he was drugged, physically and psychologically tortured and reduced to his basic instinct and given option to experience its greatest fear or 'love' Big Brother. That's closer to real world than it being the only good option. LibreOffice needs a good compare function, not the whole review shtick.
Sounds remarkably like using Microsoft Office.
Basically, you pulled this out of your butt because it hit the right notes and because it fit the preconceived notions of the readership of HN. WYSIWYG word processing was actually pioneered at Xerox PARC and MS Word has a direct lineage from there. Fitting the office correspondence conventions of the time was the obvious place to start. In a world that still operates off of paper, this is what makes sense at first.
Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory are a direct result of the deliberate crippling of the Smalltalk runtime model that Java was based on. The very small and minimalist Smalltalk runtime model was another product of Xerox PARC, BTW.
Back in the day, even Java was one of these subversive back-door hacker/engineer things management wasn't hip enough to be a part of. (Unless you were one of the even hipper folks into Smalltalk, Dylan, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, what have you, in which case, you knew better than to fall for Java.)
Heck even SQL, Fortran, and COBOL were the new hip thing back in the day. (Even if that came with corporate backing.)
Actually, they are a consequence how easy Java allows to write such type of code and how enterprise architects design software.
I have seen EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory examples in the enterprise done in lots of languages.
The same way there are developers that write FORTRAN in any language, there are those that make Skyscrapper designs in any language.
Then indeed, its influence over those fields should be allowed to wane.
LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right.
I was required to use the Review feature as a sort of half-assed collaborative editing system for tech specs on a couple of projects around 2008-2010. I found it to be a buggy, work-destroying trap of a feature. Things would actually have gone more smoothly for my project Microsoft had never implemented this feature.
I haven't tried any similar features in LibreOffice. If it doesn't do anything totally crazy (like randomly duplicating blocks of text in odd places) it's probably better.
I read an interview with some high-muckety-muck in the MS Office group years ago. He actually said, in response to a question about features vs. bug fixes, that he was sure users preferred new features to bug fixes for old ones. That features got people excited and no one really cared if they lost a little work every few hours.
He didn't say he'd asked any users. He was just sure.
I wish I could link to it, but I don't recall where I read it.
He's probably right (if you think of users as being the person who approves the payment). I can't imagine the CFO at a Fortune 500 company approving a few million dollars to be spent on bug fixes. The obvious question would be "why did we pay for defective software in the first place?".
So perhaps one side effect of the subscription model will be less buggy software, since the business model relies more on keeping users than getting them to upgrade.
Don't bastardize the message and theme of the book.
That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software.
That is all that most office workers need. So why is Office, a huge piece of software the default?
Abiword's grammar checker is not nearly as good as Word's. That is specially in non-english laguanges. Also I would add to that list all the templates and design that Word brings out-of-box.
I am a weird case because I use Abiword at work and Office at home. And at least for short documents (10 pages max.) the experience on Word is just more enjoyable to me.
LOL seriously? Look everybody, v2 even has footnotes and -gasp- tables! And they are 'very powerful' tables, too, because you can even merge cells (in a 'non-modal dialog', no less!)
(oh, and last release version - 2009).
Most users don't care so much about the "size" so much as the cost.
I suspect this is the ultimate longevity of Word. Retraining is a real pain. So the only way to kill Word is by a thousand cuts. One of those cuts seems to be Google's documents. A number of non-technical folks can now send me a document in Google Docs so I don't have to switch from my Linux desktop to something else to access it, and Google has done a reasonable job of auto importing Word.
So domain specific solutions, with "good enough" import/export may be the solution.
Unfortunately as Publishing is now having to deal with online and electronic it means they are not best placed to deal with the changes.
And book publishers have sclerotic processes (makes teh Laudry service seem slick and efficient) to take a book from delivery to publication and extra month or so playing with word is't going to make much difference
And that's why they released a "Home and Student Edition".
Student Edition: "Give them Office now at a discount, and they'll keep using (more expensive versions of) Office when they get a real job."
Office is named Office for a reason. Its entire existence revolves around the typical 20th-century white-collar office. All other use cases are secondary.
Confluence? Twiki? Or equal such centralised documentaiotn and revision service, be it SaaS or locally hosted, Yes.
He pointed that out. And he pointed out that the industry was still foisting it on him. That is why he wants it to die. This was the summary at the end of the article in fact.
