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Comment by silicon2401 | Hacker News Reader

I believe this 100%. After using google office for years (just because it's free and cloud-based), I recently tried MS Word and Excel recently at work. The different was mind-blowing. I forgot just how functional and straightforward MS Office is compared to the clunky, barebones google options.

If I wanted a desktop-first, cloud-backed solution, what would be the most future-proof and durable? Can I use Open Office across OSes? What would be the best cloud backup service these days? (just a general question to readers)

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I also prefer desktop-first, cloud-backed solutions, but I have quite the opposite experience. Working with MS Office has been a pain and I've been a happy Google Docs user for about 10 years. My wife who isn't an especially technical person also finds Google Docs quite a lot more intuitive and laments when she has to use MS Office products for work (she is a consultant for Microsoft including their 365 line of business and her whole firm makes pitch decks in Google Slides before converting them to MS Office to present at Microsoft meetings--IIRC for the Azure and other b2b lines of business they don't even bother with MS Office). Note that my wife and I (like most of our age group) grew up on MS office, so it's not a question of familiarity.

Google Docs just built a better product and MS Office still hasn't caught up. I wonder if this is because or in spite of the browser target?

What makes Google Docs a better product than MS Office? Can you provide some examples of features that are better in Google Docs?

Copy a few cells from a Google sheet and paste it in an email, then do the same with Excel. Collaborate on building out a document from scratch with 10 people in Google sheets vs Excel.

Excel is a monster, and much more powerful than Google sheets in many ways, but in my experience, Google docs apps are a little better for collaboration, and they integrate a little tighter with each other.

Google docs is their document editor. Sheets is a part of GSuite.

I've also never had trouble pasting a spreedsheet selection into a word document. Email is a nightmare in general though.

I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern. One of the big inconsistencies is that cells in sheets don't update while being edited while collaborating, which is not great if you have a spreadsheet heavy workflow. Docs is impossible to replace that though, because it's auto formatting is draconian and always seems to reset its preferences. When editing docs we spend more time formatting them then creating the content.

> I'm not sold on collaboration personally. I've had to do it a bunch since the pandemic began and I've found it to be an anti pattern.

How much of this is really related to technology? I do a lot of writing in both Word and Google Docs and see different sets of problems for both products. Having a group of people jump into either and expecting a good product (and experience getting there) is unrealistic.

With the pandemic, I think people have been trying lots of things without understanding what will be most effective. At least early on, there was a feeling that people had to be seen to be productive. It's nothing like real remote work.

For important docs, I still come back to having individuals write their content and only then does one person attempt to assemble it. The individuals often need their own independent reviews and consultation anyway before they have a decent draft. In some ways it improves visibility and helps with keeping folks on schedule too.

Google sheets is the specific example that I hate. In my experience, it's often laggy and clunky. You can't even scroll smoothly: the window MUST snap to row/column lines. When I realized that google sheets has such a laughable shortcoming, I knew I needed to get out of google office eventually.

i think copying some cells from excel into outlook, which i guess is the comparable transaction, works pretty well - what doesn't work for you? Maybe I am just missing out on some amazing functionality by not using google docs.

Personally, I like it better sometimes for having less features. MS Word has such a massive number of formatting features that interact in complex ways that there's plenty of ways for your document to end up formatted in a weird way and to be very difficult to figure out exactly where the switch is to make it not do something. I think one time I had a document where the entire doc was highlighted in yellow, and it took me over an hour of fiddling with various formatting boxes to figure out how to turn it off. Any word processor that doesn't have the capability to do that has some appeal to me.

I haven't seen a word processing document in a professional setting for many years now (didn't realize it until just now). Who uses a word processor these days? Writers certainly don't use that garbage.

I use text editors so I can think about the content and if it is going to get prettied up with fonts it goes into a target system that supports markdown (confluence, git, email, etc..). If you are flummoxing around in a word processor or sending around formatted docs that aren't PDF I fully expect people to be looking at you sideways.

> Writers certainly don’t use that garbage.

I hate to inform you that, yes, writers do indeed use “that garbage”. I’m married to an author who regularly uses Scrivener to write. But anytime she has to send anything to anyone she has to convert to a Word document and send that out. Everyone uses Word that she interacts with. (Though author friends of hers might also use Scrivener for their writing)

Writers who understand git, let alone Markdown, are going to be extremely rare. You’re in a bubble if you haven’t encountered how dependent the writing field is on Word documents.

