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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.
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."
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.
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
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'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
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?
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