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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.
I'd love to see a next-gen spreadsheet program that could marry Excel with something like SPSS or Minitab and with Tableau or Cognos. I want a 1-stop program that can handle day to day sheets, but enough power under the hood to do statistical & forecast modeling along with creating executive dashboards/reports.
In the old days, people chose tools according to what they needed to do.
Now, the tool is designed by someone who studied user interfaces, instead of how users interface with the tools, so they feel no compulsion to make it work the way users normally work.
"rapid-fire discussion threads" tend to be unfocused explosions of verbosity, so that is a bad user interface to model.
thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud
The flip-side to this is "easy come, easy go". When one starts storing their stuff in somebody else's space, it might go away if the provider closes shop. Even if you are able to download your data, you still need to find another app that can read it.
For all the grumbling about MS Office, they do a great job with backwards compatibility and offer "read-only" versions of their apps for free.
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."
M$ Office needs to natively support ODF!
I'll admit I don't use spreadsheets for much fancy work. So educate me. What vital functions does Excel do that LibreOffice Calc (or Gnumeric) doesn't?
It sounds like you want to have stable function key access for all the features, which was one of the awesome features of WordPerfect. I remember the templates that everyone taped above their function keys. I even had a keyboard with a built-in template holder that included templates for WordPerfect and several other popular programs of the day.
The problem now is that everything is mouse based. The majority of users never learn keyboard shortcuts, so the shortcuts aren't so short.
Maybe these collaborative things work well for some people, but I can tell you that for software development - even Agile - the lure of tools like these are dangerous. Because faster isn't always better. You can't sacrifice sound engineering principles and system design for speed.
Full disclosure: I have been working on a project for a year now that has been going on for 2.5 years... that was supposed to release in 6 months originally. The original team that built it has been fired, and we are left holding the bag. They were all about fast fast fast. And they wrote a ton of code without thought to design or maintainability. They threw together "documentation" on collaboration tools. Their bug/story process statuses were new/open/closed. They copied/pasted code throughout the system because it was faster than building a common, reusable module. They didn't have testers, and development didn't write tests because NO TIME FOR THAT. We are on AWS and the code wasn't written to leverage elastic computing because even though that was promised, it would be faster to get it working and refactor it later. (hint: they never got it working, so we will have to eat that one and refactor it).
So this project has been a perfect example of how NOT to do a project, and fast collaboration was just one piece of the disaster. So I'll take the old-fashioned ways of building a sustainable project and documentation, thank you very much.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Indeed, nothing else pisses off Data Scientists quite as much as Excel. Without Excel how else would people mix up data and logic in an incomprehensible mess and then expect them to magically transform it into a production ready system.
I just don't care anymore. I've got appFatigue
There's no real replacement for Excel.
I think the main point damn_registrars was making is that Excel 2019 is, for most intents and purposes, just Excel 97 with a bunch of the interface bits moved around. And the only thing I remember Excel 97 offering which the earlier version did not was being able to accommodate 64K rows in one spreadsheet.
Heck, I remember a few years ago I fired up an old Apple II or some such and launched Multiplan... that app, from 1982, already seemed to do almost everything an Excel user typically needs.
#DeleteChrome
"... although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello"
It appears that, by "very different take on the spreadsheet", the author means "not useable as a spreadsheet by any stretch of the imagination".
Has the author never actually used a spreadsheet?
#DeleteChrome
Oddly enough people who are good at the command line interfaces can be extremely efficient in getting their work done. However it also makes them very resistant to changes, a small update to the command line parameters could in essence put such people into a productivity stand still.
The GUI Office tools are less efficient for the expert then a command line expert. However small changes are easier to adapt to.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That is great, there is already a good collection of some rather powerful text editors you can use.
For some other jobs a Word Processor is a better tool.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The fact this doesn't get a mention is baffling.
There is still absolutely nothing that comes close to MS Word when it comes to a WYSIWYG Word processor and as a Review tool for multi-version, multi-author (asynchronous editing, not collaborative, synchronous multi-author editing). And even though Word has been "dealing with it" with cloud features, Sharepoint/365 and whatnot, there is nothing that comes close to Google Docs for collaborative work. ...except maybe git combined with LaTeX. Although for purely synchronous authoring, especially working on very, VERY close sections, not having to "save a file" (or commit it, so it gets pushed to others) and having versioning built-in, Google Docs still beats the rest. And WYSIWYG also still goes for Word at the end of the day.
I'll admit I don't use spreadsheets for much fancy work. So educate me. What vital functions does Excel do that LibreOffice Calc (or Gnumeric) doesn't?
In my case, I can use LibreOffice for >90% of my spreadsheet work. The missing function though is that it does not always reliably open or export MS Office formats. Being as my colleagues use MS Office, I absolutely positively have to be able to handle their files and deliver files to them that open correctly for them on the first try without them having to think about it at all. Importing from another format is not acceptable for them unfortunately and it's a hopeless endeavor to try to get them away from MS Office.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
IMO the ideal spreadhseet would be a GUI frontend to an APL interpreter. APL already has the column based processing and a good functional foundation that solves the same problem as Excel, but with a much more elegant approach. Scripting would have been perfectly integrated.
