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Time to Kill Microsoft Word?
Allnighterking writes "Apparently the frustration with another Windows Product is starting to reach increasingly visible users. John Dvorak over at ABC News is starting to question if it's time to kill Word With Viable options like Open Office.org available for Windows as well as AbiWord and others. Since they are both using XML as a way to create the documents. Or perhaps dropping a separate application altogether and going with something like X Forms to create a browser based office suite."
Am I the only one who noticed the guy's last name, Dvorak, and thought it might be a pen name for a tech writer? If not, it seems that he was destined for his job.
As nice and progressive as this sounds, the likelihood of a mass migration away from Word is highly unlikely. As an employee at a large tech company I see many daily reports in Powerpoint, Word and Excel. There are thousands upon thousands of these reports archived on network drives. How likely is it that a CEO/CFO/etc.. is going to mandate the transfer of all these documents to OpenOffice/Abiword/Etc.. ?
Where the Music Matters
I put Lotus SmartSuite on my box in '93 and used 2 versions through '02. OO is now the only way to go.
I was worried about the old Macro virus problem and avoided it by never owning a copy of Word or Office. I have never regretted that decision.
In the last 2 years, getting a programming degree at the local CC, I have to use Word at school. At home, OO opens and edits those documents just fine. I have not been impressed with Word at all, too much fluff (cute by mostly useless 'features'). It seems like a large waste of resources.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Still, at least I didn't think it was Antonin Dvorak...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Firefox should be the "first" browser to full support this.. ..
They are going nuts on it
see the Technology Preview
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
As much as we all hate M$ products, Word will be resurrected to the max when they can figure out how to effectively do hand writing recognition.
What's available in the market now is just not cutting it. People with chicken scratch hand writings have to flock back to the keyboard.
I also used a great word processor called 'Q&A Write for Windows 2.0' for a number of years which (IMHO) was much better than the early versions of Word for Windows. Anyone else remember these or other popular alternatives to Word?
Yeah, but the common man doesn't know what Netcraft even is. Time magazine has way more clout to a lot of people, and a few "early adopters" of the Time world will give it a try. Any non-lawsuit-related press OSS gets is good press, even if just saying it won't make it come true.
SAILING MISHAP
I've suffered more frustration at the hands of Microsoft Office than I care to remember, but I'm still not seeing OO.o as a viable alternative--mainly because it's soooo frigging sloooooow. I have Win2k installed under VMware for the sole purpose of running Excel 95: it takes OO.o about 8x as long to load my ~4MB finance spreadsheet as Excel, and every time I try to make a change in OO.o the thing locks up for about 20 seconds(!).
I'm very much in favor of open source beating MSOffice, but it looks to me like the developers still need to do something about that "we write what we want, not what you want" mentality.
I have a client who has been having intermittent problems with Word2002, namely "abnormal termination" errors. Crash, boom, bang.
/a" -- a word processor with a "safe mode"?), installed the support and troubleshooting document templates, turned off NAV Office virus checking (as per the MS KB article 320475).
.DOC files. I would switch these users to something better, if only there was a clearly superior product on the market. As much as Word sucks, it's become a de facto standard. There's no competition anymore, and I wonder if this situation means that there's no incentive to make this a stable product. I wonder who is in charge of product development in Redmond: engineers or marketdroids? Do I really need the ability to make Word my default HTML editor? Do I really need to know my Fleisch score? Clippy? Hello? Is anyone home?
I've done everything: deleted "NORMAL.DOT" (which had bloated to 710KB), scanned for macro viruses, did a repair install, did an uninstall and a clean re-install, applied all three service packs (service packs for a word processor?), started it up in safe mode ("winword.exe
And still it mocks me.
I'm starting to look at the OS and the network at this point, but none of the other applications have crashed, and both the computers and network are new (under a year old, mostly Dells running XP Pro). The users don't do anything fancy with Word, no pictures, no embedded objects, just plain vanilla legal documents (it's a law office, so I'm thinking that maybe there's a karma thing happening).
I've met every challenge that administration has thrown at me, but the solution for this one has eluded me for a month now. The users are getting impatient and they aren't taking "Well, it is a Microsoft product" for an excuse. Nor do I for that matter. I can't blame Redmond, even though their products are starting to remind me of the US automotive industry back in the 1970s: big, inefficient, prone to crashing, waiting for a nimble competitor (Japan) to eat their lunch.
The automobile:software analogy breaks down, of course. When you bought a Toyota to replace your Ford you didn't have to migrate anything but the contents of your glove compartment and your trunk, not a year's worth of
Just give me a goddamned word processor that doesn't throw a runtime error and my users and I will be happy. Or I swear to God I'll kill this puppy.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
While I generally agree with you, I think automatic translation, if even possible, is not going to be in any version of office in the near future.
