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Google Docs Vs. Microsoft Word: an Even Matchup?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Software developer Jeff Cogswell writes: 'About a year ago, I decided to migrate my documents to Google Docs and start using it for all my professional writing. I quickly hit some problems; frankly, Google Docs wasn't as good an option as I'd initially hoped. Now I use LibreOffice on my desktop, and it works well, but I had to go through long odysseys with Google Docs and Zoho Docs to reach this point. Is Microsoft Word actually better than Google Docs and Zoho Docs? For my work, the answer is "yes," but this doesn't make me particularly happy. In the following essay, I present my problems with Google Docs and Zoho Docs (as well as some possible solutions) from my perspective as both a professional writer and a software developer.'"
Jeff Cockswell? What kind of site is this anyway?
I love Google Docs. But, in the end, Word has been around forever, it's very mature, and it has features that fit any conceivable needs. It also has the advantages (and disadvantages) that come with being local to your machine instead of living in the cloud. Google docs is great for a quick and dirty word processing or a collaborative project, but you shouldn't try to write a novel with it.
You can see a detailed revision history of a document, including every saved version ever, in Google Docs.
It can show you the differences from the current/previous versions.
So if you deleted text, just pull up the revision history, grab the text you want, and paste it back into the current version.
It's not any different from a "real" version control workflow.
Word has more features, but Google Docs is good enough for most people. Depending on what you use, Docs is good enough.
There's a definitive book for anyone wanting to write a wordpressor. It's called 'Harts Rules', and it goes into micro detail of, for example, how to layout footnotes that are bigger than the page they refer to. The real micro detail of every extreme case of layout and composting anyone might face writing a wordprocessor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart%27s_Rules
Google Docs developers should read it, as should Microsoft Word developers quite frankly.
Docs is suitable for simple tasks associated with everyday writing, memos faxes, instructions, meeting notes etc, but to write books, particularly technical ones requires a bit more processing.
Well said. And it's easier to tack online storage on to word processing than word processing on to online storage. So who's surprised, really?
No need to copy and paste. You can just restore the revision (unless you've made changes since that you want to keep).
Word sounds so great I'm gonna get 10! One for each person on the team. Heading over to microsoft.com now... looking at the price now... sticking with Google Docs now.
Or is Google software getting worse instead of better? I tried so hard to like Google Docs and Drive but it's been so buggy for me (in their browser no less) that I simply can not stand to use it. Worse still is the unfinished nature of EVERYTHING Google puts out these days. There is absolutely no polish to anything they have besides gmail. Gmail is fantastic but everything else from them is just terrible. The nail int he coffin for me on the Google side was the Google Drive sync client on OS X, it crashed constantly, failed to sync files all the time and used a crap ton of CPU time draining the battery of my MacBook Air. Not to mention the lack of a Linux client (still!)
Add to the above the fact Google likes to just close shit down whenever they feel like it and I can never let myself get too deep into their ecosystem without worrying whether they'll just cut it off one day (Wave, iGoogle etc.) Google just can't seem to follow through on anything to completion.
I'm neither a Google fan or an Apple fan, I own products from both (Nexus 7 and an MBA) so I don't think I'm biased. I have to say, the two companies have the opposite failings. Apple lacks features but has polish while Google lacks polish while has features. In the end I find myself more inclined to use Apple these days just because I have real work to do and can't dick around with all of Googles BS.
That said, I don't see why anyone would use Google Docs. I guess for simple text files its ok and I hear the collaboration is good so maybe it has uses for a small subset of folks out there but I just don't find it useful. I combine Scrivener, LaTeX and Word for my writing and find my needs met quite well.
Google is run by engineers, which is cool, I actually like that, but as a result, suffers from a lack of real world usability, polish and commitment. Google lacks focus in the right areas (they can sure focus on selling you to advertisers though). I just don't see Google as anything but a search + email provider. Everything else I've tried of theirs has been lackluster and easily met by other options out there at a decent price without the privacy issues.
I deal with documents on professional basis. This, in my industry, means that none of my documents may ever hit the cloud. (Encryption is a possibility, but it creates more problems than it solves.)
I tried OpenOffice of several versions, over the years, and all of them were buggy. The latest one, for example, corrupted the watermark in the document. This is unacceptable. I have MS Office now. It may have bugs (not that any bit me recently) but the overall quality of the software is certainly acceptable. OpenOffice does not pass that test - it is unusable in an environment where the wordprocessor will have to correctly handle all kinds of inputs, written by me or written by others.
MS Office costs about $100 per license. This is a very acceptable cost of doing business. Perhaps this would be too steep if you are a grandmother with limited resources who only wants to create a single page note about a missing cat and print it for her nearest neighbors. As a business, you want to be as sure as it ever gets that the important proposal that you are writing will be correctly opened by the soliciting party. (In many cases editable Word documents are requested, not a PDF.)
A good wordprocessor is not a good target for an F/OSS project. It's a lot of boring, thankless work. Nobody has an itch that has to be scratched in such a masochistic way. That's why F/OSS wordprocessors are all not very good. Same goes for accounting systems, CAD systems, and many more. Often a F/OSS project just can't muster enough resources to complete the project. A for-profit company has no such problem; they just pay money, and developers show up for work.
I know it's popular to bash Microsoft on Slashdot, but this is as absurd as asking if Windows Phone 8 is as even matchup to Android or IOS. The story and article are flame-bait and should be treated accordingly.
Yeah, he's way off... Word also has version control. So does Excel. I'd wager PowerPoint does, too.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Google docs is great for anything involving collaborators. It's really easy to send out the link to other students I have been grouped with for projects, and explain how it works.
However, for the final copy, we have one of the team members copy it into word and do the prettying up there.
it has features that fit any conceivable needs
Speak for yourself. I use Google Docs for lots of things, where Word simply does not fit. For ex:
1. Daily time-sheets of my team members with details of work done, and time spent, with status.
2. Project progress of my department; which plugs into the that of the entire division.
etc.
3. A taxi dispatch system uses Google docs to find out current location, availability, status etc using Google docs. Word is totally unusable in such scenarios.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Agreed. Do everyone a favor - list everything you hate about Google Docs. Hopefully someone from Google will read the list and actually cause change. You know a list of Office painpoints would go unheard.
Can you do a linear regression in Google Docs or find R-Squared? If not, then no, it's not.
That's all I have to say.
i still use word perfect. being completely OCD about formatting, i cannot stand anything but that old standby. using word is just frustrating. how come my table just got deleted? why is it typing in italics now? everytime i use it, these questions just take more of my time than actually typing the document. with word perfect, there is a legitimate explanation every time this happens, and since you can see all the markup codes, it most likely wont happen.
I think he is using the wrong tool for the job, and then blaming the tool. I don't know about the collaboration features, having never used them. But Google docs was never (IMO) intended to be a replacement for a professional editing tool.
He talks about style sheet feature in the professional writers world. I don't know what that is, because I use Google docs for simple things. Sharing a to-do list with colleagues. Sharing a grocery list with my family. Short story writing in my spare time. Yes, a lot of professional writers need particular features - but MOST people don't. If you try to include features that everyone and their dog would want, you'd get a mess that is unusable, especially in a browser (I can configure MS Word to some extent. Change the layout, add shortcuts to the ribbon, etc).
The closest I have come to a specialized writing software is Scrivener - and I love it. It has features MS Word doesn't have. And I don't expect Word to have them. But that isn't Word's fault - not everyone wants a pinboard and notes section while writing technical papers. They want to send a letter to Grandma thanking her for the check.
And while Word might have some of the features he wants, that comes at a cost - I think MS realized it when they made Microsoft Works. A simple Word editor, a simple spreadsheet etc. It was much easier to use. But it tanked for reasons I don't know. Maybe (pure guesswork) because the mentality while buying software is - "I don't know what this feature is. But hey, I might want it some day!".
Do you expect Paint to have all the features of Photoshop? Frankly, I couldn't use photoshop because I found it too complex, and I use Paintshop Pro. But that isn't Paint/Paintshop's flaw - if I need the features, I'll find the tool that fits the job.
Lost me a this since he seemed fairly oblivious to the fact this worked both ways.
I am curious too know which of those 3 you think can't be done in MS Office?
NO.
Word's version control is a lot more sophisticated. It can show you the document clean, or with strikeouts and inserts, or with annotations in the margins. You can accept and reject changes by pointing to them.
I don't know how widely useful such a thing is, but I personally find it very useful. It's one of the few things I break out Word for. (LibreOffice has a similar feature, but its implementation is slow, and it's unusable on the dozens-of-pages documents I use it for.)
Word on office 365 does all of that.
http://connect.microsoft.com/directory/
Though it looks like Office is currently empty.
Last year or so I was modded down for pointing out that simple functionality just doesn't work in Libre Office. Google docs doesn't even have the functionality of GEOS on my Commodore 64. MS Office just works, and even if Word is crap, the other options are ten times worse. Deal with it.
I recently used Google Drive with directory sync to "collaborate" with two others on a presentation. It's not true collaboration in the sense of how multiple developers could use something like CVS and merge, but it was useful enough. LibreOffice will create a lockfile that is also synched, so at least can tell you if someone else has the document open.
The process was:
1) Create a shared directory in Google Drive.
2) All team members installed Google Drive and synched that folder.
3) One member uploaded images to a subdirectory, another generated a layout in Scribus, another created copy.
4) Finally everyone uploaded PDFs to another subdir so everyone could view.
Normally we'd do this over a local fileserver but even though we were all sitting around the same table, it was just easier to do it via Drive because everyone was using their own laptops.
I'm not a professional writer so LibreOffice is good enough for me. This is why feature creep happens in Word. Without all those "pro" features, there would be no reason for most folks to pay a premium for Word when LibreOffice suffices.
What does a post of that website have to do with the parent's comment?
If you're using Google Docs to dispatch taxis, you're doing something very wrong.
Google Docs is a great band-aid to quickly hack something together, but it's no substitute for real tools.
Honestly, Wordpad is good enough for so many users' individual needs that it's almost foolish for the vast majority of users to purchase extra word processing software in Microsoft environments. Hell, even the netbook I'm using to type this with Windows 7 Starter Edition has Wordpad built in.
Throw in free word processors that are more feature-rich than Wordpad or are meant for other platforms and the actual number of users that needs Microsoft Office is very, very small. It's dumb for school districts to buy Office for most of their computers. It's dumb for home users to buy it. I would argue that it's even possibly dumb for many professionals to buy it. They simply do not need it unless there's some true need to protect proprietary content.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Comparing Google Docs to MS Word is like comparing every sport played in the USA against just Cricket in the UK. Atleast compare like for like.
Really, the story here is the following: 1. Google Docs sucks 2. There is nothing in Word that makes it peculiar compared to other traditional offline editors 3. The guy uses Libreoffice. So: How's Word really winning here?
This. Google docs and OpenOffice/Libreoffice are low-to-midrange tools. They are WAY better than *nothing* and much better than that stripped-down Wordpad tool that Windows gives you out of the box. I got through college just fine using OpenOffice and I still recommend it to people (if it's appropriate for their needs), but when something just has to work without problems I get the big tools out. MSOffice is professional grade and is what you use when nothing else will do.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
To be fair, it's not that the OpenOffice and LibreOffice are crap, it's just that the format you're feeding them is. Get us an actual free and open source document standard, and have folks follow it, and things will be much better. Here's an interesting anecdote: My moderately computer literate mother now uses Linux at home and Win7 at work, and prefers Linux. She takes her Linux laptop with LibreOffice on it to work because there are MS Word documents that MS Word won't open that LibreOffice does. There. That should counter your "it's buggy" anecdote.
Have you had many corruption problems with the FLOSS office tools saving and loading their own format? Or is it just them failing to comply with MS's flawed published document standards that not even MS complies with? How can a FLOSS word processor work with MS Office if they publish one thing and do another? Oooooh, so now you see do you? Perhaps your fingers have been pointing in the wrong direction all along. Look, I know you don't give a damn why the competing free alternatives are buggy, but let's not go pretending they can't do the work. There is a deficit of CAD, but then again, look at CAD users as a percentage of market share vs total users... Then again, I actually prefer Blender and YafaRay for 3D modeling and animation and even just adding special effects to videos.
