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Comment by jwrallie | Hacker News Reader

Can confirm, my boss has his own paid Zoom while I’m using Teams to save research money. Another assistant professor I know pay for Slack as well.

I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.

Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.

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I thought everyone on academia used LaTex, or at least in STEM?

Are people really making hundred-pages thesises in Word?

I suppose it is not that bad if you don't have a lot of charts/pictures/formulas, but still...

Not everything is papers and theses. Not an academic but I can imagine Excel being quite useful.

> I can imagine Excel being quite useful.

As long as they use it for actual calculations, and not to maintain tables full of data.

A while back they renamed some gene names so they wouldn't trigger Excel's autocorrect: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...

Not so much autocorrect, but Excel is very eager to interpret things as a date, which may be useful when you're dealing with dates a lot, but it disqualifies it for anything related to serious data.

People also used it to collect COVID data during the pandemic, and a lot of data was lost because someone accidentally opened it in an older version of Excel.

It's one of my pet peeves. Excel should not ever be used to maintain data. It's a fancy calculator.

> I thought everyone on academia used LaTex…

LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.

If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.

Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.

For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.

Don't most people use git for their latex (or even markdown) version control? All the tools that have been developed for code collaboration work really well for documents compared to messing around with word's undocumented format and binary blobs.

In academia (at least in fields that primarily use LaTeX) most people just use Overleaf.

No, git is understood as an unreasonably difficult Dropbox for most people that do not code substantially.

I use Markdown + Pandoc compiling to a .docx as a workaround, but merging changes back is manual.

Disagree. Hunspell and aspell have tex modes that understand well what needs to be checked and what doesn’t.

Comments can be added with ‘%’. Just make sure to have a linebreak at every sentence and it’s cleaner than anything. Services like overleaf also exist for collaboration.

You can use any versioning system you want. From git to dropbox, its plaintext.

I do agree that layout can be very time consuming, but it helps once you learn to not care about it till the absolute end of working on the content.

It isn't realistic to teach your collaborators a new system just for your own comfort. They'll just avoid making edits/comments. Especially if you're just a PhD student/postdoc interacting with a full time scientist - who will have much more work to do than fiddling around with your esoteric editing system.

It's kind of the same issue that FOSS enthusiasts often miss regarding other things, eg. most gamers wouldn't waste their time fiddling around with WINE settings to get things to run in Linux, the solution wasn't to tell them to just install something extra and do things different, it was to improve the infrastructure such that very little fiddling is needed in most cases.

Sure, I did my phd back in the 2010s and latex+git/svn was what everybody used. Im not saying you cant use word, im just saying the criticism raised of latex above is not a valid reason to.

Last time I wrote anything remotely academic was several decades ago, but at that time, the argument was that you had to use LaTeX because Word documents had no support for simultaneous editing, version control, and editors comments. It is truly bizarre to see the same arguments repeated after so long time but completely reversed, in favor of Microsoft Word. Surely the tools haven't become worse over time, given the popularity of github, Overleaf and such?

Even if you write your thesis in latex, all interaction with the administration, grant applications etc. still happens in word documents. Thank God/John MacFarlane for pandoc.

My experience has been that there's somewhat of an age divide. I've noticed that fellow junior academics are far more likely to prefer LaTeX, while all senior collaborators I have ever had, preferred Word. So I end up using Word for everything to ensure that it is easy for them to edit/review the paper.

Word is good for collaborative editing, but not very convenient for version control (and version control is very important when using AI assistance). So lately my strategy is to draft in Markdown, then copy over to Word once the draft is at a point that I might be okay sharing it with collaborators.

Not really, when I attended CERN in 2003 - 2005, LaTeX was out of favour.

Most teams in ATLAS TDAQ/HLT, used Word templates with similar fonts, or Framemaker.

LaTeX used widely for papers, but it does not cover all. PowerPoint is huge, Word is used closer to Markdown’s level for simpler documents (and Pandoc is a huge helper). All administrative staff is using MS Office, that means Excel is used a lot for forms as well. Then there is OneDrive and Teams for collaboration.

Not sure why you'd not just use discord if cost is that much a factor, it has better calling that slack and ironically given what slack is used for way better code embedding etc.

I took online classes in both Zoom and Teams. I prefer Zoom for that because I can hide most of the UI (and the other people) to focus on the teacher and their shared screen

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