I'm ethnically bangladeshi, speak japanese (kinda), and was raised in the u.s. Out of the three languages, I know there are somethings that simply don't translate (even some common phrases) for whatever reasons. Both Bengali and Japanese let you (in fact, encourage) dropping the subject of a sentence if its already understood. That would be hard, if not impossible for a computer to pick up on.
I can think of another set of examples that *could* be translated into something similar if the computer had a person's intuitative abilities; in bengali there's a phrase that literally translates to "If I let you sit, you want to lay down." I know that roughly carries the same meaning as the english idiom "If I give an inch, you'll take a mile," but outside of brute forcing every idiom one by one I don't see a computer being able to make the connection.
Far be it for me to predict the future (watch google come out tomorrow with some brilliant translation tool), but considering the complexity and nuance of human language, I doubt "automatic translation tools" any better than babelfish's garbeledness are anywhere near the horizon.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
A couple years back, a professor of mine gave a talk entitled 'Is Microsoft Word Inherently Evil?' in which he outlined why the assumption of peoples' use of MS Word creates problems and what we can do about it. It's probably nothing that most /.'ers don't already know, but he presented this at an instructional technology fair for faculty and staff, so he's helping to make the issues known outside the Computer Science populace.
Opinion and anecdote:
Grammar checking is mostly worthless now. It's good for seeing whether you have used the wrong properly-spelled syntactic word. I mostly get false positives. Until the grammar checker has a basic understanding of what you are writing about and maybe an understanding of your writing tendencies, it will be mostly worthless.
I write for a living. I have a license to Office 97, but I've been using OpenOffice for my work for nearly two years now. I've never found Word 97's grammar checker good for much of anything but a good laugh. Maybe things are better now, but I've never been inclined to "upgrade" to a version that seemed like it would need every motherboard change to be registered with Redmond.
The near-universal assumption of Word's dominance can have interesting effects. I once exchanged exported-to-Word copies of a document with a client a couple of times until we discovered that we were both using OpenOffice, both of us importing what we had exported to Word format for the other guy!
Yes, the doc format changes. How else are new features supposed to be saved? However, Office has XML-based formats that work quite well now, too (since Office2K, even!)
New document types should be a solvable problem. Guarantee a certain meta element within each document, containing the URI of an XSLT file that transforms the current version to the previous version. Apply recursively until you arrive at a format you can understand.
A friend of mine with an LCD screen had trouble with the fonts and although his desktop was nicely anti-aliased Open Office stubborny refused to show anti-aliased fonts.
Searching OpenOffice.org revealed this:
The issue has been classified as "an enhancement", has 3 votes and thus won't be fixed anytime soon!
I suppose everyone running OO on Linux (except for those three persons) is using a traditional monitor and couldn't care less about sub-pixel hinting.
The owls are not what they seem
... back to the keyboard? What, are you kidding?
If they have hen-peck keyboarding skills, then I can understand this statement. However, if you've made it far enough in the business world to require the use of a computer, there's no excuse for not having sufficient typing ability. None. Not only that, but typing is much faster for most people than writing, and the creation of the text usually requires significantly less thought.
Mathematics is another matter entirely, but that's not what handwriting recog is usually used for, anyway.
Tablets are just a fringe/novelty item and have no significantly practical use. My school just made the students pay a shitload of money for Gateway m275s, a combo tablet/laptop machine. They suck as laptops, and nobody uses the handwriting ability because it's awkward writing on a screen - regardless of the handwriting recognition.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I use VBA to automatically create very complex reports. Perhaps this is not the best way since it tends to be slow but I have so much control over the placement of constructs especially tables, text, pictures, page breaks, etc.
... I've never really heard of anyone pushing Word that hard. It certainly doesn't seem to be designed for this kind of work. The programming is awkward. It may be possible to encode my documents in HTML/XML and then send them to Word - very definitive regarding data organization - but how do I specify page breaks? With Word I can query for the results of automatic formatting and in a "second pass" give extra instructions to perfect the formatting - not exactly available with HTML as it would have to be perfect at first specification.
...). I don't like being tied to a technology that can change at the whims of Redmond, but the power! The power!
Does anyone else achieve a like objective but not using Word? What I see is what I print - that is definitely a feature I utilize to the fullest advantage. I've always wondered about the possibilities of Crystal Reports, but never had any way of trying the software. I'm going back to look for an evaluation version, but I fear two things:
(a) inhibited features in an evaluation version
(b) Word offers me all the power I need in terms of programmabile control but will Crystal Reports give me that much control. I'd hate to make a major effort only to come up against a major weakness that requires major hacking or re-planning.
