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The New Word Processor Wars: A Fresh Crop of Productivity Apps Are Trying To Reinvent Our Workday (geekwire.com)
Nearly 30 years after Microsoft Office came on the scene, it's in the DNA of just about every productivity app. Even if you use Google's G Suite or Apple's iWork, you're still following the Microsoft model. But that way of thinking about work has gotten a little dusty, and new apps offering a different approach to getting things done are popping up by the day. GeekWire:
There's a new war on over the way we work, and the old "office suite" is being reinvented around rapid-fire discussion threads, quick sharing and light, simple interfaces where all the work happens inside a single window. In recent years, the buzzwords in tech have been "AI" and "mobile." Today, you can add "collaboration" to that list -- these days, everybody wants to build Slack-like communication into their apps.
For notes and docs, there's Quip, Notejoy, Slite, Zenkit, Notion and Agenda. For spreadsheets, there's Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet, as well as Airtable, Coda and, although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello. The list goes on seemingly ad infinitum, largely thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud. "Work has totally changed," said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, the online storage company that is building its strategy around unifying data and messaging from a dizzying mix of cloud apps. "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
For notes and docs, there's Quip, Notejoy, Slite, Zenkit, Notion and Agenda. For spreadsheets, there's Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet, as well as Airtable, Coda and, although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello. The list goes on seemingly ad infinitum, largely thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud. "Work has totally changed," said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, the online storage company that is building its strategy around unifying data and messaging from a dizzying mix of cloud apps. "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
I've never heard of any of these apps. Do they do anything that currently existing apps don't? Or is this a slashvertisement?
Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive
That would be great, except that it takes an infinite amount of time to evaluate an unlimited number of productivity apps. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I might be too curmudgeony here, but every time I find myself having to install a newer version of MS Office I find myself missing the previous one(s) more. In my case it's not even the word processor as much as it is in the spreadsheet though. Has anyone else been bothered by how many times the "Fill" command in Excel has moved in the past 20 years? When I started really using it a lot it was under Edit (Alt-E, F, R for right). Then it was moved to Insert (Alt-I, F, R). Then it was moved somewhere else. Then it got hidden behind ribbons. Now where the hell is it?
For Fill -> Down it was easy - Ctrl-R. But no standard shortcut has ever existed for Fill -> Right. And playing hide-and-seek with it doesn't make it better either.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Why are you sticking to their software? There are so many others around.
There's no real replacement for Excel.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Excel lets you do far more dangerous macro programming that the others don't support. That's awesome for people who want to think that they're being more productive burying business logic in fragile, hidden macros than if they were to actually code it up correctly.
Pretty much what everyone "has" to have Excel for are things that could be done better, faster, and more robustly in something like Python or R with proper comments and a CVS. And which could thus be properly backed up.
Excel provides tools to half-ass this analysis work, and if you're a spreadsheet warrior to begin with, it's hard to resist that lure. A bit of googling later, and you've now got a nice cut-and-paste macro to do something. However, lacking any real exposure to proper programming, there's going to be no comments, no CVS, and the code that does this is hidden in a spreadsheet in such a way that a casual user may not even know it's there.
Let this nasty habit pick up steam, and a few years later you end up with someone dependent on fragile, unbacked-up Excel macros, and it all goes to shit when they leave or the spreadsheet gets corrupted. Or another version of Excel comes out. Or someone accidentally deletes the macro, or changes the structure of the spreadsheet.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Ok its very valid and I have personally had that happen multiple times, but your solution of "program in python or R" is laughable. Do you honestly think most offices have programmers on staff? Are you asking office workers to learn a programming language, what, in their spare time?
People use excel and VB macros because its easy to learn, its available in literally every office in the land, and there are many online resources available. And if you can write python code that needs no maintenance for 15 years i applaud you. I am not sure a "real" programming language would help the regular office worker at all. All code needs to be maintained, or its the exact same trap. And you think they will put their code in version control? Repeat after me, office workers are NOT programmers! They would have the exact same sloppy habits and zero documentation no matter what language they are using.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy