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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

I still use Microsoft Office 2010 at work and it does everything I need it to do. It if it was up to me I'd go backwards. Every newer version seems worse than the last for my use cases. I'm a scientist and I just need to crunch numbers in Excel and write papers in Word.

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Just yesterday I was using someone's computer with Word 2013 on it and even with my existing cynicism I was surprised to find that it takes four mouse clicks to bring up an OS-native open file dialog, pointing at the user's default folder as chosen in the options.

All these clicks are for ploughing through the 'Backstage' view giving you various roads for recent documents, favourites, OneDrive etc, despite the fact that most of these things are already addressed by the native open file dialog. (And turning off the 'Backstage' view in the options doesn't actually turn it off for mouse users, only for the Ctrl-O keyboard shortcut.)

After the complaints in the LibreOffice thread the other day about its 'old'-looking menus it was a reminder that modern Microsoft UI is generally a hot mess that I'm happy for them not to rush into.

This is completely non-malicious: why are you writing papers in Word instead of more advanced typesetting tools like LaTeX?

Haha oh man. I don't think a single human in academia I work with even knows what that is. We don't need typesetting tools, we just write the text and provide figures and the journal does the typesetting, etc. It just needs to be as easy as possible and looking up LaTex that seems to be a bizarre abstraction that seems even more difficult than typing in Word.

You must be in a very different field than me.... If someone posts a word document on the arxiv, it's almost a reason to ignore it as unprofessional.

If people are judging research by that criteria they are idiots. I'd prefer not to associate with or gain approval of such persons.

It's more about conforming to the standards of the field. I can think of maybe one or two articles written in Word that I've seen on the arxiv ever (maybe it's different outside hepex and astro?).

I find it much easier than writing in Word, and so do my colleagues. In fact, when selecting journals to send a publication to, "requires to send the paper in Word" tends to be a big red flag because of the huge work it takes to handle references, format equations, etc. which are trivial in Latex. (fortunately this requirement almost never happens within my own field, but it does when submitting interdisciplinary work, as some related fields use Word).

You don't even need to actually know the commands to get started with Latex in academia, it's typically fine to download the journal or conference template and fill in the text. All the PhD students I have worked with learned it just fine and fast.

I was in graduate school in the biological sciences, and the vast majority of papers were formatted using word and some extension for reference management. At one point I really wanted to switch to LaTeX, but it was too much of a learning hurdle given all the other stuff I already had to do.

Because academics shouldn't be typesetting their papers and very few journals accept LaTeX. Most journals will give you a Word template that you're supposed to use and handle the typesetting for you.

Journals wouldn't accept generated PDFs? This genuinely shocking to me. Is this prelevant in all fields?

Some do, if you've used their templates, and some don't. Most journals want to ensure a uniform look and feel across all their papers.

No. Most places I submit to use PDFs and require authors to typeset themselves. Both Latex and Word templates are typically provided for you to fill your content into.

But I still use Word, because odds are good that for any given paper I'll hit at least one collaborator/editor/proofreader/etc who doesn't know how to use Latex, and so using the lowest common denominator (word) saves us all a lot of complication.

Word is why HCI papers have such bad kerning and word spacing in general (ironic, because HCI is the CS field closest to design and typography!). I’m from the PL community, where Latex is fairly standard, but co-authored a UIST paper in Word once, it was a nightmare and still didn’t look very good.

Word just doesn’t do double columns very well, and such a niche use case doesn’t seem to be a priority for Microsoft.

Oh for sure. Column-spanning figures in particular are an unholy nightmare.

https://journals.aps.org/revtex

Which field/journals? Everything I submitted to required LaTeX.

Why not LibreOffice?

In most large corporations and governments, the primary reason for not using open source (especially is software development) is that open source doesn't take purchasing people out for lunches or golf vacations.

Office 2003 works great for me ;)

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