One day I may end up using TeX or LaTeX. I used to write TeX and LaTeX by hand, but how can anyone turn away from the allure of Word's ability to let me compose pages without code?
Programming VBA to control Word is a far cry from TeX code. TeX code is far more definitive. Word code can sometimes be tricky - there are times when I had to really wonder why Word just wouldn't display the page the way I specified in the program. There seeemed to be an incompatibility with certain video card drivers - a problem that fortunately had a programmatic solution. However, TeX to DVI was never 100% guaranteed either, and when I tried DVI generation in Linux I found some strangenesses.
I wonder if my usage of Word is all that reasonable in the eyes of other users
Thus, I say Word is really a powerful tool but so deeply proprietary to Microsoft! Are there open source tools that give the same power? Most people use Word to write documents manually. I generate documents automatically but use poor man's formatting by controlling Word. I can, with a lot of code, produce pages with proper formatting (perhaps Perl
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I think automatic translation would be a great idea though I entirely agree that arbitrary documents, probably couldn't be translated with any sort of accuracy.
I think, however, it would be great for a software program to come out that would enforce writing in simple English sentences so that you could pass ideas to non-English speaking users quickly.
This would be akin to a programming language but the language would be English. For example, when we write documentation for our software, I insist on the language to be simple, direct and non-technical. While, at times, I'll write more complicated documents depending on my target (though I prefer simple, direct and non-technical by default most of the times anyways).
In the same way, we could write English that is simple and direct and the translation software would flag anything it doesn't understand. After a while, you will probably learn its style and you'd have a lot less need to revise.
For example, a sentence the translator couldn't translate easily or a sentence that could be ambiguous could be flagged like bad grammar (or supposed bad grammar) in a Word document is. Then we could just edit it.
At the end, we'd have a simple and direct translation to another language that we can almost be guaranteed works because the engine was smart enough to tell us when it doesn't. And by the nature of it flagging it naturally and unobtrusively (because you can go back later to edit, and not while you are in your train of thought) you actually learn to write in a translation safe way.
It's not a translator but it's going to be a whole shitload cheaper than one. Another thing is if you are writing documentation for multiple languages that just happens to be simple and direct, it would facilitate a great first draft. Then your translator only need be paid for the revisions which would probably be much cheaper than doing it from scratch.
Sunny
Be my Friend
There is a misconception about Word's Save as HTML function. It isn't there to generate (clean) HTML.
It is there to save your document in a format that can (somewhat) be read by a browser, but more importantly, that can be read by Word. I found this out when I managed to corner a MicroSerf "evangelist" (or whatever the fark they call their sales/tech dweebs) and ask him what the #$@ SA-HTML was supposed to do.
He told me the extra garbage they embed in the file is for Word's benefit, so it can recreate the document in all its bloated glory if you load the HTML file back into Word.
Let's take a look at a "Hello World" doc, shall we? (spaces added to deal with crak-smoking---sorry---'leet filter/editor)
Note that only a tiny bit of the document is concerned with rendering "Hello world." The rest deals with preserving document styles and properties--stuff you'd find under the "File, Properties" dialog.
Yeah, right.
...no other program so far (and yes, I mean OpenOffice.org, too) does not even come close in speed and usability to Microsoft Word. I am sorry to admit that, and I try to avoid using Microsoft stuff as much as possible, but so far I can't imagine my life without Word.
I am a scientist, not a professional hacker, and mainly use Word for writing (chemical) papers.
While Word indeed has some annoying features (Office Assistant and "personalized menus" in the Windows version, Autocorrect in both windows and Mac versions, "antipiracy" checking on Mac), they can easily be killed. Properly configured Word is reasonably fast (on both Mac and Windows), annoyance-free, and has all the features I want.
For example, install ChemDraw (a de-facto standard chemical graphics package), draw a structure, and paste it in OpenOffice and in Word. Then double click it. Word preserves the structure intact, and it can be post-edited in ChemDraw. Not so in OpenOffice! It converts the .cdx object to a useless picture, which makes me store and track more files!
In addition, such features as tables, multi-column text, and foot/end notes are implemented almost flawlessly in Word. Not so in OpenOffice. Just try to grab a .pdf of any paper from, say, pubs.acs.org , and try to duplicate the formatting in OpenOffice.org. Good luck! Trust me, I have tried it - and got terrible results. The only two programs that succeed for me are Word (in its various incarnations from 2000/Windows to 2004/Mac), and LyX.