(Un)Fortunately this doesn't work both ways. Here, I'll show you: MS has no Emacs or Vim replacement at all! Who can even write code for their system? VS doesn't even work with my Emacs macros or have block select! Ah, but you see? Emacs and Vim, and essentially every FLOSS program can run on Windows as well as any other OS -- They're not hindered by vendor lock-in strategies...
I use Google Docs for collaboration, and LibreOffice for my own work. Clients sometimes have MS specific Visio needs, and so I pull out that and integrate with Word.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
"Honestly, Wordpad is good enough for so many users' individual needs that it's almost foolish for the vast majority of users to purchase extra word processing software in Microsoft environments. Hell, even the netbook I'm using to type this with Windows 7 Starter Edition has Wordpad built in."
We are talking about word processors, not text editors. Programmers are probably the only profession where they would tell you to use Wordpad and claim it covered 99% of your needs.
Why would I help Google (a big evil corp) compete with Microsoft (a big evil corp), when Microsoft is playing nicer with my cloud data?
Google scans all my cloud docs for content, potentially makes some of it available to G+, and generally abuses my privacy. At least my private cloud data is private on the SkyDrive.
Why the hell would you use Google Docs for Taxi Dispatch?
so what MS is good at office. Office 2013 easily beats competitors such as LibreOffice, and alternatives on Mac for many usage scenarios. what's with the "MS is better" = "doesn't make me happy" So they sometimes make good software. oops did i say that aloud on slashdot??? *waits for crucifiction* when will the apple/linux/google/ms world learn to live together in peace & harmony...like they do in my house.
Wordpad is a very stripped-down word processor, not a text editor (as unix/linux veterans understand the term). Have you ever opened a source file in Wordpad? It treats code like a regular document and the results are absolutely dreadful. Meanwhile, Notepad is god-awful as far as plain text editors go--it doesn't even understand Unix-style line breaks. If you want a decent text editor for Windows, I recommend Notepad++.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
But the handful of people who don't fit in that category set the standards, and they need features like tracking changes, comments, and stylesheets. The Unix philosophy doesn't sell to non-technically-minded people, especially not when it conflicts with a superior workflow.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It's extremely popular in business and academia when people are collaborating on documents, and it's used just how the article's author uses it. This is so critical in The Real World that it's the number one complaint people wield against Open/LibreOffice.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The wordprocessor had about as many features as wordpad on windows 2000, the spreadsheet was compariable to gnumeric, and the whole cloud interface made things feel shakey at best ... in late 2011
MS Office vs GDocs, heh yea dont even bother. Libre / Open office vs MS Office, very comparable (if your looking at MS office 2000 or 2003, but that does quite a freaking bit)
Yeah.. wanting something better citing specific examples, what a nerve. If you ask me people should quit bitching and move on from this whole "improvement" nonsense.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
it has features that fit any conceivable needs
Speak for yourself. I use Google Docs for lots of things, where Word simply does not fit. For ex:
1. Daily time-sheets of my team members with details of work done, and time spent, with status.
2. Project progress of my department; which plugs into the that of the entire division.
etc.
3. A taxi dispatch system uses Google docs to find out current location, availability, status etc using Google docs. Word is totally unusable in such scenarios.
Wait, what? Are you talking about the ability to do real-time collaborative editing of Word documents here?
Word (and Excel, and Onenote) has this already, and has for a few years now. It's part of the Skydrive integration. Documents are stored "in the cloud" but you get a local copy, too, for disconnected editing. Any machine (or phone, yes even iPhones and Androids) connected to Skydrive gets the synced up copies too). Version history (up to 25 versions anyway) are stored. Hell, even the OS X versions of Word and Excel support real-time collaborative editing. You don't even need Office installed.... the web app versions of Office 2013 are free.
In short -- Microsoft has real-time editing of an Excel document by someone using a native app on Windows, a native app on OS X, and someone using Chrome on a Linux system. Your uses cases are supported just fine.
Google docs has version control and can show you every change you've made. Unfortunately, the author was either ignorant or an idiot, but he did suggest installing SVN, exiting Word each time you wanted to version the document and checking it in manually as an alternative to the seamless version control used by Google docs . He then goes on to criticize real time collaboration as useless in his workflow because it doesn't track changes. Perhaps if Google Docs had some sort of version control to indicate to him what has changed...hmmm
She takes her Linux laptop with LibreOffice on it to work because there are MS Word documents that MS Word won't open that LibreOffice does. There. That should counter your "it's buggy" anecdote.
Aren't those documents created or edited by LibreOffice by any chance?
Because in a few cases this has happened to me (with OpenOffice of course) but I don't remember a case that a document I created using word could not be opened with word. I edit very large documents (several hundred pages most of the time).
I have tried out Google Doc a couple times. It didn't take me long to conclude that it is unsuitable for scientific writing: ......
1) Inadequate review function. Only allow you to see history;cannot accept/deny changes.
2) No reference. This alone is a deal breaker because auto numbering of figure, equations, and table are life-savers for long technical articles and reports.
3) No bibliography. Another deal breaker.
4) No spelling checker. Yet another. Believe it or not, even professors and scientists make typos, lots of them.
5) No custom style. First thing I do when starting an article is to define styles and sometime cascade numbering (e.g. 1, 1.1, 1.1.1).
Off the top of my head I know there's at least one Vim port for Windows (I forget what it's called but I had it installed years ago). If you're complaining that Windows doesn't give you anything comparable out of the box then you have a point.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
I got through college just fine using OpenOffice and I still recommend it to people
It's perfectly usable for college, sure.
But I think it's doing the average college student a real disservice to recommend to everyone they use OpenOffice and not Word. Think of the poor history major; unless they go on to some kind of advanced degree a proficient skill in Word may be the only marketable skill they have!
If a college student has never used word you have introduced a real hurdle to them performing well in any company job right out of the gate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Spell checking is automatic in Google Docs.
Thank you for stating the obvious, Microsoft Office has more features than Google Docs and free Office suites. If I have enough money to buy a software license from Microsoft and don't care about cloud storage, obviously I will not be wasting my time with a combination of other free software solutions. Yes companies are moving to cloud storage and using free software in a shitty economy. But others bite the bullet and continue to purchase volume licensing for Microsoft for a reason, because they have a need. This isn't news by any stretch of the imagination. Why is /. wasting bandwidth on it?
Or is it just them failing to comply with MS's flawed published document standards that not even MS complies with?
How could they? The OpenXML standard is more than 6500 pages long!
Part 4, the Markup Language Reference, weighs in at 5756 pages -- 5756 pages -- to define "every element and attribute, the hierarchy of parent/child relationships for elements, and additional semantics as appropriate"
It's madness. Pure madness. No one in their right mind could claim that such a ridiculous, impossible-to-follow, standard couldn't (or shouldn't) be dramatically simplified!
It should surprise no one that Microsoft fails to comply with their own standard -- and why it's virtually impossible to produce an implementation that is completely compatible with Microsoft Office.
Required reading for internet skeptics
If you really think that then you're pretty stupid. Perhaps you didn't see the privacy changes Microshit tried to slip in on a friday evening before a long weekend. Yeah, that's how these assholes operate.
For me it's that and Outline View. (Not OpenOffice Navigator).
Yeah, every standard should be like ODF - the standard is short, but so badly written that it's possible to save an ODF document that fits the standard perfectly but renders incorrectly in every ODF compatible word processor.
fuck google. fuck microsoft. fuck 'em all.
LaTeX, FTW
captcha: adaptive
In a way, the choice of word processor is more or less irrelevant by comparison with the level of trust involved in putting my files in the hands of someone I don't personally know. If anything should happen to files on my own hard drives, I at least only have myself to blame for not having secured or backed them up. But there is always the risk that Google might be compromised, either from the outside or by some rogue sysadmin, and I don't want to even think about trying to claim any redress against Google if they fuck up.
Further, since I live a long way away from urban amenities, I can't count on the availability of a constant internet connection, which could easily put me in a bind if I had my files stored in the so-called "cloud".
So, FWIW, my choice is simple: LibreOffice, since I don't run Windows. There will always be someone who will bitch that the free software suite doesn't have this or that all-important niche feature, but it has pretty much covered everything I need since it was StarOffice - only, of course, infinitely better now.
That's why it has always been so popular---even on the Mac platform.
Give MS some credit for doing something better.
This is the reason why it's difficult for other word processors to read and write Word, they just don't have the exact same COM object hierarchy in memory. So they can only support a subset of the full "format", but on the other hand they can often read a broken document much better than Word itself because they literally only extract the bits they need.
We love APK but now and then he goes off his meds and has to post this stuff. He's a local character.
APK, take your meds please. You're scaring the tourists.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...is that there is no version for Android, IOS, or Linux. They've certainly had long enough to port, so I can only assume the problem is related to some sort of business politics. IMHO, MS are idiots for not taking advantage of the mobile mobile - MILLIONS of dollars on the table and yet here we are - NO mobile versions.
It might be time for Steve B to go. He's still thinking it's the 80's where you just ignore the competition or buy them out. Well, here they are now, Windows 8 and Surface are failures in the market - so much wiping out the existing order. Google Docs and LibreOffice finally giving Word a run for it's money - well, they MIGHT, if Word could be found on Android/IOS...
MS needs to shift course quickly before they aren't the only option anymore, although I think that ship has sailed now.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Strictly-OOXML-for-Office-2013-says-Microsoft-1669264.html
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
About that novel thing... yeah. Google Docs has serious issues with editing large documents. I've been working on a book for a little under a year now, it's sitting at 949k characters / 145k words / 420 pages. It loads the whole thing into memory at once, nearly crashes Firefox (it repeatedly begs me to kill Google's scripts) and generally has horrible performance.
The upshot is that I can get it proofread by anyone at any time, and no matter where I am I can edit my work and write out my ideas. (The Google Drive app for Android is surprisingly easy to use for text input in Google Docs, and doesn't suffer the performance issues the browser app does.)
That's actually something google docs doesn't do well.
Let's say you have a spreadsheet with a bunch of pages and cells. Google docs says who edited when, but it doesn't tell you what or where the edits are - and you can't jump to them, which means you have to manually look at each cell until you find the highlighted one.
Gmail's constant interface revisions are making it worse.
Not as bad as google groups, though, which (on my monitor) reduces the space you can actually read posts in to about an inch vertically, thanks to all the useless static unscrollable stuff.
For me, Word 97 is much faster to use than any subsequent versions. I don't need or want something that mangles text I paste into my document, even if it did come from a web site. (I'll spare any unsuspecting readers of this post 981 more examples of management-user detachment.) Recently I was forced, kicking and shouting, to install Word 2003 when 97 kept crashing on Windows 7. I am quite depressed about that. There are better than even odds I'll go back to XyWrite, or possibly I'll get out of the stone age and use NotePad++. (I like Google Docs, but I sometimes I like to compute without an internet connection.)
LaTeX for the text (or just plain text if you're only writing prose). Github for "the cloud" and emacs to actually do the editing.
But the handful of people who don't fit in that category set the standards, and they need features like tracking changes, comments, and stylesheets
That's not a handful, that describes basically the entire enterprise world.
But it's the same problem that Word has. Get a doc from Word 2010, send it to somebody with Word 2003, then Word 97 then 2008 for OS X and hilarity ensues. This is where Google might have a leg up. The couldnt create such a clusterfuck of file formats if they tried.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This is off topic in exactly what way?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The tasks a typical undergrad are asked to complete with a word processor are not very advanced, so OpenOffice instead of Word should not be much of a hurdle.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Google docs is great for a quick and dirty word processing or a collaborative project, but you shouldn't try to write a novel with it.
I'd say the exact opposite. I edit a lot of novels, and every single author now uses MS Word. Not one of them has a clue how to use any of its features. And really, to write a novel, you only need the simplest features. Business documents, with lists, bullets, tables, headings, etc, etc need more elaborate formatting. A novel is a stream of paragraphs. Maybe one or two heading styles, and block text (for things like quoted letters, poems), and a spellcheck. That's all you need and you can do that in any wordprocessor made in the last 25 years. It was a lot simpler back in the days of Wordstar 5 and WordPerfect 5.1.
