It isn't the presence of bugs that drives me from this suite to MS office. It is the fact that everyone else is using it, and interop is terrible.
I've got a pile of inaccessibile old university papers that for some reason are in Aldus Pagemaker format.
Edit: typo
I keep all my notes in markdown: Daily journal entries and templates, schedules, collections of code snippets; even a book which is just about ready to publish. I find that I rarely use any of the conversion tools, but they are nice when needed. Overall I'm really glad that text editing keeps evolving and find it a sort of foundation of computer use with which you can't go wrong.
And, given the example of GeorgeRRMartin, perhaps something WordStar-like would fit the bill? If so, are there good free editors in the style of WordStar?
I have this friend, and I've seen the mess of unintended font changes, sizes, styles, bulleted lists, indentation changes. and all kinds of horrible stuff in his manuscripts when I had to repair some of that damage because it was getting unusable - think he'd appreciate a more focused alternative..
For anything else, even though it is not open source, Typora is to me the best visual markdown editor. It even makes me tolerate it being an Electron app, so it's pretty good.
It was strange to use a desktop publishing tool to write papers, but I fell in love with its story editor[1], which looked like a plain text editor with a left column that indicated the applied style for that paragraph or heading. I would do all my writing in the story editor for a distraction-free experience, before I got handy with text editors.
I guess it was obvious even then that I would gravitate toward plaintext markup.
[1] InDesign ended up incorporating the story editor concept from Pagemaker: https://rockymountaintraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02...
What I use Word for is at Work, mainly for sending back and forth specs with an update history and annotations. I do not even read documents in Word. I “check out“ the version of a spec that I need, save it as a PDF and open it in Sumatra.
I am sure there are better tools for this. There must be, because the process sucks. But customers do it this way and I am sure it makes them jizz their pants, because if you are not enthusiastic about tools in general and know very few tools other than MS Office, it must actually seem cool and pro to be able to do it like that.
I would push better tools on customers if I would have to spend more time on reading specs. But I do not, so I will not. And Libre would not make for a improvement.
Current change integration tools each lack on their own way.
Yes, it is harder to use than markdown, and it is mostly geared toward academia, but LaTeX is also orders of magnitude more powerful.
I believe AsciiDoc is a happy medium between Markdown and LaTeX. AsciiDoc is as powerful as DocBook, and as easy to write as Markdown.
And as a student, I definitely used free options. I encourage that use. Just don't think you will make much inroads in the commercial world. Until you can use all of the commercial world.
Security is an enormous concern with an office suite. The formats which need to be supported by an office suite are terrifyingly complex, and people open documents from untrusted sources on a regular basis. Opening malicious documents in office suites is a major vector for malware attacks, especially in the "commercial world".
and as soperj points out, LibreOffice often has better interop with word, especially older documents. It also correctly opens and saves ODF formats, generates better quality PDFs.
The UX is also kinda hard to objectively iterate on. The current iteration of the office ribbon generates some amount of positive feedback for new users, but experienced MSO and OO.o users often prefer the current style of LibreOffice. If iterating on the UX means anything, it probably means adding a second UI. Outside of UI, it would probably be good to get better cloud (or even collaborative) support. It's frankly not certain how that would be done, maybe federated synchronization servers.
You are right that they can and are doing both.
In the end I changed the strings that specified the problematic/missing fonts in a hex editor (I naively assumed that would do the least damage...) to a compatible font I eventually found after some digital archaeology. LibreOffice accepted these files but didn't display them correctly (as in: according to what my eyes and brain expected - "machine readable" was in a different universe at this point). I saved the hex-edited documents in whatever version of docx LibreOffice exports to. Word accepted these, displayed them as well as could be hoped, and a little bit of modern history could be saved for future generations. Not a very technical approach, I guess.
I feel the 1990's in general did a lot of damage. It's not only Word. Competing, proprietary formats together with lacking text-encodings (and in my case custom fonts messing up character tables, due to academic/linguistic needs) has caused more information loss than the decades before and after for the data I've worked with.
Suffice to say I use plain text as much as possible (markdown, latex), as text-encoding alone is hard enough.
To be clear on definitions, my understanding of "interoperability" involves the following workflow - if I open a complex document made by someone else in MS Excel or Word, change one word in it, save it (in MS format) and send it back, then I have to be sure that I haven't corrupted anything else in that document - layout nuances, styles,references, pagination, whatever. Currently it's not the case, and it makes it unusable, since I can't even verify if something looks different on my computer than it had looked in MS Office.
I mean, it's a simple test - if opening ("importing"? "converting"? technically that might be more appropriate than merely opening) a document and immediately saving it changes it somehow, it's not ok.
Intrinsic quality of the code allows the developers to change the code faster and with less risk of breakage. This helps them address everything else, including interop and ux.
This doesn't make this bad or mean that you should leave bugs around, but fixing bugs found by a fuzzer is unlikely to lead to improvements in Office compatability, UX, etc.
And let me be clear, I agree with the argument.
Just a taste thing though I suppose.
The Ribbon was created to improve discoverability, in part because users were constantly requesting features that the Office products already had. User testing was performed to verify that the Ribbon improved discovery. I believe there is/was a series of blog posts on the Office blog that go into great detail about the design.
> Just a taste thing though I suppose.
Could be. Or perhaps the UI/UX folks in the Office organization did the testing incorrectly.
I'm presently half way between MSO and LO - I use MSO in a VM for legacy work, mainly in Excel. And I use LO for all my other work.
You can already try it out in LibreOffice 5.3 by ticking the "Enable experimental features (may be unstable)"-checkbox in the settings under LibreOffice->Advanced. Then in the menubar, select View->Toolbar Layout->Notebookbar.
Microsoft Office isn’t some side project tossed together last weekend, it is a decades-old product from a company with billions of dollars and thousands of engineers. Therefore, it should be able to create new items in a bulleted list without completely destroying indentation, it should be able to handle pasted text without utterly confusing the style of everything else, and it should not completely fail to save customization of the Ribbon (to name just a few things still true in 2017).
If a product costing hundreds of dollars is going to misbehave like someone’s open-source side project, then I would rather invest in the open-source side project (at least that might get fixed).
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/124869/how-does-the-doc-...
The complexity is explained, and it's not due to an attempt by Microsoft to encourage vendor lock-in. I'm curious of the commenter I replied to above has evidence to the contrary.
I switched to MS Office 2011 and then MS Office 2016 afterward. The 2016 suite is by far the best from UI design to response time. Besides interop (since at work everyone uses MS Office suites) (I am using Outlook at work so I don't bother with a separate Office suite), but also because of stability and performance. Perhaps now LibreOffice is better, but I am going to stick to Office, plus I've an educational license (forgot if it's 4 or 5 years for ~$100) from using my university's email address.
You can claim MS Word is good at interop if it can open, display, and save the other main wordprocessor file formats with good verity.
Arguably you'd want [reverse] interop as part of that too, that MS would openly publish all details of their formats to enable other programs to use those formats.
What you describe is using a format for the benefits of the monopoly position of that format. That's very different from interop. I'm not saying you're wrong to do that, just IMO wrong to describe it as interop.
(I must have missed this when I made my other comment.)
They have. For a decade. ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500.
What benefit is there to having a plurality of word processing formats? HTML has a monopoly. Is that a bad thing?
Yes they are. For a decade.
(Now, my understanding is that they aren't a great open documented standard, but making the niceness of the format the issue would be moving the goalposts.)
So I'm still curious about what I asked above.
Although not a totally Open Source workflow, it does provide the possibility of using it in any system we personally work and makes sharing and editing documents from various parties much easier.
For me, this signals a paradigm shift at least in academia where we would normally use open source in various places, but revert to Office to write collaboration documents and proposals (and even scientific papers in some areas like biology).
It seems like it's not open source at all.