My affair with OpenOffice.org has started and ended tragically twice, and I am not entering that boat again. The first time I tried installing it (under Red Hat 8) was around the times of version 1.02, if I am not mistaken. What was immediately evident to me is that the program was sluggish (on a P4 mobile 2.4GHz laptop with 512M RAM). The disaster stroke me on the third day of using it. That day I have been working on a long document and saved it in the native OpenOffice format before going home. And when I tried to open it later that night, it won't open! OpenOffice corrupted the document while saving it, and nothing could be done to restore the whole day of work (and the document was due next day!). What added insult to injury was that no error message has been displayed when saving the document. The program did not crash. It just killed my document.
The second time I have tried installing OpenOffice was on my girlfriend's Fedora Core 2 laptop about a month ago. This time, the gremlins stole the ability of OpenOffice to write good .pdf files. The .pdf save feature worked the first 3 times. After that, the .pdfs were still being produced, but they were containing only gibberish. I was amazed - mainly by the fact that this impressive feat of self-destructive programming has been achieved on registry-less Linux. Bravo!
Needless to say, since then I have bought Crossover from Codeweavers and have been using my trusty Office 2000 on all my Linux machines.
As for other alternatives, don't even get me started. I still remember with horror the first time I tried to compile Abiword (I think, 0.96 at the time). That was on my SGI Octane with Irix 6.5. Abiword would not compile with SGI's native cc - there was just too much gcc specific... "features" in the code, and SGI's compiler was correctly treating all this "exxtreme programming" crap as bugs (no, I am not making this up). So gave up and compiled it with gcc. The resulting executable was showing the splash screen and immediately dumping core. I have investigated this behavior (took about half an hour with Google) and found out that is a known problem. Finally I got it to run from shell with a command line option to turn off splash. Great. I was happy. Until the moment I tried to actually edit text. Typing was fine, but Abiword dumped core as soon as I tried to switch font. Well, at this point I gave up, and I don't think I am to blame here. A week ago I've be
The best article I have read that summarizes what word got wrong is http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html.
The gyst is that Word, and all word-processors, confuse the distinct tasks of preparing your text logically, and laying it out. This leads to the standard situation that frustrates me when I have to use Word: I am entering text, when I see that it won't fit on a page, so I stop thinking about my text to change paragraph formatting and then, oh, where was I? Later I'll change the text, and probably want to change the paragraph formatting back, but won't be able to remember what it was before. Now my document is inconsistently laid out.
Implementations may vary. Word is often slated as being particularly obnoxious, changing formatting of its own volition. However, the conflation of distinct tasks is a conceptual error of all word-processors.
The alternative suggested by the article, LaTeX, is undoubtedly not to everyone's taste either, but at least if you read the article, you will understand the deeper reason Word is frustrating.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Once upon a time, I was a young(er) programmer who saw the creations coming out of Wirth's group at ETH.
/bold /unbold /deeplymeaningfulbutconfusing something .. in the text...
My friend and colleague (Mr. P.C) (yes really, but I won't name him) ported their Modula-2 compiler and a strange entity called "Andra" which was a document processor to that wondrous new home computer beast the Atari-ST. Nobody at the UK
company (who older folks may recognize) understood
Andra. I sure didn't.
Sigh. I didn't understand what it was then. Words were things that you processed with meaningful commands like
no WYSIWYG. What you saw was what you deserved.
(There is a good reason why Don Knuth is a hero
amongst most of us. Playing with fonts and stuff
appeals to our taste for the bizarre...)
Now, Andra was really a distant ancestor of AmiPro (remember that?) and Wurd. But, all these years later I want to know precisely what is so difficult about making something with at least few
enough bugs that the bug log doesn't implode and create a local black hole...
I'd like a black hole. It would be useful. I'd really like a "word processor". Until we actually
get one I'll stick with VI (Elvis or VIM) for programs and Emacs for pure text.
Boo. My own primitive attempts at writing shrink wrap apps blow away the crud coming out of the N.W
U.S. (or else someone explain why one man's feeble
attempt at a windoze app scores 100% in terms of
a language he doesn't understand too well despite
living in said country almost 20 years...)
Keen eyed watchers know which country I'm in...
Anyone for whom English ain't no native language
(like myself) occasionally finds good suggestions
from Word grammar checker. It is indeed a feature
I sorely miss when using Linux office products.
That and the inability to get complicated Word
forms with locked tables and precise alignments
to render right. Oh, and VB macros are (pure ass
but) unavoidable when you deal with gov'ment
forms.