Unfortunately I do agree with this. I think a lot of tech isn't a matter of "what's the best?" but instead "what's the least bad?". I don't think Office is perfect but I think it's a lot less bad than google. I don't think MacOS is great but it's a lot better than windows for certain things, and vice versa. IMO unless software puts the user first in allowing customization and control, the best we can ever get is good instead of great.

What makes Google Docs a better product than MS Office? Ignorance and Dillusions.

Google Docs seems so bare-bones. I recently couldn't find a way to format a series of chunks of text within a Google Doc as code, and I'm pretty sure that it simply doesn't support styles for anything but headings and body text. It just doesn't seem to be the same kind of tool as Word.

> Can I use Open Office across OSes?

I would recommend Libreoffice over Openoffice, but yes (for both)

And you can of course backup to your cloud service of choice. The main benefit of google docs, o365, etc. Is real-time collaboration. But there is no reason why a desktop app couldn't support realtime collaboration with a suitable backend service.

There are lots of reasons.

There must be exactly zero reasons—not lots—why they can't, since some native applications do, in fact, support realtime collaboration.

What do you prefer about Libreoffice? I've used both once or twice but not enough to really learn anything about them

LibreOffice is an actual active project; OpenOffice is a political ghost entity.

Very good to know, thanks!

The only time I've ever seen real-time Google Docs collaboration has been during meetings which should have been an email. Total waste of everyone's time. Not to mention the horrible UX of people constantly moving their cursor around and moving text around. I'd suggest that pass-the-baton style collaboration would be a much better UX if you absolutely must collaborate real-time on creating a document. Which I find the premise to be incredibly dubious to begin with.

Even if actual realtime collaboration is rare, there are other collaboration features that are missing in most desktop equivalents, like getting notified of changes, being able to mention people in comments, etc. that I do see used quite a bit.

But my experience is that realtime collaboration is useful. In particular, immediately after emailing a doc to multiple people it is not at all unusual for more than one person to be actively looking at commenting on, and maybe changing the document at the same time.

I have had the exact opposite experience—I've used Google Docs for 10 years now, and in every way it manages to exceed Microsoft Office in usability. You're right that Google Docs can sometimes feel a little barebones, but it makes up for it by being very easy and straight-forward to use. In 10 years of using Google Docs, I can count on one hand—across probably tens of thousands of documents—the amount of times I've been missing something so critical to my work that I've needed to use an Office product.

(That said, I'm really excited about the recent changes Microsoft is making for Excel, with LET and LAMBDA, and I look forward to trying it out again in the future. Maybe this is the thing that finally gets me to switch! I've also enjoyed doing some more ~fancy~ graphic design in Pages on Mac, but overall the clunkiness was just so frustrating that I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone)

I prefer LibreOffice over Open Office, but I believe both are cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS). Then, I'd just use Dropbox or similar to save the files to for cloud storage. The only downside is no real-time collaboration. You can also look into Collabora, but I don't have any experience with it.

If you don't require Linux support or if the web is tolerable for Linux, I personally recommend the Microsoft Office suite. There's the obvious compatibility concern because nearly everyone uses those, they have real-time collaboration built in for both desktop and the web, comes with OneDrive storage, and will obviously be extremely future-proof. I cannot recall a single time any of the apps have crashed on me on both Windows and macOS, so I think it's pretty "durable".

> The only downside is no real-time collaboration.

This isn't a small thing for many users.

IMHO HTML documents backed by a versioning system (probably fossil or pijul rather than the overly complex git) are the way forward for documents where content is much more important than presentation.

While “text in a VCS” is a great option, it’s obviously far less usable than something like Google Docs, and you still don’t get real-time collaboration, which can be really nice.

Yeah... I'm wondering though, Fossil is based on SQLite - a database - and databases are designed to solve the issues arising when multiple users try to change the same data. (Also, fossil by default works in "autosync" mode.) So it should be "easy(er)" to make a real-time collaboration tool based on Fossil ?

P.S.: By researching this, I've stumbled on a (barebones) alternative to Google Docs : HackMD/CodiMD/HedgeDoc : https://demo.hedgedoc.org/

The best approach for a desktop first cloud-backed solution is possibly to have a VDI with Windows (on AWS for example), and use Microsoft Remote Desktop from your preferred physical computer to access it.

I have multiple desktop Macs in my various homes but I only use them for web browsing and RDP to the same Windows VDI.

Maybe an heresy around here, Microsoft Office with SharePoint backed server.

A free OneDrive account is enough, plus Office 2016+ autosave function, with the added bonus to have a cloud version of word to edit in collaboration your document on the go

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