The biggest piece missing from LibreOffice Calc is a visualBasic interpreter. It pains me to say it, but a lot of people want it, and it's necessary for interoperability.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
Sp after having 30 years of (de facto) standardization, we're moving back to 5 billions ways to do anything, all of which are mutually incompatible with each other and all trying to get customer lock-in so that it's harder for people to switch away, and thus forcing everyone to either purchase multiple subscriptions for multiple tools or be stuck.
How many of these supposed new generation tools support standard file formats like Open Office's OOXML (As opposed to Microsoft anything-but OpenXML)? Probably less than one hand worth, if even that.
I'd like to help but I can't. I tried adding "write a ToDo app" to my ToDo list but I can't because I don't have an app for it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't understand where people get this. It's great as simple spreadsheet as well as many other software and then it falls apart when people try to use it as anything else. I used to spend so much time trying to fix errors in peoples spreadsheets where they thought that their budgets worked but when entering the numbers in a true accounting system the numbers didn't work. Seldom were they balanced.
Then you have the issue of interoperability. It doesn't play well with other software. There is no standard. Not even between versions of itself.
The last thing that I find frustrating is that it's part of a bigger problem. Document retention. The life of the document keeps getting shorter and shorter with the constant need to upgrade the format even when there is no requirement to do so. The more advanced Excel features you use the less likely the document will be accessible or functional.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Yep. Pretty much this.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I'm sorry, but the traditional word processor design hasn't "gotten dusty" at all. It's been a pretty established framework for decades because writers need an application that works that way!
This push to make everything "collaborative" with chat clients and ability for a whole group to add sidebar notes to everything creates a big distraction. A good document needs to be focused on by the person writing it. It can be reviewed after that, and marked up as needed with suggested corrections. But the editor doing the proofreading should ALSO be doing that by him/herself, while he/she can give it the undivided attention it deserves.
I remember when a lot of people considered it a "feature" when a word processor would take over the whole screen with almost nothing but the text being typed. Writers appreciated that lack of distraction or temptation to click around on menus to try out various features, rather than concentrating on the work at hand.
I find that even doing regular computer support or troubleshooting, the multiple IM client options just raise my stress levels and make things take twice as long to get completed. People keep barging in, asking for updates on where you're at with something, or for some information on why X or Y is down. I can't see how it would benefit anyone trying to write some technical documentation or anything else, having a whole group constantly interacting and suggesting things while you're trying to concentrate?
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
Not a devotee of "The customer is always right" I take it?
I actually took a crack at developing such a beast back in the day. But it was both too early and too late. APL for microcomputers came along too late to be available, and by the time it did, there was no room for such a product except as free software for the nerd market segment.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The thing is, once you've done something with a CLI it's a small step to totally automating it.
Of course, sometimes you can't remember the command, forgot to put it in your usefulshit.txt file and when you need it again it's dropped out of your history.
So if anyone knows how to extract the ISBN using pdf2txt (or is it pdftotext - see what I mean) grep and sed, I'm all ears.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't understand where people get this. It's great as simple spreadsheet as well as many other software and then it falls apart when people try to use it as anything else. I used to spend so much time trying to fix errors in peoples spreadsheets where they thought that their budgets worked but when entering the numbers in a true accounting system the numbers didn't work. Seldom were they balanced.
ok, so what spreadsheet program currently available is a replacement that doesn't have that problem?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you want to break something, you're going to need more than macros. You're going to need to write some DerpBASIC or whatever they call it these days.
And even then it might still work unless you were careful to find a feature so awful nobody is willing to copy it.
I actually took a crack at developing such a beast back in the day. But it was both too early and too late
How was it as an actual (or potential) product? Do you have any insight as to what might work and what doesn't? (not worrying about market acceptance, that is)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think I had that client, and losing them saved your company.
These comments are proof of a person who isn't any good at using spreadsheets.
Using weird niche features that save 2 out of 200 keystrokes on an operation you do once a year isn't anything advanced.
The advanced part is actually going to be in how you organize your data, not in what application features you use; but that said, Calc has all the fancy math. The feature differences are things that have nothing to do with that.
Usually the people who say this sort of thing are beginners who were following a tutorial actually for Excel, and they couldn't figure out what the feature they wanted is called, and in the end they blamed the Calc for not being Excel, instead of blaming themselves for not getting a tutorial that uses the same UI as their application. The actual "work" that you do using data is about the same.
Yes, if there are 12 ways to do something advanced, only 11 of them might be portable. But an advanced user is already using standard, idiomatic practices.
As long as spreadsheets use floats, they're not going to produce the same results as accounting software.
People think spreadsheets are good for that stuff, so they must be vital to any office, but they're really only good for back-of-the-envelope type of stuff, and making charts for presentations.
The actual work using numbers should really be done using real numbers. Floats are great for graphics, and often acceptable for statistics, but they're just not realistic for money.
In my experience, most of the spreadsheets exist either to input data without having to use a database app, or to prepare reports. And in the case of reports, it is probably just the charts and graphs.