That is besides the point. The point is that WP has an extremely handy feature that Word doesn't. If thats fundamentally how it is, thats +1 point for ditching Word rather than waiting for "MS Office XP++ 2008 Extreme Edition"
OS X takes this even farther, as its display technology is in part based on PDF. Any print dialog has a button labeled "Save as PDF", even if you don't have Acrobat installed.
I have more than a gigabyte of saved journal articles that are in PDF format and I can search the lot, print them, archive them, etc. The scientific community is moving toward a digital publishing system that will make it less necessary in the future to build huge libraries to hold printed journals. At least one journal I look at (J Cell Biol) has made its online version the definitive version, and the institution I work at (Wash. Univ. Sch. of Med. in St. Louis) is already starting to subscribe to many journals online only.
I'm all for that, as it saves tons of time: no need to go to the library, locate books, photocopy desired articles -- and we even can print the PDFs in color and pay a lot less than the library's comparatively high per-sheet charges for their color copiers. And the output looks better, too (perfectly aligned and everything.)
Take a look at NIH's PubMedCentral if you'd like to see some examples.
i am a soviet space shuttle
I'm an "average user" when it comes to Word. I have to use it to write documentation at work. Prior to Word I was using Adobe FrameMaker. One place where FrameMaker kicks Word's (and OpenOffice's) butt is with fields and variables. Say you want to change the version number of the document. Ideally you should change it in one place, and every other reference to it changes automatically.
Word can do this, but it does it in the most braindead way I've ever seen. It's almost like this is so rare they never bothered making a halfway usuable interface for it. And it's as buggy as hell to boot. Update all fields on the page and you still have to update the fields on the headers and footers separately.
That's just one feature. I'm still learning how to productively use Word after two months, when it only took me a week to learn FrameMaker. The funny thing is that it was FrameMaker under Solaris, which has one of the worst interfaces ever. Yet it was easier to learn than Word. Go figure.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
You're thinking about the 3.1/95/98/ME notepad, which is limited to 32kb. The Windows 2000/XP notepad has no problems opening documents several megabytes in size.
Besides, if your web page is over 32kb, you need to fire your web designer. Seriously. 32kb is 6.5 seconds on 56k - with a good connection. And that's before you add in all the graphics, stylesheets, scripts, and other external jazz.
The US Constitution is less than 28kb. Why should your web page be any longer?
Well DUH! Do what I've been doing Since Star Office 5.2 came out. Save the *%&^A% file as a .rtf (Rich Text Format) I did this for ages ... sent it to my PHB, then he would open it ... save as a .doc and send it off. Then one day it dawned on him. If I can open/edit/whatever the .rtf document... why am I bothering saving it as a .doc? Just send it on as is and every recipient can read it. In fact the .rtf format in OOo is substantially smaller than Wurds rtf format and .doc so it saves folder space too.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
And there may be more to it than that. Ever notice how MS documents are recognized as such by the OS even if YOU'VE NEVER LOADED OFFICE on that computer??!
This is why the E.U. is demanding that MS release it's hidden API's. And this is why MS is fighting this so hard. If Office is found to be pre-pre-loading with the OS, they are going to be in very hot water indeed and not just with the Euros.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Cute story, but in my world what .rtf
generally happens is Word currupts
a stupid document to the point
it can't open it, user puts it on
a floppy brings it to me, I open it
with OpenOffice and save it as an
Hero for a day... say good-bye
to a little formatting, but here
is that document you worked on
for 4 hrs.
Love wasting my time fixing the
same crap over and over with M$
products.
Great tools do only ONE thing, but do that ONE thing very, very well.
"you've got to have a very feature-rich application."
No. You need to have a very stable application with a very good plugin architecture.
Of course, that might not be as profitable...
paste some text that I just copied from the internet to my word document without having word wanting to connect to the internet and then applying some lame undesired formating
Set your firewall to disallow Word access to the net?
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Not much software starts so fast so people are always inclined to think Microsoft must "cheat", but they don't. It starts in a second on Linux via CrossOver/Wine as well which is clever because Wine itself imposes a hefty startup penalty.
I posted a more detailed summary of exactly what they do a few days ago here.
Ironically OpenOffice does preload.
I can't agree more with Dvorak's frustration, this has been an ever increasing problem with MS applications in general.
After installing Office on my new Windows workstation, I couldn't do anything without reinserting the original media. The selection to Run Everything from my hard drive was made during the install -- obviously the installer chose to ignore this option. What really interests me is how the install is happening when I am only a lowly user on my local machine. Obviously, the Office installer makes it convenient for anyone to make a modification to the installation. Is this a security risk or is that just my impression?
A quick check of the directory options indicates that lowly users don't have write access. So what exactly is Office installing and where?
