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Comment by nesky | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested to know what they're proposing as an alternative? LibreOffice?

Personally I use LaTeX rather than word, theres a bit of a learning curve though so it might not be suitable for lower levels but for high schoolers+ I totally see being able to use it. Everything word does it does better and most of Academia uses it already.

It would definitely be a good preparation for academic life after school. Personally I wish I had learned it at school time. How much better and nicer could my notes have been, knowing how to make a really well document, in contrast to loose sheets of paper flying around and being discarded after the school year. Granted, some people are good at taking clean notes and bringing them into order. At school time I was not. A good computer workflow would probably have sparked my attention to detail even with school notes.

I find its excellent for article writing, but note writing not so much the semi coding style doesen't lend itself well to free form writing at least for me. I'm in engineering grad school and writing equations from board to free hand notes is much easier for me than writing to a program. Though I have some friends who prefer using computers and some of the note taking programs you can use with a stylus and tablet are excellent.

A professor (taught mathematics) of mine once said, that "it needs to go through the hand at least once" and I used to think of that being an annoying attitude, but now I am more or less sure he was right.

Taking notes by hand is probably often a good idea. But you can still afterwards make them very clean in a document, also thinking about them again while doing that, so there is also a bit of additional learning in that activity.

For people who don't want to learn a new language to typeset something, LyX is out there and is fantastic and covers most use cases of a word processor (except it doesn't have mail merge).

I think the lack of spreadsheet-based software is more problematic than just Word, because it's hard to replace it with any good alternative.

Also, I do use LaTeX (and derivatives) in almost in any case when I need to compose some document - it really helps to automatize many trivial things that were tiresome to do in MSO Word. However I know at least few people who tried LaTeX and just told me "Yuck!". I tried to recognize what is unique selling point, and all of those people told me it lacked the WYSIWYG mode and that they do not want to learn some language, so also ignore the LaTeX meta-code [0]. I feel I can't objectively say how steep learning curve is, because I just got used to declarative paradigm. LaTeX is not perfect, but I guess my requirements were different than my friends had, but I can't find an answer what really makes Word better than let's say LaTeX, LibreOffice/OpenOffice or other software in the same category? What leads us to decision to use Word not other software to let's say write thesis in it?

[0] As copperx mentioned, there is already LyX but it is far from being popular application.

I haven't found a good replacement for Excel, maybe its because I learned all my shortcuts in it and anytime I go to something else it just feels "off". I would say the learning curve wasn't to bad for short documents or non-technical stuff I would say word has the edge because its east to just open a new document and type away. For my thesis I chose to use LaTeX because anytime I would try to insert a figure or a table into word it would destroy the whole pages formatting , and equations in word are just awful to format. I saw a picture once that showed exactly how I feel about LaTeX's difficulty I'll see if I can find it.

edit: here it is http://blog.adnanmasood.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/mikte...

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