Writers using Word have gotten less and less able to use it, compared to 20 years ago when people actually consulted a manual before trying. Now they just point and click and type, and so the vast majority just use it like a typewriter, and select text and style it from a button. That's it. They are clueless of and intimidated by the vast number of features and just give up and don't try to work out how to use any any of them. Then they somehow activate one of Word's wacky, "helpful" automated formatting tools and find all their text is in 24 pt red italic. Or they've somehow styled the entire MS as "Heading 1" and have to override its style every time. Writers start new pages not by inserting a pagebreak, but by pressing "enter" a few dozen times, or even worse, hundreds of spaces. I spend an hour or two cleaning up all that crap with every file I get. If I was working with them over a long period I might try to educate them, but few want to learn anything. People now want every program to "just work" without them having to learn anything.
Writers need a simpler wordprocessor. Word has been getting worse and worse as a tool for authors since about version 2 for Windows 3. Its development us pushed by claiming more and more features. Features that just get in the way of 95% of users. To disable all the crap you have to read up and tick off lots of little options. But it seems that also is just impossible for most users.
So, not having used GoogleDocs, I can't say if it really is better, but if it has fewer features it probably is. Can hardly be worse.
" It's dumb for school districts to buy Office for most of their computers."
I respectfully disagree. Learning to use a computer in the way that you'll very likely be using it later in college and at work is one of the few sane things about school. In "IT class" (7th grade, I think it was), we learned basic HTML, Excel (formulas, charts, little tiny intro to macro) and basic Word (headings, automatic generation of dynamic content, how to use headers and footers and all that junk) and to this day I find that stuff useful. Every time I write internal documentation of any sort, or papers, or anything else more extensive than a one-page letter, it's great to simply be "fluent" in Office instead of having to Google the more advanced stuff (something I see my coworkers doing a lot)...
We now have s "story" on slashdot that is just marketing for a Microsoft product. So it has come to THIS. Netcraft confirms it, Slashdot is dying.
This story is just a rant on Google docs to say "hey, at the end of the day, Microsoft word is better!". It even contains non-sense like "Collaboration: Yet Another Buzzword for a Nearly Useless Feature". Nearly useless?? This is complete bullshit. I've developed email drafts, commented and patched contracts, press releases, writen meeting minutes, all collaboratively, using google docs - or even the more limited but open-sourced etherpad, whose main feature is precisely this.
So yeah, nearly useless feature, continue using.. Microsoft work? Why not LibreOffice? Next thing we see, microsoft has bought slashdot and translated it to Azure. I tell you guys, this is complete bullshit.
It's quite trivial for this to happen. Suppose someone writes a Word document (with the latest version of Word), then sends it to another person who has Word 97, who maybe opens and edits it, then passes it along to someone with another version of Word again. Somewhere along the line the document will get corrupted, as the classic Word format is just a memory dump of the objects that happen to be alive during editing.
Microsoft has a solution for that. You're supposed to upgrade to the latest version every time they release one. Buying Microsoft is buying built-in obsolescence.
This remark might seem insightful, but I wonder whether it is based on actual knowledge of Google's infrastructure. Let us not forget that some large companies, with many thousand employees, have gone over to Google Apps. This presumes that Google has a high degree of reliability. Assuming that taxi drivers have internet access via their smartphone, what is to stop them from, for example, monitoring a specific page or cell or whatever that pertains to them? This seems vastly more reliable to me than setting up some old-school antenna system that somehow has to punch through all the dead spots. Moreover, cabs can deliver fares far outside of their regular area and still stay in touch.
Don't forget shopping lists (when the Tasks pane in Google Calendar won't suffice)... :)
It sounds like your situation with internet connectivity is reason enough to make LibreOffice the obvious choice.
My situation is a bit different, in that everything I own is connected, and I need to be able to get at things from multiple locations. Carrying around a drive is a pretty cumbersome option for what I'm doing day-to-day, so online storage works really well.
I'm the first to concede that desktop word processing is better than the web versions, but I've found that most of what I need to bang out can be done with the web ones well enough. Or at least, for seeing what I've already done. And most of the fringe features that people make hay over in Word are things I never see anyone using anyway... because there's usually a better way.
But as with most of these things we try to argue about, it makes sense to do what your situation dictates. I can't bring myself to get all religious about it one way or the other.
There was an earlier posting to Slashdot that laid out the cost factor between Google Apps and Microsoft solutions, with the former being a small fraction of the latter. Given that, it may well be true that Microsoft can also do a lot of what Google can, but unless somebody needs exact Microsoft compatibility, why should they spend the additional cash?
If we are talking about the paid versions (Google Apps for Business), then there are no ads and every expectation of privacy -- a basic requirement for businesses.
This is a reviewing / collaboration tool, not version control. At any time someone in word can hit "accept all changes" and whoosh it's all gone.
These markups are fantastic, however where I work we use it with a separate document management system that does version control for us. We basically check out the most recent document, and the first thing we do is hit "Accept All Changes" this provides us with a very clean slate. The final edited document is checked in and that way only the most recently changes are visible when you go and open the approved document. It also makes it very easy for the document reviewer / approver to see what has changed.
I've seen people try to use this feature for version control before. It quickly becomes a clusterfuck of uncontrolled rainbow colours and strikethroughs.
Have you reported the issue? https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/
LibreOffice has revision functionality
In a way, the choice of word processor is more or less irrelevant by comparison with the level of trust involved in putting my files in the hands of someone I don't personally know. If anything should happen to files on my own hard drives, I at least only have myself to blame for not having secured or backed them up. But there is always the risk that Google might be compromised, either from the outside or by some rogue sysadmin, and I don't want to even think about trying to claim any redress against Google if they fuck up.
Absolutely right. But a cloud provider has a team of pros exactly to avoid that. And I'd bet that for every file lost or compromised by a "cloud accident" there are 100 of files lost in a drive crash or "oops I didn't want to delete THAT folder" accident. (Or lost USB Stick or "reply all" or what else for the "compromised" variety)
So basically, you need to choose your solution based on your personal risk profile, like , is your company big enough to hire someone to take care of backups and storing them offsite? Is that guy reliable?
bickerdyke
He already mixed it up with notepad.
bickerdyke
Wait, what? Are you talking about the ability to do real-time collaborative editing of Word documents here?
Two key features: Cost and Convenience. With Google docs, it is integrated with gmail and Google Talk, which provides a complete infrastructure to accomplish the needed collaboration. All that is need is a browser, be it Chrome or Firefox. With the Microsoft approach; I don't know... maybe I need MS Office for all (not operable through Android tablets unlike Google docs), then I dont think it is integrated with Hotmail or MSN Messenger; maybe I need to get Sharepoint for all for collaborating, and God knows what else. And to top it all, every 3 years, some jerk at Microsoft would introduce a clippy, ribbons, hair-bands, necklaces and what not. And all users need to go up the upgrade treadmill to accomplish the same thing while consuming more resources in lesser number of platforms at a greater cost and frustration. No thanks, I will stick to Google docs.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
But the handful of people who don't fit in that category set the standards, and they need features like tracking changes, comments, and stylesheets.
The why on earth use Word? Have you ever seen someone actually use the Word Version tracking? 95% of business, version tracking for word files is to use "Save As" Document_new.doc, Document_newer.doc, or even Document_today.doc, cluttering a shared network drive. Documents get mailed around, either to people not able to access the office network share (or even to people who are), local copies are created by the dozen and so on.
I have to admit that MS office is really easy to use, but that often leads to the mess described above. There is nothing to prevent that but user education and discipline. We all know what happens when we have to rely on that.
The proper solution to those requirements would be LaTeX (or any other text based document source format, FormattingObjects, whatever) and SVN. Perhaps combined with a pdf-based archive to documeht incomming/outgoing stuff.
The Unix philosophy doesn't sell to non-technically-minded people, especially not when it conflicts with a superior workflow.
You can set up a superior workflow with *ix-tools, but you have to do it yourself, it's nothing that comes out of a box.
bickerdyke
Why the hell would you use Google Docs for Taxi Dispatch?
Er... not me; but a prospective client of ours was using Google Docs, Gmail and Google Talk to co-ordinate the entire taxi dispatch system. We replaced his entire infrastructure with an open source based front-end, talking to a GPS-based location-tracker service provider. Now he has been able to reduce his workforce by 60% while increasing the number of taxis managed.
But my point is; it is possible to do excellent real-time collaboration with free Google tools, at high reliability. Which is simply not possible with Microsoft solutions, inspite of paying hefty sums of money.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
You can learn all this with LibreOffice at school. Anybody arguing you have to do it all over because MS Office used at work has a different user interface? Well, I learned MS Office, then came The Ribbon. Now I use The Ribbon, next comes the MS Office Tablet Interface or some other new fad for my desktop PC?
Show the kids the principles; the details of UI will change soon enough.
emacs is both a boring text editor and one of the most prominent foss projects so your theorem does not hold. Personally I boot libreoffice from usb sticks rather than work under multiple office versions and windows, do long stuff with latex, and consider google apps a last resort solution when only a web browser is available.YMMV
oh and office costed a lot more when alternatives were not around...
We are mentioning only Google Docs vs Word.
Why not also include MS excel.
Word's version control is a lot more sophisticated. It can show you the document clean, or with strikeouts and inserts, or with annotations in the margins. You can accept and reject changes by pointing to them.
And it goes completly down the drain as soon as someone mails out the file or edits his local copy for whatever reason or simply insists on explicitly saving a new version with a different filename.
bickerdyke
It's not about the UI, but rather all the missing or more bend-over-backwards features in OpenOffice (or LibreOffice or whatever you want to call it) when compared to MS Office. In 7th grade, we were using Office 2000 or maybe XP... the basic concepts translate to 2007+ (ribbon) just fine.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, drives me crazy because I can't find many of the features that I'm looking for, or they work just slightly differently enough to be annoying...
I agree - unacceptable.
However - try being in a situation where you are sending documents to an intermediary who translates the document into your client's language (and vice versa of course), and ending up with the document describing the 100 million euro project, CRASHING Word, as soon as the document crosses 100 pages.
Then imagine calling Microsoft's quite expensive business support, asking for help, and flat out being told, that this is a known issue for documents that traverse different language installations, and that there is no forthcoming fixes for this bug, and that the work around is to keep the documents below 100 pages.
At that point, it either becomes a beaurocratic nightmare to keep track of every piece of the 2,500+ page document, OR you simply instate a simple rule of always opening the document in Open Office, saving it in Word format again, and then opening it in Word, after which there were NO crashing issues with the large document. A few layout issues, but no one really cared about that.
Granted, that was about 10 years ago now, and I have no idea why the hell that work around turned out to work, but THAT is a horrible type of bug. It is a show stopper, and quite frankly much worse than a watermark corruption issue.
Now, do competing suites have issues? Yes, they do. But for some reason the relatively trivial issues that they have always trumps the game stopping bugs that probably still exist in MS Office, simply because "that's what everyone uses".
And this applies to all the dominant pieces of software. Doesn't matter what they are.
And in case you hadn't noticed, I seriously hate that attitude.
I am a teacher and everything I do involves collaboration. With Gmail Docs, I can have a document open with both the student (at their home) and myself looking at the same doc at the same time and I can even see where the student has their cursor. It is the dog's bolox. I never dreamed that such a perfect solution would arrive so soon.
Does that mean that I think that it is the best office suite? No, of course not. Why do all these articles overlook the simple fact that what is the dog's bolox for one person is just a dog for someone else. My friend runs his business on an Excel spreadsheet that has an incredible macro that requests all the information that the person taking the first call needs to ask the customer, receives that data and provides a quote and work sheets for the guys that do the work and then invoices and accounts etc. Complete package in one, I think he is mad but he thinks he has God in software form. I know that Google Docs is really God in software form.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I will rather stay with libre office than juggle multiple office versions with their different interfaces. I also am way more productive under linux.these two factors outweigh greatly the incomplete support for watermarks...at least, in my universe.
You also do not make sense when you say a for profit company makes better software, were you around when office was the only game in town? bloated slow buggy and pricey...
We learned wordperfect for dos in school because "thats what people use at work"...
When i left school, wordperfect for dos had disappeared.
