During my studies I worked at the faculty, „typesetting“ the following for my professor: https://www.amazon.de/Evangelische-Akademie-DDR-Bildungsstätten-Widerstand/dp/3374024653
>700 pages in Microsoft Word in 2006. I knew about LaTeX, but was not familiar enough to convert everything to LaTeX and integrate last minute changes on top. The authors of course only knew word and the professor did editing and typesetting in parallel.
Afterwards all my academic text were written in LaTeX with Bibtex and I never looked back.
At this point I’m curious: WTF is Microsoft Word even good for? It’s like the worst-in-class tool for all things word processing, page layout, typesetting, embedding other stuff into the document, and more. Why are people still torturing themselves with this garbage? Just because it’s there? I mean, Wordpad is there too (though maybe not for much longer) but nobody uses that. It’s also garbage but still…
It’s the most reachable thing. Markdown feels like a toy for many (not me) and people outside of academia look at you kinkily if you suggest latex and bibtex.
It’s the most reachable thing. Markdown feels like a toy for many (not me)
Oh yeah. Markdown. While it does have a place, the limitations on top of my head as to why I wouldn’t use it in bigger projects:
- There is no standard in that sense, but multiple dialects / flavors
- No support for stuff you might want, e.g. alphabetical ordered lists.
It’s fine for when you know what output you produce, like for Lemmy or in a wiki or whatever. But once you want more control, you lack options or need to rely on non-“standard” (is there was one) solutions to somehow achieve it.
I think, as an easy, yet powerful solution, AsciiDoc is better-suited.
skill issue
word is fine if you know how to use it
none of its direct competitors have the same feature set, and a word processor that can give me compile time errors is not one i’m going to use with much enthusiasm
word is fine if you know how to use it
But most don’t.
I had to rewrite the CV my job coach gave me from scratch. She’s a professional and used line breaks for spacing and texts blocks for grouping. Because she didn’t know about some key concepts (like frames or line height) you learn from web editing.
and a word processor that can give me compile time errors is not one i’m going to use with much enthusiasm.
That’s what happened after i saved her mess (written in MS Office .docx) once in Libre Office and loaded it again. To be fair, this was the document formats fault.
Nobody knows how to use Word. It’s unlearnable.
But hell, it’s good in pretending to work the way people think it works. All the way until it blows and destroys all the work.
Word is not horrible as a word processor. The issue is that people try to use it to do typesetting, reference management, and all kinds of non word processor shit. And Microsoft encourages this. If you understand what the tool does it’s really a decent tool.
If you understand what the tool does it’s really a decent tool.
But most don’t. Which makes it a bad tool.
A screwdriver doesn’t become a bad screwdirver just because someone is using it to drive nails. There is a lot to hate about Microsoft, but its basic Office tools are really quite good, when used in the manner in which they were designed. There really are no meaningful competitors for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Outlook as an email client is not great, but its strength is calendaring.
Yes. LibreOffice is better in every way.
And don’t reply with “but it has problems opening Word files”. That’s cause the Word format doesn’t follow any standards. Nothing but Word can correctly open Word files (and even that only works well if they were made with the same version of Word).
It is the easiest way to let other people participate via comments and annotated changes.
Have you ever used Google Docs for that? Vastly superior. You don’t even have to send your updated version to anyone… They can see it and work on it with you in real time.
SharePoint promised to make this same functionality work but never got it right. Same for the web version of office. They’re horrible compared to Google Docs and there’s supposedly even better collab word processing tools.
Google Docs does not integrate in the typical European (or German) company and can not be deployed on premise.
If you can not control the update path (besides other obv. shortcomings) of the product it is already in a bad light when considering within an enterprise environment.
Since the AI rush I now encounter American software named alongside in requirements like:
“isn’t an american, russian or chinese product”. These requirements are stated by lawyers and product owners explicitly beforehand.
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This post brought to you by the open source Zotero committee.
I use Google Docs for anything simple (1-3 pages), and if it has no citations or more than 2 figures. After that I upgrade to LaTeX.
I had a conference demand a docx file for the paper submission. I figured “fine it can’t be that bad to use word for a simple 8 page publication” but boy was I wrong! It was torture trying to get it formatted and arranged properly. Every part of the word tool is weird and clumsy.
Oh, and they’ve completely broken the original GUI WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) premise of a GUI style editor. The PDF it creates often doesn’t look anything like what the document looks like on the screen.
I dropped a note on the conference organizers about the docx requirement. I don’t have that many hours to fuck around with bad tools so I can attend your venue. I’ll just go to a conference that doesn’t torture us to participate.
LibreOffice FTW!!!