I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents.
I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working fast than new features.
And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking things for no good reason.
Microsoft Word is also a styles-based tool, and produces nicely-formatted documents that are consistent with a stylesheet.
The problem is that people don't use the styles.
I only needed to style H1, H2, P, EM and possibly A (they don't have those names in Word, but you get the point). That's probably the simplest document structures you can have for a task that reasonably makes use of styles.
The biggest problem was, those styles are like liquid, slipping between your fingers as you work with them. You do one thing to the text and suddenly you find yourself in a style that's "adapted" from a style you've already defined, I think I've even encountered a new hybrid style between two of my user-defined ones. And then there's of course the "built in" paragraph and heading styles, occasionally thrown into the mix as well.
The point is, this is not at all like an actual style sheet based way of working, such as with CSS/HTML. You could get the above result by using (bad) code such as <h2><p><em>OOPS</em></p></h2>, you'd also get a mix of three styles. But the thing is, in Word, all these new hybrid styles got added to the style sheet!
So get this, I wrote part of a document, decided (as long as I have to do this in Word ..) I'd use style sheets, made the styles, continued writing on the document and the existing styles changed as I moved bits of text around.
Not having exactly that happen, is one of the main reasons to have a strict separation of content and style in the first place, is it not?
I'm sorry but, I don't think Word actually supports "styles". It's got some stuff that kind of looks like styles, but once you actually try to use it, it'll just waste your time at exactly those moments where you'd expect a proper styles system to save you time.
At some point I had finished the content and I decided to make the H2 a bit bigger font. With styles that should be the easiest thing right? Haha! Right. That's when you get to see all the adapted styles that suddenly appeared in your H2's markup, and they don't change along. So instead of just changing your styles, you are going to have to edit your document content anyway.
The whole experience was very, very messy. In hindsight I'd have preferred to keep the "style sheet" in my head and apply all the markup manually, like most people do, instead of relying on the program to take care of this for me, but wasting my time instead. No wonder that's the route most people seem to take.
(disclaimer: this experience was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now and styles are actually styles and don't change while editing your content, and are in fact either applied to some part of the content or not, and not somewhere in between)
As an aside: Did you know that you can create a halfway decent xhtml from Pages documents by exporting to epub and extracting the embedded documents? I've used that in the past to create a simple database my wife can edit using the tools she knows (Pages) by converting that stuff to an xml db. You can even script all the intermediate steps using AppleScript. As a platform to hack on, OSX can combine the strengths of Unix with the UI scriptability of Windows OLE.
Pages has always scaled fine for me, however Numbers will choke on a gigabyte-sized CSV. I tried to, import the US census data into it. I couldn't get Numbers to work. It crashed every time. Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.
Although Excel has since been corrected for this use case[1], it isn't even the right Office tool for the job. That's what they created Access for.
[1]The SQL Server team built PowerPivot for Excel 2010+, which basically imports your data into a SQL db that gets embedded into the Excel file and transparently queried from Excel proper. Runs smooth as butter, and pacifies the Excel purists who refuse to lower themselves into using Access (I've worked with several of said purists).
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The day will come when you will need those two figures side-by-side, together with a caption positioned just right. Or a table that spans multiple pages and has multi-column cells. Or, heaven forbid, you will need to submit your bibliography in a byzantine format invented by someone with nothing better to do ("we take pride in the fact that we place a period after author's names").
LaTeX also has another problem: even if you know it, getting from a document.tex file with 0 bytes to a document that looks good takes much longer than it should. By "looks good" I mean doesn't use Computer Modern, and overall doesn't look like a thesis from the 70s.
To be fair, I would advise almost no one to do the same. Something better is needed[1], but I think that most potential competitors know better than to attempt to challenge MS Word.
[1] And, indeed Google Docs is usually passable and offers some advantages.
That is in addition to the horrors you unleash once something stops working and you need to dig deeper. dvi2pdf..
These tools play well with git and make it easy to automate an analysis. I am a strong believer in literate programming - embedding the code in the documentation where feasible. There are case where it is not (long Monte Carlo simulations) but I can at least pull in the results and have the source code that generated them in version control and the report automatically uses the latest version.
Microsoft kept changing VBA and each release would break things. We had third party tools that had locked VBA modules and ours just wouldn't permit processing data in these workbooks.
I can extract all the data with R and am much happier. The Open Source community seems to better support their products than Microsoft. Go figure...