Equally signficantly, the user interfaces are complicated and repleat with unnecessary embelishments. I do not want a "Getting Started" box to soak up half my screen every time I launch Word. When I'm ready to write a document a blank page is perfectly acceptable, and the reason I'm launching Word is so that I can write a document. Also, I have no interest in "searching the web" from inside Word, it's perfectly acceptable that I need to start Firefox to do this.
It doesn't help that my company has standardized on MS Word, but I am using OpenOffice for documents whenever possible. It's just easier, my wordprocessor needs are nothing like what MS Word wants to offer me.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Did you really read that link? I'm not following how a "container" is any different than a "start marker", the "contents", and the "end marker" in Word Perfect.
From what I've read from a variety of sources, a Word file is actually a serialized dump of Word memory. Which is horribly stupid, as a document format. Or horribly brilliant, I guess, from a business standpoint.
So no, the horror of Word may not be representable by rational codes ...
As the title says. Windows, Linux, whatever, I find Oo.o's font rendering to be completely crap.
;)
For starters, yes, it doesn't seem to do any anti-aliasing. Even under Windows. And since it has nothing to do with sub-pixel hinting, it's just as crap looking on a CRT as on an LCD. Probably worse looking on a CRT, actually.
Second, when you scale a document (yes, I like to have the page scaled to fit the window width), instead of getting the fonts simply rendered at the new size, it looks like something that got first rendered and then unevenly scaled.
I.e., to quote MacHall, "Hey, it doesn't look like OLD ass. It's CLASSIC ass." If you want that CLASSIC look you used to have in Windows 3.0 with a non-accelerated Trident graphics card and non-scalable fonts, you can't beat OOo for that.
Third, and most annoying, I'd like it to just fscking use whatever fonts are already installed on that machine. X and all normal X application can already use them. Nah, for OOo you have to explicitly install the fonts _again_ in OOo.
Once for each user, too. Whoppee.
Presumably because, for all the crack talk about how standards are great, OOo still does its very own font rendering. And if it at least did it better than Windows or X, I could see the point. But a hack that actually is _worse_ than using the standard libraries? Well, that's gotta count as cool.
Add other OOo "features" like the highly annoying nagging. E.g., daily I _have_ to edit one excel file: the hours I've worked in that day. Sometimes more than once a day. Every fscking time I have to click "yes" on not one, but _two_ nag dialogs.
You'd think it would be able to get the idea that _yes_, I do want to save it back as Excel. I know it's mind boggling that after loading a file, I'd want to save the changes back in the same file. Probably noone in the OOo team ever save their changes to the exact same file they loaded
And that _yes_, I still want to exit the program nevertheless.
At least, you know, give me a "don't ask this again" checkbox. It's not like it's that new and unheard of idea. But nah, some cretin probably felt a Holy Duty to nag the users to death to completely switch to OOo formats. Probably is even proud of that idiocy.
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically IMHO OOo is a substitute for Office in much the same way as a bullet to the head is a cure for headache. I.e., not really, other than in the "well, technically speaking..." way.
It's getting sorta in the right direction, but it has a looong way to go.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I hate the spell checker the most. It just says YOU ARE WRONG. Now I'm no expert but let's say I start righting something and transconductance becomes an issue. Right after a type the word, it turns red. Fine, it doesn't understand this, they didn't ever look at any technical jargon when making the dictionary. So I add the word to the dictionary. Later on I have a sentence that starts with "Transconductance" capitalized because it's the first word in the sentence. ruh roh! No, apparently "transconductance" is a word but MS Word also thinks it's a word that cannot be capitalized (because words like this exist....). Later on I Must be sure to compare the transconductance of two things because if I dare compare two transconductances, I'll be wrong about spelling again.
Ok Microsoft listen up. I thought about it: No, it's not acceptable for your program to lack the jargon in ANY field unless it is bleeding edge. Additionally when someone adds a word locally ask them, "is it a verb/noun/adjective/adverb/particle/etc". Immediately enter it into your grammar rules so that sentences with these words aren't ignored. Figure out the most probable plural form of the word, or in the case of a verb, every form of the word.
This is too funny. As I am typing this message MSN Encarta popped up... Let's see my browser doesn't have pop-ups, the only other thing open is Word, it must know that I am talking about it.
Oh yes I'd like to petition the world to allow "them" over "him or her". It's about time we had some sexually neutral words (unlike "it" which is sexually sterile).
I do a lot of writing -- manuscripts for publication, business documents, software documentation -- so I use many different tools for getting words onto paper.
LaTeX is very utilitarian, and the document sources (being pure text) are eminently portable. But for letters, short documents, and many tasks, I prefer a simple, clean WYSIWYG word processor.
