Hacker News Reader

Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

> I think Word is a pretty mediocre product and has some ludicrous limitations. But really - this is just as nonsensical from the other side.

I wrote a ~200 page (digital) textbook on 3d Modeling using Word.

Word is incredibly customizable, I had hotkeys setup to do everything I wanted, figures and diagrams manages themselves rather well, and I was easily able to get into a state of flow using Word.

Now it took several days to get Word that customized, but having seen what it can do, I will not call it mediocre.

However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise.

Should be noted I wasn't doing any typesetting or any such thing, just writing the document, I understand that beyond just writing, LaTeX is a far superior tool.

View on HN

I'm right (write?) there with you. I routinely write documents hundreds of pages long in Word that are filled with cross-references, figures, complex tables, and Visio objects. Word is very solid (though it wasn't always so) and maintains really good performance even with large documents. Cutting and pasting massive amounts of content from one place to another in the document can be done with more or less reckless abandon.

My hot Word tip is to use Styles. My other hot Word tip is to use cross-references. If you type "See Figure 3-1" in full, you're doing it wrong.

If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please fix a) the unreadable text in the Styles drop-down selection list in dark mode and b) stop asking my if the large amount of data I put on the clipboard should be available to other apps when I exit Word. With SSDs, this anachronism takes me far longer to read and click No to vs. just saving the damn clipboard content without asking me.

> My hot Word tip is to use Styles.

Wow. That was my hot tip for Word 1.0 too. I felt they did a rather too good job of hiding them subsequently.

For me, Styles take about 50% of space on Home ribbon, so I wouldn't say they are hiding it.

> My hot Word tip is to use Styles.

This works great with your own document or small experienced group. But let any "normal" person do any changes... and you're back to local modifications. And is actually hard to figure out what was done ad-hoc and what via styles.

"Restricted editing" -> "Limit formatting to a selection of styles"

Done.

Thanks a lot. This is exactly what one needs to do when using Word Documents in a group setting. Always.

We enforce this and it makes it so much easier for everybody. We also enforce that no one is allowed to mess with the style definitions once they are fixed for the specific project.

It is the same as if one is using code formatting rules and enforces them by configuration of linting tools.

Do some people complain, because they cannot do their personal pet peeve? Sure. Do I care in terms of the greater good for the project or the team? Only in so far as I learn not to want said people in my projects/teams.

Do some people point out specific and relevant flaws in the designe/code/style rules? Sure. Do they count? Hell yes. I love these people in my teams/projects. They know how to understand systems, think systematically and also how to communicate relevant criticism in a productive way.

> It is the same as if one is using code formatting rules and enforces them by configuration of linting tools.

Feature request: some sort of ML in Word that detects when someone is using spaces to line text up between lines, stops them, and pops up a tutorial on using the ruler.

You can turn on the show "show character and other hidden formatting symbols".

You can also do a search for double spaces.

That feature is a lifesaver for collaboration, but it requires that everyone is on Word 2016 or higher IIRC.

And you don't think "normal" users would mess up a LaTex document pretty badly?

I think people with no LaTeX experience would not have a shiny "Bold" option in front of them and would either see usage in other places which already has expected formatting, or would have to read up on what LaTeX is in general.

It's not that they can't easily mess up. Instead there's a higher barrier to do that - once you're past it, you have more understanding of the system.

> and maintains really good performance even with large documents

Out of curiosity how large were these documents, and were they completely text or did they contain a fair number of images?

I'm asking since I once ran into a situation with a long and image-filled Word document (150 ish pages, maybe 50 high res images) where there was a noticeable lag when typing and saving would take 30s.

My documents contain a fair number of images. For me, a large document is 200-300 pages and 20-30 Meg in size saved in docx format. I didn't count but I'd probably have well over 50 images - maybe double that??? However, I do put my images in at a fairly low resolution (maybe 1280 x 800 or something) to keep the file size under control. There is no noticable difference in the final product (at least for my purposes), it makes it practical to transfer my document back to our master file server over my peasant internet connection, and it keeps the file size reasonable enough to allow us to email a PDF version to our clients. Word has some feature I can't remember the name of off the top of my head that will optimize image sizes like this automagically for you.

Hope that is useful information for you.

It might be so on Windows, but on Mac Word has been surprisingly buggy. I don’t think there’s a day I don’t find something. Yesterday it failed to print page 2 of a document when page 1 was empty. Am using it for my colleagues sake, all personal writing is in Tex

Office on mac is just a shadow of the windows version. It kind of looks the same but all the crazy plugins and stuff does not exist (could be a pro but is mostly a downside).

My experience with word documents with large number of cross references (think 500+), is that after some time they tend to get 'corrupt' and just don't work correctly anymore. At an old job where we prepared teaching material, we went through the effort of converting all of our materials (1000+ pages) to Latex just because of the lost productivity.

I've used MS Word over very many years and I'm happy to say that it is a far better product now than it ever was in terms of reliability and doing what it's supposed to do. I'd even call it... good.

But that is now, and the number of times I've been burned in the past and watched other people being burned, and the distress it is caused those who just want to get their job done and the time wasted; those memories fade slowly.

This. Word is decent until it becomes a crashing, byzantine reformatting mess. Then it becomes some kind of obscene torture device as bug states propagate with the documents and restarting only brings inescapable anxiety.

> However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise.

This points to the real criticism of Word: that its internal representation of text is quite different to its appearance (i.e. WYSIWYG does not imply WYSIWYM) and if you make even a little use of its advanced features and reedit, you will quite likely get a document that behaves perversely. I have quite often seen Word users give up on reformatting a section, cut and paste it into another application and then cut and paste-back-without-styling so that they can reformat from scratch.

The can generally use Format Painter for that. Or they could just use a style, which overrides local settings.

Quite a few of the properties a run of text might have are not controlled by styles, and Format Painter makes gives a uniform format for all the selected text: if you go this route, you still might have lots of hand reformatting to do.

The point I was making is that the more of Word's advanced features you use, the more of these kinds of mismatch you risk encountering.

Downside with pictures in text boxes - you can't put footnotes in text boxes so if you need to cite pictures with any of the referencing styles that use footnotes that makes it a no go. It's an awkward and arbitrary limitation that ruins Word for a surprisingly common use case

How do you get rid of Word's insistence to select text that I do not want to be selected?

That is the one feature of Word that drives me nuts as a LaTeX and markdown user. I'm sure there must be a setting to change it somewhere, though. Right?

I don't think people are saying it can't be done. I think people are saying if you value your time or care about the risk of failure, you wouldn't do it like that.

Did they fix this bug, where images in text-boxes where omitted from the automatically generated figure list? This caught me off-guard during my thesis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com