You need to teach concepts not specific applications, because those specific applications either won't be around or will be significantly different by the time you leave school.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I find it quite depressing how little firms use macros etc. Many years ago we had a Lotus 123 system that read in a text file of account transactions from a mainframe then scanned each one, pulling in custom pricing for each client via additional sheets, formatting and printing a bill for each one with breakdown before issuing a charging schedule. Worked great for 2000 plus clients a month. With Excel and Word plus macros we built some very sophisticated and functional pricing tools and even a tool that optimized cash collection routes for a security firm. These days, people don't even know macros exist.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Do you really think it's likely MS Office will disappear any time soon? :)
Yes, schools need to teach concepts - however, this usually involves the use of actual examples, and why not make those examples relevant to current everyday work life?
The 95% of business that you had experience with must have been from some bottom of the barrel places, intelectually-wise.
In the three companies I've worked for in the last 12 years (the last two counting > 10k employees), the "track changes" functionality, along with all related stuff (review comments, automated tracked change merging, accept/reject) was in active, constant use as an integrated part of work processes and culture. This extended to all of those companies' partners throughout any collaborative work on any set of documents.
That's not to say that the dreaded document versioning scheme using name suffixes (Document_2012-11-28.docx, etc.) wasn't in use - one practice doesn't exclude the other. It has been a common sight to see multiple document copies with different versions in their names cluttering a shared network drive, SVN directory (!) or a SharePoint document library, even when the underlying store was capable of versioning by itself. Still, lots of those versions were "draft" ones with tracked changes and comments inside them.
That's funny. I find myself going \LaTeX{} when nothing else will do and arguing with it is easier than arguing with Word.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Every place I have worked has used MS Word version tracking. If a document has gone out for review and changes have been requested, then it's necessary in order to verify that the correct changes have been made.
There is absolutely no way that a markup language such as Latex is going to be used by a "normal" office worker.
That is interesting. Can you elaborate?
I've tried it, doesn't come close to Word in funvtionnality nor ergonomics nor looks.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Spot on. I see this all the time. The company buys application X to do task A. X does A well but can also do B, C & D well with proper configuration and some glue in place. Now company realizes they need to do B. In comes application Y which does task B well but also can do A, C & maybe even D if properly configured, yadayada...
Buying tools is easy and FUN. Using them requires skill. Skill is hard to to acquire and takes time away from shopping around for tools.
I don't understand this: If Word works, then what's wrong with Word being better than Google Docs and Zoho Docs? A bias against Microsoft? Google is necessarily better than everyone else? I think this is ridiculous.
The office ribbon drives me crazy because I can't find many of the features that I'm looking for, or they work just slightly differently enough to be annoying...
A proficient skill in Word is a marketable skill? I feel sorry for the society where this is even remotely true.
Touch(e-with-a-line).
However, the ribbon has other advantages, such as making all non-dialogue functions accessible via keyboard shortcuts. Want to highlight the last word yellow (something I use a lot at work), for instance? CTRL+SHIFT+Left then ALT H I Enter. Insert a cross reference? ALT C R F.
Hell, I almost updated to Windows 8 just to get the ribbon in Explorer... :p
Duh, topic was bashing Microsoft. This is supporting Microsoft. It is not just off topic, it is the polar opposite of the topic !
Mod parent up. Seriously. Loudly: TRACK-CHANGES IS NOT VERSION CONTROL.
Say it again: TRACK-CHANGES IS NOT VERSION CONTROL.
"Version" implies, well, a version of a document, a stopping point, a revision of the whole. Tracking a version of a document is a point construct; not at all the same thing as tracking the flow of changes over the course of a period of work. One is a node, the other's an edge. One's a pixel, the other's a vector. Not the same thing.
Both are really useful, but they're different tools for different purposes. As the parent posted, if anyone in a workgroup hits "accept all changes" the tracking is gone. Anyone using track-changes as version control -- expecting never to accept changes, and worse, puttering along with the idea that rolling back through tens of thousands of incremental changes is a remotely practicable rollback function -- is a moron.
On the other hand, true version control is analgous to an audit function. Writers in a workgroup should not be able to defeat version control adopted by that workgroup. Seriously, it should not be easy to lose track of versions or toast the ability to roll back to an earlier version, which in the current state of word processing software (local or in the cloud) means version control has to be external to the document itself. Google Docs' record of explicit saves is pretty close. Wikipedia's history of change commits is dead on. Track-changes is something else entirely.
I think not...(*poof*)
The fact that "professionals" are using Word ( or similar ) for their work for quality output betrays the lack of their sanity in the first place. 20 years ago Microsoft-Word was a joke of a tool for legitimately professional publishing tasks, a Fisher-Price mallet in a world of steel hammers. Back then it was LaTeX, Quark or some other probably-insanely-obscure DTP system, even WP5.1, but over the years people have forgotten how it was (probably with good reason though, none of them were all that fun and easy to use and never came with cheesy clipart). As a publisher, I still find ms-doc files to be inconsistent a lot of the time (especially from some writers) and almost always needs to be fixed up by selecting the text, copying in to a fresh file with a very strict style and manually reworking it; as opposed to LaTeX (hand generated or via LyX) where you can generate print-ready novels consistently without all the screwing around.
It would seem we've traded the steeper learning curve for substandard results and since it's been happening long enough now, it has become the 'professional way'.
Now get off my lawn!
It is perfectly possible to save your Word documents to online storage, and have the best of both worlds from that point of view, with a copy both online and on your local hard drive.
The other thing is that while most people only use about 10% of the features in Word, they don't all use the same 10%, so most people will find that the feature lite alternatives are missing something. In my case it is the ability to pull data from external databases.
OpenOffice, even in the latest version, is unable to do properly kerning to most font types when you have freetype with bytecode interpreter on. KDE works, even the GNOME renders correctly. Except OO. I should also mention the grotesque errors that it cause randomly, trying to align a text with the document margins?
The 95% of business that you had experience with must have been from some bottom of the barrel places, intelectually-wise.
Not neccessarily. A combination of small shop, grown infrastructure and a field of expertise not related to file management and word processing can do that trick too.
In the three companies I've worked for in the last 12 years (the last two counting > 10k employees),
it's only natural that it gets less of in issue in bigger companies. At some point you're crossing the line where buying and maintaining something expensive as sharepoint is worth its money and you tend to use specialized software for more and more tasks. There is nothing wrong with abusing excel as a database as long as e.g. your inventory consists of a few hunderd items. (assuming you're keeping some kind of document hygiene like making sure the guy responsible for updating it knows which one is the master copy and backups are kept) But you should know when to stop doing that and get some real enterprise tools for the tasks at hand. And at 10k employees, you're WAY past that point.
What you should be aware of at that size is a backlash-effect when people turn to Excel-macros again to bypass enterprise software, because setting up that urgent report would be a 3 weeks paperwork-heavy process instead of 3 hours of Excel magic.
(During my last 12 years, I worked in companys ranging from 50 to 250 employees. Usually owner managed and specialized enough to be global market leader in their field. I guess that's a difference between US and Europe.)
bickerdyke
vim (set spell) + latex
done
I've played with Docs, but never used it for anything serious. The thing is, it's so easy to have the best of both worlds - mature, local software, stored in the cloud. Why bother with a purely cloud based solution?
For my personal use, I use Open Office, but it could just as easily be Word. Doesn't matter for the point I'm making. The documents get stored in a directory I sync with Dropbox. I could just as easily swap in another cloud storage provider - Google, MS, whatever - so I'm not tied in to one vendor and I always have a local copy anyway.
OK, so I have to install Open Office on every machine I use, but I guess that's the advantage of free over paid software.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
suiting that this story comes shortly after a story about google taking over microsoft in the business world.
the answer is no.
Depending on how you use the word "professional" I might be inclined to agree with you. When I entered law school, most of my professors were decidedly Word Perfect users. This was true also of judges and big law firms. This was more to do with tradition and backwards compatibility than anything. About the time Office 2000 came out, my law school handed out copies of the professional edition to the entire student body and said we needed to learn Word. I had already been using Office in college. College students need Office because 1) they may be using it in their professional future, thus learning it early is a strength; and because, as generalists, they will be writing multiple types of papers which may require the more advanced features of Office, or at the very least consistent ease of use. Not every type of professional will need Office, but there are many types of professionals that will. I had an architecture major friend who wrote his papers in Adobe Pagemaker. He was a glutton for punishment, but also it was what he had, and it seemed to him more native to the way he put down ideas. MS Office's worth extends far beyond any protection features.
Hehehe, your suggestion to people is LaTeX????????? Mod this funny, cause seriously what the fuck. I would argue LaTeX is overkill and requires too much of the user.
The very fact that most screenwriters use dedicated software for the formatting of their work is an indication that all office suites are ridiculous. I mean, Word comes sooo close to being exactly what Final Draft is, yet...
No it's not a marketable skill; Word and Excel proficiency are a basic requirement.
I'll add my support for Notepad++. It's a very powerful and much, much lighter weight tool than Word or LibreOffice, suitable for configuration files, source code, HTML, and most scripting languages. It integrates very will with the file browser, and handles multiple documents and multiple applications opening the same document better than either Word or LibreOffice.
Sadly, training students to gain expertise with such a specific toolkit as MS Word in preference to tools like Notepad++ is a serious error and waste of their limited school time. They _will_ spend much of their document creation time on the colors, the formats, the fonts, the indentation, and the inevitable document losses and downtime during forced upgrades of a too-powerful toolkit that encourages appearance over content.
Google documents are intriguing in their features. I'll be curious to see if they're mature enough, in the next few years, to actually use in the workplace. (My colleagues and business partners have been, unfortunately, tied to MS Word formats for business documents.)
I've seen this happen so many times it's not even funny. OpenOffice/LibreOffice weren't brought in for any part of it until people couldn't open it and in desperation they agreed to try the suggestion to try opening the file in LibreOffice. File opens fine, is saved in the MS format, and the result is openable in MS Word again.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
It's quite trivial for this to happen. Suppose someone writes a Word document (with the latest version of Word), then sends it to another person who has Word 97, who maybe opens and edits it, then passes it along to someone with another version of Word again. Somewhere along the line the document will get corrupted,
It was corrupted right at the start, when the first person saved it as .docx - the colleague with Word 97 won't be able to open it.
Oh, I hear you say "Word 97 is old, they should buy the new one." Yes, and pay MS their extortion money only because they made the new format incompatible with the previous version for reasons that 99.9999999% of users won't appreciate.
Contrast with OpenOffice, that is backwards compatible since forever.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
> Aren't those documents created or edited by LibreOffice by any chance?
Not in my direct experience. MS Word format has _never_ been fully standardized or had a robust API, standards for which features are compatible with which revisions of MS Word. The result has been absolute chaos with old documents, and is part of the reason that governments have tried to switch to an "open" and documented format such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice use. Microsoft finally published an API, referred to as "OOXML", to get by government requirements for documented formats.
But the history of the lobbying to get OOXML passed as an ISO standard was a horrific abuse of a standards process. It should _never_ have passed in that broken state,and Microsoft _does not follow the standard_ they worked so hard to legislate. The result is disastrous and unpredictable loss of document content. And _LibreOffice can often recover content that MS Word cannot_ in such corrupted documents.
I used Google Docs heavily for a few years. Then one day, about two years ago, they disabled offline mode. Guess what happened to me a few weeks later? Yup, I was in some situation with no internet access and needed a document and couldn't get it. I dropped Docs like a hot rock and switched to Dropbox the next day. (Granted, they now have offline access once again, through the very nice Google Drive. But, you know, "screw me twice," and all that.)
OTOH, I use Maps all the time, and Translate and YouTube. I arrived on this page via Google Reader and am entering this comment via my Nexus 7. So clearly they know how to make (or acquire) some good products.
Final note: Google relentlessly a/b tests everything. They know exactly how many people are rejecting the GMail redesign, or how many uses they stand to lose by killing iGoogle. Sometimes I think these cold, rational decisions backfire, as they annoy a vocal minority or misinterpret the reasons for the test results.
-- 77IM
Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
Master: Well, yes and no.
[...] basically the entire enterprise world.
Most corporate documents are transient: they are critical for a very short time, until a high-level decision is made, and then they're basically landfill. Contracts, sure, you might want to go back and look at them, but pretty much everything else is ephemeral. They use change tracking and comments, but hardly ever stylesheets.