Long ago, on a planet far, far away, I took a liking to the original versions of Microsoft Word -- even the non-graphical version that ran from the MS-DOS command line. It seemed cleaner and more logical than Word Perfect.
Up until a couple of years ago, I used Word under Windows -- but as time passed, I enjoyed using it less and less. Microsoft kept piling on feature after feature; the constant upgrade cycle was frustrating in the extreme. Until just recently, though, "free" and "open" software really didn't provide a good and reliable tool. Today, I have several "free" choices -- and that makes me quite happy.
I'm not fond of OpenOffice. OpenOffice is much too slow on start-up, and it feels almost exactly like Word, but "klunkier". And OpenOffice does not, as of this moment, compile for 64-bit AMD64 (yes, I know I can use 32-bit binaries, but I don't want to).
I like Abiword, though it has bitten me several times with crash bugs. I tend to use Abiword for MS Word documents.
For manuscripts, letters, and most word processing, I've settled on KWord. It starts quick, runs reliably (your mileage may vary), isn't overtly complex, and I have yet to try doing anything that KWord couldn't handle.
On the other hand, for spreadsheets, I've found Gnumeric to be more comfortable than KSpread or OpenOffice Calc.
For me, the appeal of "free" software is choice. I don't really care if other people prefer different solutions -- what I care about is that people can do their work comfortably and reliably. I think companies like Microsoft have forgotten this; they're so wrapped up in trying to force people into upgrades and service contracts, they've lost a sense of building products for people. While "free" software certainly has its problems, I at least get the sense that I'm working with software written by people, not marketroids.
All about me
>linux is by far, a more complex OS to
>setup/use/configure then windows
Is it? Really? I just poped in a mandrakemove cd, clicked three times and in a couple of minutes i had a perfectly configured linux running on my machine.
Yeah... now get around to the "using" part of that parent mentions...
Ease of installation does not cover things like:
- no easily discernable method to menus
- few common practices between applications on where things are or how they behave (no platform standard... funny thing... folks rant and rave about having standards... but only for data... and if you say you want a GUI standard, they get up in arms... they want choices, but only for some things, the others shouldn't have choices)
- little commonality between distributions in the way that the distribution is managed and configured... try explaining to someone who uses Mandrake how to configure the network by using only SuSE terminology and application references...
- etc.
The appearance is (and it is somewhat true) that Linux is more of a loose collection of programs than it is a work platform, from the users' perspective. Unless you are doing command line stuff, things don't interact among each other that well... many times, even simple things like cut-n-paste don't work "right" between applications not written by the same group. In many cases, it seems very disorganized.
First, I'm sure nobody wants to "kill" word. What would be nice is to simply reduce it's strangle-hold on the market. Second, the key to Microsoft's stranglehold is clearly .doc compatibility. OO has good .doc compatibility, but then who would send their boss a critical memo that got 2% of the formatting wrong?
The way to break .doc's strangle-hold is for corporations and government agencies to establish and adopt a completely open word-processing standard. Call it something like Universal Text Exchange (or whatever acronym isn't taken.) .ute needn't necessarily be "complete". But it could shoot for 95% of .doc's bell's and whistles. Next, corporations and government agencies would require that any used word-processor be capable of reading and writing .ute. Third, corporations would next require routine documents to saved in and distributed in .ute. Finally, work would immediately begin on .ut2
There are any number of existing text formats that could serve as a base for .ute. They just need to be opened up (if they aren't already) and (here's the tricky part) embraced and demanded by corporations and governments.
>> I just want to past clean text that's all.
Simple - just use "paste special" instead of "paste" on the edit menu, and choose "unformatted text" or "unformatted unicode text". The only annoying thing is that this option isn't available via just right-clicking (as regular paste is), even though paste special is included on the right-click menu in excel. MS still needs to work on their interface consistency...
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
After an undesired auto format occurs in your document just hit back space, it will only undo the undesired auto format without touching what you typed.
Plus, the newer versions of Office (2003, XP) have this lightning bolt icon that pops up whenever it's trying to auto-format something. Most of the time it's just in my way so I hit ESC to make it disappear, but sometimes it's a helpful notice that the Office app is doing something it shouldn't.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
My biggest grievance about Word is the way it does styles. If you change a style by actually going into the style and changing it, Word will ask you if you actually want to update the text that's in that style. Um, of course! And trying to get text to actually conform to its style is another exercise in frustration. It means many extra keystrokes for every change of the style, which can be a lot when you're tweaking fine things like paragraph spacing, indents, etc. Styles in Word seem to be an afterthought, rather than the basis of things. Word's clearly designed for people who don't use styles; it pretends to be a good DTP package but isn't.
