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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
This problem extends to Windows as well. When Microsoft tried to get everyone to switch to Metro apps, they moved a lot of Windows configuration settings to the Metro-like Settings dialog. These were settings which had been in the same place since Windows 2000, so every IT person knew where it was. When they changed it, not only did every IT person have to learn the new location, but every online instruction guide was immediately made obsolete. Then people rebelled against Metro so Microsoft moved some of the settings back. Except their hearts weren't really into it, so now Windows is left with its configuration settings in two different places - in the Metro-like Settings (Windows key=>gear icon), and Control Panel.
The solution to this is simple. Let the user select the layout. If you want to add a snazzy new Ribbon interface, knock yourself out. But there should be a simple menu option which lets you easily and immediately select "Layout - Office 97 classic, Office 2003 (bubbly), Office 2007 (with ribbons), Office 2013 (with rearranged buttons), Office 2016 (I don't know what's new because I haven't yet found the buttons I lost track of in 2013), custom." Then each user can easily and immediately select the UI layout that works best for them. But it seems like UI designers' egos can't stand the idea of people not using the snazzy new interface they designed. So they force everyone to use the new interface with no way to revert to the old one.
And it's not just Microsoft. Google has been vacillating between allowing or blocking Dark Mode in its Android apps (it's currently blocked). This isn't even a user preference thing. OLED displays use more power when displaying white, which seems to be the predominant theme with Google's apps. So switching to Dark Mode can add several hours of battery life. It's a functional change which objectively impacts the usability of many devices. But some Google designer with a stick up his/her ass can't stand the thought of people using the apps in a way that looks different from the way they designed it to look so keeps getting Dark Mode blocked.
Clue to designers: Your design is not successful when you force people to use it. Your design is successful when you give people a choice and they willingly choose your design.
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