Documentation, particularly professionally-written documentation, on the other hand, needs named styles, and this is where OO, LO, and GD fall flat on their faces. Word lets you set a style margin, where each paragraph-level object's style name can be seen at a glance. In other systems you have to hover or click or something on each object in turn. Editing or writing in this mode is a snap compared to OO, LO, and GD. Named styles are the only way that you can reliably get a reusable XML document out of a wordprocessor (ie not OOXML), and without proper facilities in the interface to manage styles, a wordprocessor is a dead duck.
For the record, this is possible with menus too. [Alt] always opens the menu bar (it's the best way to do so on apps which now hide the menu bar by default, in fact), after which you can hit the letter corresponding to the menu that you want, followed by the letter for the option, etc. It's basically exactly the same thing as you're doing right now, in fact, and some of those key sequences may even not have changed (may Ribbon tabs using the same shortcut keys as the menus they replaced).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Vim and gvim are available for Win32 (native port, I believe using MinGW), Win32-via-Cygwin, and POSIX on NT (SUA via Interix; the [g]vim package is available from http://suacommunity.com/ or any other Interix package repo). Kwrite and KATE (KDE's text/code editor programs, with KATE being mostly a multi-doc capable Kwrite) are available for Windows (along with the rest of KDE4) from http://windows.kde.org./ I'm sure there are many others.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I'll echo the above, but add that (unlike MS Office), Libre/Neo/OpenOffice also has a mature user interface. MS Office's ribbonwhatsit might arguably be "better", but there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the old UI, and LibreOffice preserves it. It's familiar, and I can be productive with it. I can install LibreOffice on every computer I use: a Windows 7 system, a legacy XP box, and a Mac at work; my MacBook and Mac Mini at home; the TabletPC I mainly use for drawing; and it's even on my Linux server at home. The documents I'm working on are synched painlessly through Dropbox. It is nearly impossible for me to suffer "downtime", even offline. A couple years ago I was dragged along on a week-long cruise, and instead of losing a week (as I would with cloud services), I got a whole lot of writing done at sea. The cloud could evaporate, and I'd barely see a hiccup in my workflow: all of my software and all of my data are on almost every computer I own. (So my house could evaporate too, and at least my work would be OK.) The only fly in the ointment are my phone and tablet: At this point I can only view files in MS formats, and there's no LibreOffice (or even a subset) for working on iOS or Android.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
What do keyboard shortcuts have to with the Ribbon interface?
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
I'm not quite as PC-illiterate as you seem to think... I've been using menu keyboard shortcuts (with ALT to open the menu) for years, far before the ribbon existed ;)
The issue is that in older menu-based UIs (Office 2003, OpenOffice) the keyboard shortcuts very often lead to UIs that are no longer keyboard-navigable, or require the use of the tab key (multiple times) to navigate through a bunch of checkboxes, drop-down lists and so on. Also, many of the options don't actually have a dedicated shortcut key...
For instance: In order to change certain formatting aspects in Office 2007+, I can use keyboard shortcuts to access anything visible in the home tab of the ribbon. In Office 2003, I have to open Format=>Font (which is accessible via a keyboard shortcut, like you said), but then I need to either tab around a lot to select checkboxes and drop-down lists or just use the mouse.
They said the same about WordPerfect back when we learned it at school.
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
Reminds me of the following:
Excel is a great band-aid to quickly hack something together, but it's no substitute for real tools.
In other words, people don't care if their solution is seen as a band-aid, as long as they get stuff done with it.
Will MS Office disappear soon? No.
Will some grads suddenly find themselves in jobs where it isn't used? You bet. There are cloud-loving Google Docs shops, penny-pinching OpenOffice businesses, and even some kool-aid-drinking Pages studios out there already.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
MS Office may likely still be around, but it likely won't look anything like it does now. If someone can't transition from having learned the generalized concept during grade school, to knowing specific applications during college, then... So point remains - MS Office provides absolutely nothing that K-12 kids needs, but that google docs doesn't already provide. Further, with google docs they can collaborate easier - something our kids don't learn, even in college. They learn the opposite, really. ps - I've used google docs professionally for years. LibreOffice has supplemented my use case without fail. This despite the fact that document review and creation is very important in my job.
Does that really matter? Remember, these alternatives all have a far smaller feature set, and the overlap (mostly basics) is all very similar... you don't need to relearn anything to use them if you've extensively used MS Office - you just forget 90% of what you've learned in the past and are automatically an expert user ;)
Oooooh, so now you see do you?
Objection Your Honor, he's leading the witness.
I don't understand how people can compare Google Docs to word. Google Docs works well, but its feature set is laughable compared to word. This is the perfect case of "you get what you pay for".
I was pretty interested in what you had to say until you decided to bash people that had interests different than yours.
Google Drive has had an offline mode for a long time now.
Teaching someone how to use the features of MS-Office 2010 provides them with very few skills – other than typing – transferable to other office suites.
But enjoy drinking your Flavor Aid.
We learned wordperfect for dos in school because "thats what people use at work"...
When i left school, wordperfect for dos had disappeared.
You need to teach concepts not specific applications, because those specific applications either won't be around or will be significantly different by the time you leave school.
Troy Aikman was the fastest typist in Oklahoma because he learned to touch type a skill which makes any word processor he uses better.
That is a dreadful thing to write about Barack Obama.
I at least only have myself to blame for not having secured or backed them up
Of course you are not free from intrusion or backup failure if you put your files in your hard disk. It is a question of betting in your competence or in Google's. And it is reasonable to imagine that most people would consider Google more competent than themselves. And of course you can back up your gdoc data, see for instance:
http://www.dataliberation.org/
http://gs.fhtino.it/gdocbackup
I can't count on the availability of a constant internet connection
You can work offline, see:
http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1628467
OOO/LibreOffice, MS Word, and Google Docs each have their place and uses. Below are my use cases.
Middle and High-school: LibreOffice/OpenOffice and Google Docs: All my kids and their friends use OOO and now Google Docs (dozens of papers over a 10+ year period, most written using OOO on Linux). A minor problem is that the school system online paper submission system ONLY takes MS .doc and MS .docx formats.
College: LibreOffice/OpenOffice and Google Docs: My oldest son did quite well in college using OpenOffice on Windows and later Linux. However, my second son is REQUIRED to use MS Word (VT engineering, $200 M$ college bundle). Google Docs is gaining ground here. Unless you are a business major, solutions other than MS Word are optimal.
Work: Google docs: Simple technical notes, quick documents, docs that are not sensitive, docs to share. LibreOffice/OpenOffice: short reports, technical papers, reports to management. MS Word: proposals and presentations for upper management and customer management.
Didn't anyone get the memo? The word processor is basically dead. Corporate America has replaced it with Outlook. Having said that, where I see more differentiation between Office and Google Docs is in the Excel product. I love using Excel. I love to manipulate numbers. Google Docs is very ackward to use in that way. LibreOffice can do a bit more than Google, but it's still nowhere close to Excel in features and power. All three are great for making a personal budget or tracking your expenses. I personally love Excel because I can manipulate it from vbscript. I can write scripts to collect a ton of data, organize it, manipulate it, format it, and then dump it into an excel spreadsheet. I know I can't do that with Google Docs, and I doubt LibreOffice could do it.
this is BS
what did schools used to teach? office 03 on xp. Does it matter now? sure, but you could as well learned openoffice on gnome. in fact you`d be better off. why? because you can still use libreoffice on mate.
All I need is:
- collaborative editing
- control over paragraph and character styles
- a straight-forward format for flowing text onto pages (XML would be fine)
- a way to signal to a server that the content has changed
Adobe Buzzword would've been perfect if it had only had paragraph and character styles (and they pulled support for it from InDesign a version or two back).
Every time I've tried to work w/ a Typo3 developer they've claimed that they can't format XML so as to efficiently pull it into InDesign (and one can never get the people doing the editing to tag things properly so long as they have an option for instead ``finger-painting'' the visual appearance using local formatting)
There're third-party plug-ins which let one use Google docs in InDesign, but that's a complication I'd liefer avoid.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
They use change tracking and comments, but hardly ever stylesheets ... Documentation, particularly professionally-written documentation, on the other hand, needs named styles
Perhaps my Enterprise experience is different than yours, partly possibly because I have worked mostly for ISO certified Enterprises. That's why I included style sheets, since an ISO certified Enterprise spends a lot of time documenting process, where style sheets are critical. I would imagine this also applies to any Legal departments or Law firms. If you deal a lot with other ISO certified companies, you'll need them for sure.
For (even large) companies that mostly produce documents for human consumption with few guidelines on how to structure the documents, I would assume you are right. Though, when I "teach" people to use Word, I tell them to never hit Enter twice and that using bold, italics or similar is evil. People should get used to always using named styles.
Saying that they intend to use the format is not the same as saying they plan to use the format in the way that the spec is written.
Moreover, "The Cloud" will never earn people's trust as much as a hard-copy software on their own computer. It's not reliable yet, in any way(whoops, Internet's down, can't write my thesis!). It doesn't have the proper support that established and well-known(and dare I say, purchased) software has behind it.
I am getting thoroughly sick of this "Everything is going to 'the cloud' " movement. I will never - repeat NEVER - trust all of my documents to a server somewhere far away under corporate control and government watch. Even if nothing I do is 'illegal' and all of my files are simply my own text creations, how do I know the government isn't going to subpoena everything on my drive and use it in conjunction with some unjust law they whipped up last night? How do I know the datacenter will never lose my documents due to incompetence, theft, or vandalism? How do I know my documents containing sensitive information won't just be ganked by some script kiddie from 4chan? I just can't trust it - It's just not safe.
The only cloud service I use at this point is GMail. I love it, it's great and solid - it rarely ever goes down. If GMail suddenly stopped working, I would not be significantly troubled. I have other email service hosted on a server I manage at an office I physically go to, which is no more on 'the cloud' than my router's management panel.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Every place I have worked has used MS Word version tracking.
And there you betray your age. The first true word processing package I used (not counting Emacs) was WordPerfect on Data General mini systems, and subsequently on DOS. Workplaces found ways to cope with tracking that might seem cumbersome now, but they worked. I'm sure there are many who would argue that WordPerfect 5.1 is still unsurpassed, and I would be hard pressed to honestly disagree.
I don't do it often, but when I do, I really need the feature of printed mail merge.
Until google gets into the 1980s, I cannot use google gocs.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Betteridge's law of headlines suggests that the answer is no.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
MS Office probably won't disappear, but it might look dramatically different than it does now. MS might get rid of the "ribbon", and replace it with a bow.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I guess we know who's on M$'s payroll. Google Docs/Drive blows M$ Oriface out of the water.
Agreed. Latex and GnuPlot saved my thesis.
The Excel, PowerPoint, Word toolchain for advanced graphing particularly sucks. Gnuplot may be archaic, but it blows Excel away in graphing capabilities. WordPerfect for Windows is still better than Word for large document text editing. Latex is the only one that handles complex math in an easy to use fashion. Plus, Latex gives the ability to port the same document to multiple print styles, which WordPerfect only partially accomplishes.
Key problems:
- Excel reformats the document to handle different printers, and then doesn't reformat it back.
- Absence of advanced formating functions in graphing and in spreadsheets. No equivalent of the Latex $f_{\Chi^2}(\vec{x})$ exists in Excel, especially for graphs.
- The statistics professor had a list of known bugs in Excel math functions. I think some of the newer versions of Excel fix some of these.
- Excel doesn't support exponential notation, such as 1E-4096, properly or consistently.
- You can paste the Excel spreadsheet into PowerPoint, and then apply advanced formating in PowerPoint. However, this sucks, and PowerPoint moves the symbols around every once in a while.
- OpenOffice clones Microsoft Office. By and large, it has the same problems.
- Word has no proper support for advanced graphing.
- No reveal codes in Word. This causes graphs and equations to unexpectedly disappear.
- Word does not properly support big documents.
- Word has no equivalent for LaTex support for BibTex.
- Word has no equivalent for LaTex's ability to support multiple back end formats, for instance, print, PDF, and HTML.
- Word doesn't support properly large documents.
- Way easier to script LaTex and GnuPlot than Word.