So I don't know why the original article suggests competition is dead -- unfortunately Pages is not cross-platform, but Google Docs is certainly a worthy, simpler competitor (though perhaps too simple).
It has its quirks. It's also damned powerful and optimized.
(I guess that's including its program-ability and the ability to interface it with external functionality via Win32 et al. I remember, for example, referencing IE 4, then 5, in order to "add" regex's to it via VBA scripting. Actually, as I recall that was actually Windows Scripting Host; installing the relevant version of IE at that time in turn caused WSH to also be installed.)
P.S. I was not number crunching during the Lotus heydays. I gather its products had some features that were unparalleled for their time and that Excel may never have fully matched.
P.P.S. As for quirks, I remember one bit of oddity emanating from a formatting function that an older programmer associated with a Fortran convention, when I happened to describe it to him.
http://siag.nu/
(At least it's not trivial to get it to compile on a modern Linux distro as far as I can tell...).
Not that it's really a replacement for excel for all users, but it was an interesting package.
I’m by no means an Excel power user, but Apple Numbers provides everything I need in a spreadsheet app. I have native Numbers apps on my laptop, desktop, tablet, and phone (but there’s also a web app). Whenever I save a file on one device, it’s automatically added to all the others. A file created on my laptop can be edited on my phone and vice versa. Also, Apple Numbers imports and exports Excel documents. As a result, I haven’t opened Excel in over a year and I doubt I’ll ever buy another upgrade.
Excel may not be replaceable for everyone, especially if you’re using it in a corporate setting, but for me, I have found I can easily do without. I find Apple Numbers to be way more user-friendly and convenient.
Dropbox+Excel seems like it would do the same thing, but even with more flexibility (including version control, document sharing) and supporting even more platforms.
I don't think you can ever consider spreadsheet software to be 'user friendly'. They're spreadsheets.
I have worked with Excel-based trading systems with tens of thousands of lines of VBA code, controlling systems that trade hundreds of millions of USD.
If Excel stopped working today, by tomorrow the stock markets would likely be in a blood bath, such is the ubiquitousness of Excel in that field.
Having worked with some VBA myself, this sounds like a very, very, scary statement.
That something is powerful enough to do the job does not mean that it is a good tool to do the job.
Each localized version stored function names as localized strings!!! So format was not even compatible across the same version.
https://github.com/python-excel/xlrd/blob/master/xlrd/formul...
Having problems is not the operative issue. It's userbase. All software has problems; Excel is one of the projects that has a large enough userbase that you can schedule conferences about its problems.
P.S. "EDA" is of course more than one tool, but it's close to the right scope and what jumps to mind right now.
Exchange as well.
Although the most annoying thing about Excel is actually the users who insist on using it like a database...
Are you sure? Does it not strike you as odd that OpenOffice/LibreOffice still haven't managed to replace Word?
That it has not for everyone or as a whole doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest. There are plenty of reasons to use Word. Aside from the fact that it's solid itself, it also has a metric ton of inertia. Those using it already have the license or pirated copy, already know it, have legacy documents using it, and are generally otherwise are left with very little reason to switch to something merely because it's a "solid alternative."
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And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100+ page specs (some exceeding 500 pages) needed to properly parse excel files. An incomplete list (which you can find by searching for the keyword):
MS-XLS, MS-CFB, MS-ODRAW, MS-ODRAWXML, MS-OGRAPH, MS-OFFCRYPTO, MS-RMPR, MS-OVBA, MS-OSHARED, MS-CTXLS, ECMA-376, MS-OLEDS, MS-OLEPS, MS-DTYP, MS-XLSB, MS-OFORMS, MS-VBAL, MS-OAUT, MS-DCOM, MS-XLSX
But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects (I'm sure I am missing some really good libraries here, so don't consider this a comprehensive list):
https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx (go, xlsx read)
https://poi.apache.org/ (java)
https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx (javascript, xlsx read)
https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls (javascript, xls read)
https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/ (php)
http://www.python-excel.org/ (python, based on openoffice )
https://github.com/randym/axlsx (ruby, xlsx write)
https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table (ruby, xls/xlsx read)
Excel is 28 years old and for its entire lifetime it has been one of the focal points of Microsoft development. It is also the center of one of the biggest cottage industries in the software world + servers as an SDK for probably hundreds of thousands of in-house developers.