20 years when I was a slashdot newbie I had a client company that insisted on being able to email a spreadsheet to the database server and have it processed and added. Some employees exported their entire customer database, some only included updates. They were using "excel" and never said the word "spreadsheet;" they only talked about "Excel files." It would have been simpler to use CSV.
But even 20 years ago, it was no trouble to parse it in linux. It is hilarious that the drones still think they need MS blahblah to parse a config file. Do they even know that MS participates in the standards bodies for the new file formats? Apparently not, so many think that data still isn't portable.
Text files. I trying to use simple text files the more I can (my personal files are 95% text files). Then I export it to PDF, ODF, ... if required.
...), PDF, PNG, ...
I try to use only future proof (25+ years) file formats : text (org-mode, Markdown, LaTeX,
This quote resume the way I treat MY data (don't remember where I read it) : I'm using apps against data, not housing my data in an app.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
In my experience some of this kind of tools may actually improve the productivity. However, the tools themselves tend to be relatively short-lived and/or have terrible data migration. Sometimes it may be that the data structure is too specific to the way the specific tool works. Much of the data stored within tend to get lost when switching to new tools
I believe that using them for day to day workflow *can* be useful as facilitators as long as any long-term useful information is stored elsewhere in common file formats on file systems or in revision control systems.
And of course, on another note, if you rely on SaaS for mission-critical stuff, you probably want a stable company and ToS behind it, not the next month's startup with a hip name and no 24/7 monitoring and support. I would guess that this disqualifies many of the artifacts mentioned in the OP (never heard of any of them).
Not a devotee of "The customer is always right" I take it?
Regrettably 'The Customer' frequently needs saving from themselves. Especially when it comes to choice of software.
I will say this about Excel. It can do a crazy amount of stuff. It, by itself, can do almost all the stuff a SMB needs when it comes to finance, and it can be added on with macros and add-ons. Excel may not be as edgy as whatever people to try to replace it with at crazy prices, but it has stood the test of time.
There are programs which can do most of what Excel can, like Libre Office's Calc, or Apple's Numbers, but Excel tends to be the standard when it comes to this stuff.
I once had a problem where one version of Excel couldn't open a spreadsheet that a different version of Excel wrote out. I had to open the spreadsheet in OpenOffice, save it as Excel 95/97, then open that copy in Excel. So if you want interoperability between Windows and Windows, sometimes the best choice is Linux.
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
If by, "being productive" you mean spending more and more time trying to master all the different so-called "distraction^Wproductivity tools" that different teams--both internal to the organization and the external ones--have decided to use.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Dollars to donuts the file would've opened Just Fine if exported Just Right and the customer Just Was That Much Less Of An Idiot and actually somewhat qualified to use software. I don't think I'd even want customers who're that prickly. Cool down already.
You're absolutely right that the customer probably could have been coached through how to open the file, but it's worth noting that they probably wouldn't want to be coached on how to do that. The customer could well resent doing that, or view the shop that sent it in a non-MS format as being some sort of "fringe" group or "fly-by-night" operation.
These file formats aren't ment for interchange, and in fact even microsoft often enough isn't compatible with itself.
It is certainly true that MS file formats have been known to eat shit in transfer, or to indeed just not be compatible between what should be very close versions. But if that happens, they can at least blame MS and hopefully get another chance. If you send your file to a customer and your file didn't come from MS Office that is more than sufficient reason for them to tell you to take a hike.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
Good lord! You need to work on your sensitivity training. Some of us have PTSD from using CVS. Please at least switch to SVN so that we don’t all end up crying ourselves to sleep tonight. Not that CVS was terrible, but there were so many simple ways that an incompetent person could mess it up. So if you want to be more generic then say Version Control Software or VCS rather than CVS. It could save a life.
They didn't. They copied lotus 123 and word-perfect. As they did later with Netscape. They always surfed existing waves....
I have been using Libreoffice and formally OpenOffice for decades. It's great software, and the file saves are compressed so they don't take up as much space as .doc and .xls.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Noted. I'll try to move to use VCS.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
None of them comes close to what me and my friends at work can do with orgmode on emacs.
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
As a software developer, I've long argued that the multitude of disjoined apps are a problem. I suggested that operating systems or desktop systems (like KDE and Gnome) provide a framework for services -- not applications -- so users can put together their own working environments, in whatever manners is most efficient for them.
When you open up a desktop like KDE or Gnome, not only do they work differently but the tools all have cryptic names that tell you little to nothing of what they are useful for. Each tool or app is an education in itself. The same goes for various Windows applications or phone apps.
What we REALLY want is not XYZ text editor (and 50 different editors in various programs) and PQR video editor, ZQY messenger, etc. We want services like:
- a text editor (to plugin everywhere we need to edit text so we don't have to learn different ones in every app)
- a spell checker (to work everywhere we want to check spelling)
- a grammar checker
- a sound recorder
etc..
And we want to use them in any activity in which they might come up -- not each application having its own implementation of each.
Implement them as transportable micro-services and let us put together our own workspaces with the tools accessible where we'd like them to be.
Similarly, if we want a video streamer... etc..