- Has Word fixed that bug where it will randomly reformat and/or delete pictures yet?
- Has Word fixed that bug where if it crashes if the embedding becomes too complex?
Word does not work for complex documents. For years, the legal profession kept purchasing WordPerfect because it had a few key functions that were missing in Word. Every month or two, an article pops up in Groklaw about how a law firm was bit by Word. If you need Mathematics or advanced document generation, then Word still doesn't work either. PowerPoint and Excel are no substitutes for a image editing programs or graphing programs.
Seeing two different misspellings of "bollocks" between your post and your signature, I'm hoping you're not an English instructor. :)
A whole new market of simpler word-processing apps has sprung up to cater to writers' needs. Many writers now use programs like Scrivener to write their novels.
I use Word all day at work and hate it. I liked it best around 2000 and even the 1997 version was great. I think it's gotten worse over time. But someone else said it: it's not very buggy, and OOo/LibreOffice are, and that's a killer. I don't find myself using it anymore, but am greatful that its existence led to the ODF document standard, since Word formats are a hodgepodge.
I use instead Softmaker Office (www.softmaker.com), which I paid for. Runs on Linux and even FreeBSD plus Windows. Its file format compatibility is far better - I find it has very few problems importing and exporting Word files. And it's fast and lightweight and reminds of all the stuff that was good about Word 2000, like custom keyboard settings and macros and so on. They're running an offer at the moment where you can get it for free (it's publicity for them, since they're a small fish in the pond). Actually, just checked and I see the offer just ended.
Anyway, it's good software. For the heavy-duty stuff though (like my book www.dictatorshandbook.net) I insist on LaTeX and can't imagine using anything else. I wrote up a page on how I used LaTeX and Linux to manage the admin side of writing a book here: http://therandymon.com/content/view/236/98/
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
The NYT had a pretty good commentary on the topic yesterday. (I know, I know. Gotta log in to see it. Sorry 'bout that.) There were a couple of excerpts that I found really fascinating. For example:
In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000 use it.
One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe.
And this one:
In a recent report, Gartner, the information technology research company, called Google âoethe only strong competitorâ to Microsoft in cloud-based business productivity software, though it warned that âoeenterprise concerns may not be of paramount importance to the search giant.â
Google is tight-lipped about how many people use Google Apps, saying only that in June more than five million businesses were using it, up from four million in late 2011. Almost all these companies are tiny, but in early December Google announced that even companies with fewer than 10 employees, which used to get Google Apps free, would have to pay.
While most users most of the time don't need the extra features of Word, some users need them much of the time, and I expect many serious users would benefit from learning about them and using them on occasion.
In my own discipline (analytic philosophy), it is very common to have numbered propositions in articles, which are then referred to by number. The right way to do this in Word is to set up an automatically numbered list that allows for the list items to be noncontiguous but still numbered sequentially, and then to refer to the numbered propositions via the cross-referencing feature. This way, as you insert more numbered propositions while editing, the numbers and references get automatically updated. As far as I can see, Google Docs supports neither noncontiguous lists nor cross-referencing. That said, it is my feeling that while most people in my discipline use Word (a few use LaTeX, and I use it myself for symbol-heavy articles), most don't know about these features and just number and cross-reference manually.
For non-fiction writing where one needs to refer to other chapters, sections or footnotes (e.g., "See footnote 17, above" or "As we shall see in Section 4.3.1.a"), cross-referencing is pretty much essential if one wants to avoid error prone manual references, fixing which up can be nasty if the editor calls for revisions. Again, that's a reason to use LaTeX, but there is no need for LaTeX given that Word's alt-I,N does this quite well.
Assigning keys to special symbols is also very useful--sometimes I don't want to bother with LaTeX for something that just has some symbols from the Symbol font, but I certainly don't to be pressing alt-I,S and using the mouse to select the symbol (or alt-I,S,Tab,arrows,enter) each time, and a keyboard shortcut is just what the doctor ordered.
And while most of the time, macros aren't needed, there are times when they greatly reduce labor. For instance, recently I indexed one of my books. To do that, I used a perl script that uses in-text ASCII codes marking index entries and page breaks on the Word file back-generated from the galley PDF (the press refused to give me a copy of their Quark or InDesign file). But I had to insert all those ASCII codes to mark areas of text to reference, e.g., {{IndexEntryA:}}Text to which the index entry should point{{:IndexEntryA}}. Typing in the codes would be error prone. So I wrote some super-simple macros which greatly reduced labor. It still was a ton of work, but without macros it would have been very hard. How often do I index? Only once every couple of years when I have a book coming out. But when I do, I need all the help I can get from the software.
And there are little conveniences of macros. I was once writing something that didn't have much in the way of symbols, but kept on having italic variable letters with numerical subscripts in the text. I could have switched to LaTeX, but I liked writing in Word and that was about the only bit of technical symbolism I routinely needed. Without macros, a typical such sequence (T subscript 1, say) would be: ctrl-I, T, ctrl-I, ctrl-=, 1, ctrl-=. Easy to slip up, and a nuisance. With macros, I could just type T1, alt-S, and it would format it correctly. (A more sophisticated macro would check whether the subscript was numerical or a variable letter and italicize the latter but not the former. I can't remember if I had it do that.) The macro made it possible to more fluently, without the annoyance of slowing down to format subscripted variables whenever they occurred.
Whenever one is doing anything repetitively, a macro will help. I suppose for simpler cases when it's just a keyboard shortcut, one could use Google Docs and a keyboard macro program on one's desktop. But sometimes the macros need to aware of what's in the word processor text.
From personal experience:
The problem is that the company hires someone to create the fancy macro that makes life easy then doesn't bother to retain them to continually update the macro over time for new versions of Excel. 5 years later there's only one person left, who now works somewhere in management, and is the only one who remembers what the password to unlock the workbook is so that an IT hotshot can make the change to that one line that was hard coded to check the version of Excel with an integer when it needs to check with a decimal for the latest version. 10 years later, no one remembers the password to unlock the workbook and no one ever bothered to write it down. The IT hotshot was laid off so that desktop support could be outsourced, the macros no longer work thanks to a "security" patch from Microsoft, and no one on Earth knows who in the Hell wrote the macros in the first place. At this point the macros that were so simply to use and made life great get removed and the company signs up with company X who offers a new shiny system that puts all their data in the cloud for managers to have unlimited access to so they can wring every last bit of life out of their sales people.
That was very insightful, but i think that it would have worked better as a car analogy.
No, I kid i kid, this is exactly it. At my place of work we have tools for everything, and each tool is capable of doing a good portion of the other tools too but it seems that one person needs one special feature from one program so we have to support and deploy it. then when someone who does not need that program see it they inevitably ask for it so that they too can use it. and yes we use a combination of Google docs, Word, and to a lesser extent Libreoffice.
so you teach excel?
Of the last 3 companies I worked at with more than >10K employees, all in Silicon Valley and very well known, 1 used the track changes and commenting which constantly broke and required going back to previous versions of a file due to the latest version being unrecoverable. The other 2 used Sharepoint's Check in/out system without issue. I've only ever seen horribly obsessive people that had Devry degrees use naming suffixes on their documents as a means of version control. Everyone else was intelligent enough to look at the Date Create/Date Modified columns in Explorer.
So, in order to save a few hours of YOUR time, you want the many authors who feed you stuff to spend hours of THEIR time learning a different text editor. Seems the problem is more in the cost structure..Let the authors do what they do: "write" and let the graphics pros do what they do: "make it look right"
This is like businesses that roll out an insanely complex travel expense system (e.g. Concur) to 10,000 employees on the basis that it saves 5 people in the travel expense reimbursement department a lot of time.
Or businesses that have engineers and software developers spending countless hours making block diagrams on power point slides look the way they want, rather than having graphic artists working off pictures taken of whiteboards. In a small shop, sure, you have to be a jack of all trades and do it all, and you need tools that can do that, sort of. But in the enterprise world, I think more money has been wasted by providing "desktop publishing-like" capabilities universally, because then people who don't know anything about publication design (and, really, they shouldn't have to know) wind up doing it themselves, ineffficiently, expensively, and poorly. Come on.. we hired you to design integrated circuits using VHDL and Verilog, not be a graphic artist.
Because if you update to the next version of Word or Excel, half of your macros break. The simplest-yet-complete rant on this I've seen is here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/comptoolsExcel.html
And by design, Word & Excel will ratchet themselves forward in versions (especially if you're working with clients). So why invest significant time in an infrastructure that is designed to break?
To play devil's advocate here -
My wife uses a package called EndNote, which is a word extension which accomplishes the same task as BibTex.
Other then that, spot on!
Part 4, the Markup Language Reference, weighs in at 5756 pages -- 5756 pages -- to define "every element and attribute, the hierarchy of parent/child relationships for elements, and additional semantics as appropriate"
And it's incomplete!
There are numerous elements whose function isn't spelled out. Instead, the "spec" just points to previous implementations of Word and says "do it like that".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Let us not forget that some large companies, with many thousand employees, have gone over to Google Apps.
Including Google.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
But did it still work 3 versions of Word and Excel later ?
I think it didn't work so well, right ?
Maybe that is a reason people stopped doing it ?
New things are always on the horizon
I do not understand people's willingness to be dependent on the teat of an online service, when there are free local alternatives that cost nothing!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I'm a playwright and novelist in my spare time, and I totally agree. Plays need more formatting than novels, but not that much more. I'd rather just write than fool around with Word. I starting tinkering with Q10, a very minimalist word processor, but it was ***too*** minimalist for me.
I also work for a federal government press office handling news releases, and we use Google Docs to collaborate on editing. It's an excellent tool for that, and we're all on the SAME version of the document. We had a lot of different versions of the same release floating around when we used Word, and while we never sent out the wrong version of a news release, we came close a few times.
ahem...that's why god invented emacs!
He talks about the shortcomings of Google Docs' word processor from a viewpoint of using it as a "publishing" platform. The problem is that most of us aren't publishers, authors, or anything more than someone whipping out a quick page or two of shoddy documentation or a memo. If we were authors, we'd probably be using LaTeX, or Pagemaker, or something other than Microsoft Word (which, from what my friends who are actual writers say, is a pretty crappy platform for that purpose). And he misses the point completely about collaboration for things like spreadsheets, where it's all about the shared copy and only marginally about the concurrent editing features.
He is right about one thing, though - Zoho is a buggy piece of crap that never should have seen the light of day...
That is all.
Are you kidding? Macros are one of the, if not the most-used features of Excel in business (small and large).
Excel is effectively a lightweight database, and the macro functionality provides a quick and dirty way for Joe sixpack to get into the data without having to write queries. Everybody uses Excel. Even people who don't know what a database is use Excel. Excel is used everywhere to track everything from orders to invoices to HR information (in which case, the spreadsheet is locked behind a password).
Excel only fails for large amounts of data. And when I say large, I mean humungous--hundreds of GB to TB worth. It also fails when an outside vendor needs an interface into the data. But it's more than sufficient for all small business database applications, and sufficient even for most large business database applications, especially in-house data sets that are not too large.
And it's everywhere, and the main reason why nobody is going to crack the MS Office golden egg in the business and enterprise market. Powerpoint, Word, those are just supporting applications in the business world, present and useful, but not deal breakers. Excel and its macros is the key to Microsoft's dominance.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
And that is where you separate the men from the boys.
So to speak.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Google docs is great for a quick and dirty word processing or a collaborative project, but you shouldn't try to write a novel with it.
No, for a novel you need Libre Office... or a pen and paper.
Free Martian Whores!
Is this article written by a professional writer like Harlan Ellison, http://www.photographyhistory.com/harlanellisontypewriter.html ?
Surely not.
Why would a professional writer care about stylesheet? Can't the publisher look after that part? Why is
the professional writer not happy with Notepad?
Otherwise, the article strikes me as a collection of randomly selected and unmotivated issues with using word processors.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Why do you use GnuPlot instead of PSTricks with LaTeX?
That's because nobody argues with the Word. /ducks
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The lock in for Microsoft Office with business comes from their products scripting capabilities. Businesses love to automate, and Microsoft Office does this very effectively across all their products. e.g. Corporate users can use any MS Office product for data entry into complex database systems with a minimal of training.