I think such an effort is just an order of magnitude smaller than replacing Windows on desktop systems. And that's saying a lot about Excel :)
That is one full time developer for a year, not counting any project management etc. If we say that so far, there has been spend 1000 man years on Open/Libre Office (I'm just making that number up, it has been under development for decades and probably with more than 20 devs working on it, so it's probably more, but let's say 1000, and not even count all the project management / user feedback / documentation work etc); then still you're saying that bringing Libre Office to the level of MS Office is within 0.1 resp 1 % of completion. I hope I don't need to argue how that is prima facie nonsense.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
(I realise I'm not answering you. I'm bad at estimates)
I wonder if there will ever be a shift to a future incarnation of hypercard, or some other mainstream oriented 'programming' platform that would displace Excel.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint all have viable alternatives in LibreOffice. I also really like OneNote as well. The biggest reason I don't use the MS products more, is that I happen to run Mac, Windows and Linux regularly on my different computers. More of my development work is now targeting Linux than Windows, which leaves me less tied to it.
I'd also like to see the Office org split out, and let free to target non-MS platforms more.. would love a better Office solution for Android. And, I'm sure iPad users would appreciate it too.
Anyone engaging in any sort of historical research?
Replace "Word" with "HTML". Now is it still the abominable dichotomy the OP is claiming?
Although I think Word sucks in many ways, letting users combine style sheet and local formatting doesn't seem like the Original Sin from which all evil flowed.
They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.
Say you had a large document of 600 KB size. Floppy drives wrote at 45 KB/second. Imagine waiting 13 seconds for your file to save out. You might save less often -- which means that you ran a correspondingly higher risk of losing data.
The .DOC file is a binary format so that it could contain document "sections," with pointers between the sections. This is what made "Fast Save" possible. If you only made a small change to an enormous document, Word would simply append the changes, and then change the pointers in the rest of the document.
Instead of waiting 13 seconds, you'd get the save in under a second.
And note the 'IMO' bit: Why on earth do people think that because they don't like a piece of software, they want to force all the other happy users to stop using it. It's just selfishness and self-importance. The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices.
Choice- singular. The real problem with Word, as highlighted in OP's post, is its longstanding market dominance & attitude of outright hostility towards interoperability.
I do feel that this is one of those cases where you should be able to write in the way you feel best for you, and if the publisher insist on having the final document in a word format, it should be straightforward to convert your chosen representation to theirs. It's hard to say without knowing precisely how the publisher expects the file to be formatted, but if it's fairly straightforward, there are libraries that will write to doc files for you, or there are open formats that MS Word already knows how to convert into .doc files that you could target instead.
He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct.
In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament: "the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems."
Some examples:
∙ Hard science research are the poster child where "Word slave labor" happens daily
∙ Math research, fortunately there's a lot the web can do but still the Word drudgery
∙ Engineering research
∙ Self-published and indie writers (Scrivener definitely has made a splash)
∙ Law
Who cares? Well, if you want to make a lot of money, these people would throw their money at you if you could ease their pain a little bit.
The publishers get a lot of bad press for other things they do (like Aaron Schwartz), but they're still wrong about MS Word being a publishing platform.
It could be worse, at least he's not writing scripts (which generally mandate you to use Final Draft)...
One problem with Word is exactly that it is very difficult to get anything remotely consistent out of it. Even people who are very knowledgeable and smart are unable to use that hodgepodge of completely intransparent styling features correctly. Anything involving numbering and bullets tends to be broken as well.
There's no way a publisher gets a consistently styled document from an author. I don't believe that for a second. I'm absolutely certain that publishers have an army of interns who fix the jumbled mess they're receiving from authors.
No. That's the "developers" point of view (and a false dichotomy)
Word is focused on the user. If the user wants to italicise one letter, it's OK to let him do it. Sometimes it's a requirement
Of course, the problem with Word is that you can't debug the mess it creates when it doesn't work the way you wanted.
Why not let the user italicize, and then let Word itself find the style? Because that's what happens behind the scenes. If you italicize some Header 2 text, Word will create a new style "Header 2 + Italics." If you italicize some more Header 2 text, Word will reuse the existing style.
You can actually open the styles palette and decide to change all "Header 2 + Italics" to be boldface instead of italicized.
Word is a styles-based word processor internally. All the ad-hoc formatting you do gets turned into an anonymous style.