I was pleasantly surprised when I started using OO.o. Its styles are much more like a professional DTP package. When you change the style, the text of that style just changes. No annoying "Would you like to update the style, update the text or do nothing?" questions. And OO.o has the "Standard" format option, to forcibly make text conform to a style in a couple mouse-clicks. OO.o isn't perfect, but the way it does styles was enough to convert me.
After reading the prior messages on this thread, there is ont other reason I'd like to submit for moving away from MS Word: forced migrations.
Software companies primarily make money two ways: selling copies of software and, once they've saturated their target market, getting current customers to buy new versions or upgrades of the same software.
MS does the latter very well. They release new versions of MS Office every 18-24 months and bundle them with the new computers your organization buys, essentially "infecting" your organization with software that constantly reminds people that there are old, "obsolete" versions hanging around impeding your computing productivity. You either upgrade or buy an enterprise license and reimage PCs to deal with the document compatibility issues.
About 10 years ago I worked in an organization with over 2,000 people at our location. Our standard word processor was MS Word 2.0 (for Windows, not Mac). Then MS released Word 6.0. (They allegedly skipped 3.x through 5.x so the Windows version would have a higher number than the Mac version and achieve numerical parity with Wordperfect.)
Twelve people in the organization got Word 6.0 and started releasing their documents into the wild. Those of us with Word 2.0 complained that they needed to save in a format we could read. The Gang of Twelve responded that the rest of us were computer Luddites that needed to upgrade so they wouldn't have to change their default settings.
Within a year, we were all on Word 6.0, despite the fact that the new word processor provided no added value for people who were simply using the software as a wysiwyg typewriter.
This system of software migration essentially takes away an organization's ability to decide when its office automation software is obsolete and replaced it with significant pressure to upgrade existing software. Aside from the technical issues, I'd like to be able to decide for myself, and my organization, when my office software no longer meets my needs. Otherwise, we will continue to pay companies like MS for the privilege of upgrading our systems whenever they decide to release a new version through PC OEMs to improve their revenue stream.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
If Corel can find a single marketing executive who can sell his way out of a wet paper bag, with the help of Arnie, it would slaughter Word.
.sxw doc.
On the other hand...TEN YEARS AGO and more, I was reading reviews of word processors in PC Mag pointing out that 90% of all users used only 10% of the features, *ever*, and the 10% that used any of the other features only used them 10% of the time.
They're *supposed* to be word processors, not desktop publishers. How about *word* *processors*, with plugins for desktop publishing?
Alternatives:
- is there a version of Abiword 2 that does *not* break Apache (with aspell)? Abiword came up with a blank page for a new document in under 10 seconds on my 250MHz K-6
- is there *any* chance that OpenOffice.dog developers could be kidnapped, and forced to develop on something *other* than the machine that they play Doom3 on? I mean, for all practical puroses, I notice *zero* difference in how long it take me to bring OO.o up, and get to new text document, one my old 250MHz K-6, my laptop's 450, or my new-to-me 950MHz Athlon: about 30 sec. from file to to new text document. It takes that long, or longer, to open an existing 8k
Ain't my idea of competetive....
mark, ready to run WP 6 under Wine
Not sure what you are referring to as "simply not true". But if you are referring to using OO as a disaster recovery tool for M$ Word then you are incorrect.
:). The document was in the most recent version of Word.
At work one evening after hours, one of the corporate lawyers came to me frantic saying that he was unable to open the contract that he had been working on for days (and of course he had no recent backups
I simply just asked him to email me the doc, ssh'd into my home Linux machine, opened it *without* difficulty in OO, resaved it in M$ Word format, and mailed it back.
To this day, he still thanks me and thinks of me as some kind of saviour/miracle worker.
If you put the time in, you can create fairly useful though basic 3 D plans in Word. There's more to it than meets the eye. Therein lies the problem though.
Jack of all trades master of none sells to the masses. If theres a better way to do something, the average PC user doesn't seem to know about it. Heck, loads of PC users have probably never heard of other word processing software or formats other than *.doc (e.g., WordPerfect or RTF).
How many damn fonts do we need??? Half of them are just plain unuseable in a professional environment. Doesn't stop some people using 12 different fonts in the same paragraph...
Some days I miss simple Amstrad and Cannon Word Processors. They get the job done and don't take 3 weeks to start up and close down.
Ever tried editing Word docs over dial-up.....
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Its just too easy to create 50 Mb Word docs when 1.5 Mb RTF would do...
Think what all that extra data is doing to networks..
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.