I'm not bashing anyone. I personally like OpenOffice. I personally am friends with history majors.
The fact remains that not learning Word early on is a detriment in employment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The tasks a typical undergrad are asked to complete with a word processor are not very advanced, so OpenOffice instead of Word should not be much of a hurdle.
It's not that OpenOffice represents any kind of hurdle to learn. It's more that when you get a job at a company and they ask to edit documents you do not look like a fool because you don't know how to adjust page margins, or add footnotes, or adjust spacing.
Even the basic editing that college students do is quite helpful for learning enough Word to get by in a company.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Aren't those documents created or edited by LibreOffice by any chance?
Because in a few cases this has happened to me (with OpenOffice of course) but I don't remember a case that a document I created using word could not be opened with word. I edit very large documents (several hundred pages most of the time).
In my case, it was a Word document created in Word, saved (repeatedly) in Word which caused Word to crash (All the same version of Word). Fortunately LibreOffice could open it, and Word didn't crash on the resaved document.
Google Docs is INCREDIBLY more convenient than Word.
Notepad++ can't even render drop-down menus correctly. You know the menus that have been perfected since 1984? Notepad++, some-fucking-how, gets them wrong.
SublimeText is a good text editor. It costs money, but hey you have to pay money to get software that isn't written by morons who don't even know how drop-down menus are supposed to work.
Comment of the year
You work with idiots. That's not typical at all.
Comment of the year
Because if you update to the next version of Word or Excel, half of your macros break. The simplest-yet-complete rant on this I've seen is here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/comptoolsExcel.html
And by design, Word & Excel will ratchet themselves forward in versions (especially if you're working with clients). So why invest significant time in an infrastructure that is designed to break?
In car sales, that is called dynamic obsolescence.
And Office comes with Lync so your point is...?
Oh yeah: most people bitching about Office have no clue what Office is or what features it offers. Cripes. Seriously man, it's ok to say, "well I guess I don't really know what Office offers". It's ok. We won't think less of you.
Is that supposed to be a humorous dig at the new UI for Office being called the Ribbon? What a brilliant bon mot!
Cripes. The UI changed once in over 20 years. Once. Get over it already.
Fair enough. But if you're completely ignorant of Office, please refrain from comparisons.
Comment of the year
Yeah, I know. I was just trying to state things in terms for TWX. Unfortunately the mods were not pleased. :\
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
As obarthelemy said: it's vastly inferior, and that's what the complaints are about.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
So half of my macros will break after upgrading Excel? That seems a bit extreme to me, and I haven't experienced that problem. Besides, I would think that the survivability of a given macro depends on the nature of the code. What types of functions are used and how are they implemented? Wouldn't most IT teams require regression testing at a minimum if any parts of the infrastructure changed?
I visited the Excel rant page you referenced. The author mentioned a "multiple document open bug", but I didn't see any other specific references to existing functionality that required updating. IMO the author just hates MS, since I found this comment in one of his procedure declarations: "Gag me with Bill Gates' greed".
I could understand them being used in combination; in fact I've seen that a lot. That way you can prevent the document's pre-accepted-changes state from getting lost.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
So half of my macros will break after upgrading Excel? That seems a bit extreme to me, and I haven't experienced that problem. Besides, I would think that the survivability of a given macro depends on the nature of the code. What types of functions are used and how are they implemented? Wouldn't most IT teams require regression testing at a minimum if any parts of the infrastructure changed?
I visited the Excel rant page you referenced. The author mentioned a "multiple document open bug", but I didn't see any other specific references to existing functionality that required updating. IMO the author just hates MS, since I found this comment in one of his procedure declarations: "Gag me with Bill Gates' greed".
So half of my macros will break after upgrading Excel? That seems a bit extreme to me, and I haven't experienced that problem. Besides, I would think that the survivability of a given macro depends on the nature of the code. What types of functions are used and how are they implemented? Wouldn't most IT teams require regression testing at a minimum if any parts of the infrastructure changed? I visited the Excel rant page you referenced. The author mentioned a "multiple document open bug", but I didn't see any other specific references to existing functionality that required updating. IMO the author just hates MS, since I found this comment in one of his procedure declarations: "Gag me with Bill Gates' greed".
Can you elaborate?
One can write a book to properly elaborate. I don't have time for that :-) So I will only list a few typical problems: key management, access control, dependability of ciphers, reliability of storage, opponent's access to the ciphertext for cracking... and there are many more. Whenever you open up another avenue of attack you are exposing your business to more and more liability. That's why it is usually easier to restrict the documents to a few trusted systems - and keep those systems trusted.
In business with the government there are laws that simply forbid you, the contractor, to store government documents in any way, shape or form that is different from what the law says. If the law says it must be a GSA-certified safe, that's what you use. Try to scan that classified document, encrypt with PGP and upload to Google Drive - you will find yourself in prison if anyone finds out.
somebody please correct me if i'm wrong; it was on slashdot i read that standardised ODF format lags so far behind what open/libreoffice are using at the moment that the only way to create fully compatible documents is to read their source code and implement that. (which is why calligra, word, abiword suck at odf) i'm not sure if that was a microsoft shill's FUD campaign or reality and i would like to know.
calligra's odf compatibility page: https://community.kde.org/Calligra/ODF_Problems
Yes, schools need to teach concepts - however, this usually involves the use of actual examples, and why not make those examples relevant to current everyday work life?
Sheesh, Johnny starts high school in 1998 and learns MS Office. Then he goes to college. After graduating with a BS, he goes to work in 2007 and finds... THE RIBBON!
Every "new" version of every MS product is completely unusable to anyone familiar with the previous version. Going from Office 03 to Open Office is far easier than going from Office 2003 to Office 2007.
Going from W7 to KDE is easier than going from W7 to W8.
Look, it's Microsoft. They just move design elements and functions around to where they're harder to find and call it "innovation".
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To be fair, the time you were using WordPerfect for DOS was when schools were still coming to grips with this "computer thing". They knew that "computers" were a big deal and they would continue to be a big deal when you got out into the workforce and so, not knowing what was going to happen in the future (and sure as heck having little resources) they did the best they could.
I mean back when I was in sixth grade we were being taught how to program in BASIC on an Apple ][, not because it was this great problem solving exercise, but because at that time there wasn't a whole lot that computers could do yet (that a middle school teacher could teach, that is). As a result when I got to college I knew a number of people my age who couldn't maneuver Microsoft Word to save their lives but they could program in PASCAL for some reason.
Not that this detracts from your point, but your particular example wasn't because your school was clueless, it was because it was the best anyone could do at that time.
Schnapple
It has been a common sight to see multiple document copies with different versions in their names cluttering a shared network drive
There are two types of word processor users. One type does this. The other type has never actually used a word processor for anything nontrivial.
Oh, sorry. My bad.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We learned wordperfect for dos in school because "thats what people use at work"... When i left school, wordperfect for dos had disappeared.
You need to teach concepts not specific applications, because those specific applications either won't be around or will be significantly different by the time you leave school.
You won't find concepts in job descriptions for entry level positions. You'll find "must be proficient with Word and Excel", not "must know word processing". At home, I don't have Word installed except on a work laptop. Don't need it. I do plenty of writing, I just don't need it, so I spare the expense. I'm sure glad I know Word, however.
i'm not surprised. Consider that Microsoft shipped Office 2008 (for OS X) without VBA. VBA was not restored until Office 2011. Given this kind of behavior, why on earth would anyone put themselves at Microsoft's mercy by developing *new* systems for closed-source apps using a proprietary langauge subject to change and removal? (I understand that legacy systems need to be maintained.)
All modern GUI Office-suite software is interchangeable.
If you got through college using OpenOffice.org for heavy word-processing, you have that "Word proficiency".
Well written. And for those that thinks LaTeX is "too hard" for them, consider LyX. Basically, another "word processor" when you use it, but it uses LaTeX for you behind the scenes. So you get the same nice results, math support, flawless use of big documents consisting of many files...
A good wordprocessor is not a good target for an F/OSS project. It's a lot of boring, thankless work. Nobody has an itch that has to be scratched in such a masochistic way. That's why F/OSS wordprocessors are all not very good. Same goes for accounting systems, CAD systems, and many more. Often a F/OSS project just can't muster enough resources to complete the project. A for-profit company has no such problem; they just pay money, and developers show up for work.
You're right. It is hard to imagine a for-profit company having any interest in producing F/OSS software. Still, I bet there are exceptions. Maybe I'll do a search.
I've interned at Google twice, so I know at least something about their infrastructure.
You can certainly use Google Docs for many things, including source code editing, version control, and bug tracking. However, I assure you that Google does NOT use Google Docs for these purposes. It's all about using the right tool for the job.
Google Docs might be perfectly fine for a one-way paging system to taxi cab drivers, but I'd imagine you'd want something a bit more customized. While I don't know much (if anything) about the taxi business, but you'd probably want to be able to track where your cabs are so you can dispatch jobs to the closest cab. You'd also need to know which cabs are free, and you'd might like to know where cabs are going and what their ETAs are. Sure, you could have your drivers type this in to Google Docs, but that's a pretty cumbersome and time-consuming UI. You could probably very quickly hack up a custom app to provide a nice UI for all of these features and get substantial time savings.
While they've been adding a lot of features to match Word (references, an equation editor, etc.), it still doesn't have everything. For example, I STILL can't make a two-column document in Docs (without using a table hack that's... less than optimal)! Until I can produce camera-ready scientific papers with Google Docs, for me it'll be a secondary tool to Word.
The "breakage" is the removal of the old-school Excel and WordBasic macro support. I wouldn't consider that a significant loss. VBA based macros still work fine as they have since Office 95. That's a pretty significant degree of backward compatibility. MS has no plans to remove VBA support and any potential .NET based replacements have so far been abortions.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Office 2003 can be upgraded to support the OOXML formats that all newer versions of Office use by default. It's not a horrible burden to find a 10-year old copy of Office and get a few feature updates over 97 and still retain the classic interface.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Word is a word processor. It shouldn't be used for managing 2500+ page documents.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Track changes is not version control. Sure, you can check your *Office documents into CVS, Git, Mercurial, SVN, whatever already, but the two most useful features of any version control environment (that I use) are DIFF and BLAME. As far as I'm aware there are no DIFF and BLAME tools for any of the *Office document formats.
Examples?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Docs was designed to eat Word's lunch. Sure, Word is more mature than Docs. Docs was created in an environment to compete with Word.
Besides hundreds of formatting functions, what does Word have that Docs lacks? And when was the last time you read something that came out of a local printer? Sure, Docs functions are not particularly mature, at this point. But Docs is free, and platform independent. Docs never relies on local device storage.
The useful features of Word are one part of the development path of Docs. The killer feature here is revenue stream. Docs gives the license away, and profits by mining ad data from original content. Word profits by selling you a license to use Word. Aside from the format compatibility issues, how many crucial Word 2012 features do you use that weren't present in Word '95? Why would a business pay for the same thing, repeatedly?
From the site I linked to, right above the "multiple document" bug you referenced, with the animated flame gif:
From the site I linked:
(Emphasis mine)
If you have an IT team to do regression testing, then they've probably built something with a real database instead of trying to do everything in excel.
And you're an idiot.
Do you not understand the meaning of "strict"?
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Actually, if you want to get technical about it, OpenOffice switched to its present file format (OpenDocument) at version 2.0 released in October 2005, although OpenDocument's design is based on the file format used by OpenOffice 1.x and newer versions of OpenOffice/LibreOffice have no trouble opening documents in the old format. Of course, the point is mostly moot as upgrades are free (of course, enterprise IT may be slow on upgrading to a new version, but the transition was over 7 years ago now and OpenOffice 1.x was significantly less polished so likely deployed a lot less frequently than LibreOffice 3.x).
For the casual user, low overhead. If I use Google Docs, any device I can use the web from I can access all the content created through the Google Docs apps, with no software to install beyond the browser. For more involved uses, there are advantage to Google Docs if you are doing anything that involves using Apps Script to build workflows and/or web applications that are integrated with your documents (though this is probably more often going to involve spreadsheets than word processor docs.)
How do you know they aren't going to an issue a warrant for everything on your local drive, seize that, and use it in conjunction with some unjust law they whipped up last night?
I've tried it, doesn't come close to Word in funvtionnality nor ergonomics nor looks.
Fair enough - I have only used LibreOffice for small documents and it seems OK for that.
Yeah although Word 97 is 12 years old by now and you having to upgrade to some newer version is all plain forced upgrading by Microsoft. Even Word 2003 is 9 years old, meaning you have done at least one or two reinstalls since you got it (cause the hardware that originally ran it is outdated).
Well, the parent said it already - it's a problem across Word versions too. However I think it's a bit unfair to expect something like Word 2010 -> Word 97 to even work, as the latter is ancient software.
Why not? Noone thought Wordperfect would disappear, noone thought there would ever be a time when IBM didn't dominate computing as a whole, noone thought that Commodore with their hugely successful C64 would ever fail, noone thought that tablets would ever catch on.
The problem with examples, is that they only teach one example and don't teach it *as* an example... People subsequently get confused if a menu option appears in a slightly different place in the menu or an icon moves and often aren't even aware at all that anything else exists. Teaching by example is undoubtedly a good idea, but you need to provide multiple examples so that users understand the concepts and are easily able to adjust to different applications which perform the same general function. Being tied to a single tool is extremely damaging, it makes it difficult to cope with changes in versions or to switch to different tools, and means users will choose the tool they're used to rather than being able to objectively pick the best tool for the job.
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You're not wrong but we did try to ensure this didn't happen by having the passwords in sealed envelopes in the safe. We also ensured any key people moving on did a KT session to ensure other people knew how it all worked plus we documented it all as much as possible. That said, as soon as the one manager who was switched on left (and I'd gone by then) it all went downhill rapidly and within a year all the systems had fallen into disuse and/or been replaced by massively more expensive ones.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Which question did you answer? I guess it's "What types of functions are used and how are they implemented?". Yes, I read that part. Although the author says a lot, I was really hoping to see some specific code samples. I'm not saying MS is awesome; in fact, I've been frustrated by some Excel VBA bugs myself, but my experience is nothing close to what the author is claiming.
But Word still cannot print a page of Avery labels properly...
If that is core process, much better to code in proper language and database to minimize both user mistakes and desktop software bugs. I have automated up the wazoo in both Excel and Access and concluded only prototyping is appropriate.
This is the best description I have read of Word Versioning madness. Why has MS not fixed this? Is it on purpose, be damned consumers???
"was a horrific abuse of a standards process. It should _never_ have passed in that broken state,and Microsoft _does not follow the standard_ they worked so hard to legislate. The result is disastrous and unpredictable loss of'
Windows 8???
I love Google Docs and I do everything in GD now. Once you learn how to use tables, you can do some nice stuff. Most of the features in Word are fluff. Docs does everything I could ever need. Google Spreadsheets are awesome too. Try the =ImportXxx() functions! I have spreadsheets that get real-time currency conversions, stock data, etc...
Read it yourself, and his libel before it http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261720&cid=36545928 since he tried hiding it by a downmod last time it was posted here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3339513&cid=42399343 & here also http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3344205&cid=42411119 erroneus = Jorge Bastida.
MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are available on the cloud using Microsoft Office 365. You have 3 options:
1. Online only (no desktop software)
2. Desktop and saving online thereby accessible online at home or away
3. Office 2010 Plus which works on your computer without you needing to purchase the Office Suite; you save online and again accessible at home or away
Google Docs sucks. Government agencies (large and small) are regretting falling for Google Docs (read the reports).
In all seriousness, if not Word or another word processor, what would you suggest?
Your response sounds like a commissar -judging other people's choices "politically".
...
They declared food and medical services to be a human "right", but then they decided large swaths of the population didn't "need" them (whatever that means). And they don't need air conditioning or televisions or quality at all.
F/OSS (especially OpenOffice) has so many bugs people shouldn't even use it. Ever. I sent out an OpenOffice resume once and it hid the section that showed my experience! Google Docs failed similarly. If you ever send out a resume you should buy Office.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to make your choices politically
"Oh... to eat pizza again..." by erroneus (253617) on Saturday December 22, @05:20PM (#42371769) from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3335159&cid=42371769 since that disgusting fatbody pig's an obese swine with no dick!
In a way, the choice of word processor is more or less irrelevant by comparison with the level of trust involved in putting my files in the hands of someone I don't personally know. If anything should happen to files on my own hard drives, I at least only have myself to blame for not having secured or backed them up. But there is always the risk that Google might be compromised, either from the outside or by some rogue sysadmin, and I don't want to even think about trying to claim any redress against Google if they fuck up.
Further, since I live a long way away from urban amenities, I can't count on the availability of a constant internet connection, which could easily put me in a bind if I had my files stored in the so-called "cloud".
So, FWIW, my choice is simple: LibreOffice, since I don't run Windows. There will always be someone who will bitch that the free software suite doesn't have this or that all-important niche feature, but it has pretty much covered everything I need since it was StarOffice - only, of course, infinitely better now.
===
Well, even though I have been using Linux since 2004, and as well LibreOffice, we must recognize that MS Office, in particular Excel and Word, are first in class. I can do things with the latter better and faster. For that reason, I have an old laptop with Windows 7 home and MS Office on it. On my desktop systems (Linux) it is LibreOffice. I do recognize that LibreOffice is on more platforms, and it should be, being open source.
As for Google Docs, I wonder if you give up your privacy to a search engine company that can, in the end, send you advertisements based on your confidential writings.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Sure, we can debate and compare pros and cons of Google Docs and MS Office, but the really interesting conversation seems to be emerging about architecture and features:
It seems that each of us figuring out the right solution for the task at hand should run through the above questions and arrive at something. It may end up being grabbing something off the shelf (free or otherwise, proprietary or open), it may mean building up a constellation of tools, or it may mean something heavily home-baked. Each approach can be valid depending on the circumstances. The world is still changing and organizations are still adapting. Sometimes low barrier to getting started on collaboration is important. Sometimes longevity of standards is important. Sometimes controlling presentation patterns is important. Etc, etc.
BTW, something was said about stylesheets and ODF-based tools not having that support. ODF supports XML-based stylesheets in terms of persistence. As far as GUI, LibreOffice and OpenOffice make it fairly easy to manage said styles. Making these styles interoperate with CSS (within reason) isn't terribly difficult. ODF being XML-based and truly open (unlike docx) is one of the main reasons I personally reach out for it more times than not.
Alexey
I miss Write Now. It had functions I learned to use that Word doesn't. Bah!
erroneus/john b wilcox you're one ugly fat fuck http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3345911&cid=42414637 lose weight ya pig. Layoff the pizza
Since being publicly obese like you is embarassing. Erroneus/john b wilcox: When you eat, is your dish a wheelbarrow, your fork a pitchfork, and spoon a shovel or what http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3345911&cid=42414637 ? Does your bed use chevy truck coil springs and struts to hold your fat ass off the floor too? Hahahaha. No wonder you said this "Oh... to eat pizza again..." by erroneus (253617) on Saturday December 22, @05:20PM (#42371769) from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3335159&cid=42371769 you disgustingly fat hog.
Sad to hear. It's all too common to hear "we can't be at the mercy of single individuals" as an argument to invest in expensive systems provided by a vendor. In my experience this only means the company is at the mercy of the vendors instead and the vendors are often notoriously bad at retaining skills themselves. So you get a situation where you're relying on a single or a few inhouse individuals who interface with the vendor and the vendor in turn rely on a few individuals to keep track of your requirements and history. It's a double fail and costs skyrocket.
In the end it's about avoiding personal risk. If the inhouse staff solves the problem directly, inhouse, they are solely responsible for it and any problems/further needs that arise falls on their lap. It's far more convenient to shift that responsibility to someone else. That way inhouse staff can grab credit for successes and shift blame to the vendor when things go pearshaped.
There was a time, boys and girls, when businesses thought so highly of their personnel that they would provide them raises and promotions in accord with their real value to the company. This real value was a reflection of the work they had done and not the degree they had gotten from university "wonderful" and not their relationship to the second cousin of the vice-president of marketing. The company would also recognize, as did the employee, that keeping the employee happy and well fed was the best way to maximize the value of that employee, because they liked their job and their company and wanted to stay their until retirement. The employee would speak proudly of their company and the company would recognize that the foundation of the company's success was based on the work of the employees.
Only a few decades ago this was possible, but now it is gone.
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[sic] is implied, i think
It also fails when an outside vendor needs an interface into the data.
Totally not true. It is easy to get interface to excel data while online or offline through various open source libraries in many languages, COM, or office automation (VB). My god, even the AS/400 iSeries can output queries as excel data files. Excel is almost as common as a freaking text file. There are virtually no limits, hell I could develop middle-ware to hook an excel spreadsheet to a live ERP database and vise-verse.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I too shall give a shout-out for Notepad++ but it does have one glaring problem: no function navigation for each language where syntax highlighting is supported. I have had to stop using Notepad++ when my projects got so big that I spent most of my time scrolling. I switched to Genie in that case. While I did miss Notepad++ overall Genie provides function navigation on the left side. It should be trivial to add this to Notepad++, and maybe I will attempt to add that feature in the near future if someone doesn't beat me to it. None of the add-ons for Notepad++ quite do the job.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
PSTricks is more for diagrams. GnuPlot runs circles around Excel for high-powered graphing. It has lots of neat tricks including advanced graphs with complex error bars, colour coding, shading, etc. I know Excel pretty well, and I don't think it is possible to do a number of the examples at the gnuplot demo page in Excel.
The challenges facing my thesis were more basic. Excel has a few key issues with log graphing and numbers in scientific notation. Excel (and PowerPoint) have issues with Greek numbers. Also, in GnuPlot it is possible to place two graphs on the same page, one above the other, such that the X-Axis line up accurately. With Excel and PowerPoint, the results are "less than professional quality" at best. It's definitely not replicatable if a large volume of graphs is being done.
I also found a bug in Excel where it would render the bar graphs with the texture pattern inside the bar also appearing outside the border line for the bar. That truly sucked.
Another, "Not in my big moment!" bug is that PowerPoint will not consistently render the same fonts in the same presentation if you move between computers and/or PowerPoint versions. It's a really nasty bug, and creeps up in the wierdest places.
PSTricks is quite good for graphs as well. You have pst-plot and others for graphing functions. It also has support for bar graphs and pie charts.
I'll post such an example if you want.
Oh, yeah, just let me use Beamer and no one gets hurt.
Have you had many corruption problems with the FLOSS office tools saving and loading their own format?
Yes, but I can't reproduce it consistently. If you use bullets a lot on the latest versions of LibreOffice (indenting not just once but two or three levels deep), then save it a bunch of times and open it a bunch of times, it is possible for the file to become corrupted.
I know this because I use Writer a lot. I use it for writing sci-fi stories, designing programs that I'm going to code, and for writing letters (which I then usually export to .docx or .doc) All-in-all, I am still pleased with the work the LibreOffice folks have done, but it is not perfect.
For the record, I have also used Word extensively as well at other points in my life (97, 2000, 2003, 2007, and 2010) and it is far from perfect as well. Both are good products, though.
Replying to myself. I didn't want to be thought of as Microsoft shill so I'm just going to say "the 100 page bug" about Microsoft Word and leave it at that.
OpenOffice/LibreOffice weren't brought in for any part of it until people couldn't open it and in desperation they agreed to try the suggestion to try opening the file in LibreOffice. File opens fine, is saved in the MS format, and the result is openable in MS Word again.
Yep! this is how we fix about 95% of the screwed up doc files for our customers.
I here all this bitching about how LibreOffice isn't up to Word but in over 5 years or so I have had NO problems using LibreOffice or OpenOffice and still have problems with using Word. I wonder why these people have a problem when I don't. Is it operator error?
That's just your case. Not everyone uses MS Office, or any other office suite for that matter.
I'm a senior software developer and university teacher, and only use LibreOffice when I need to VIEW something that's been emailed to me (and never work-related). I've never had to edit anything on any Office suite.
Honestly, I think *office-usage is way overrated. Most people can make a living with nothing more than notepad. People who write for a living will used more specialized software (eg: latex).
Also, I belive GP's point was that there is no need for a school to pay for an office suite, they could have used a free one. Minor formatting issues in the actual file aren't relevant if you're only teaching how to use a software program.