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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

Actually MS has always listened. The problem has been (a) whom they listened to (the user has usually not been their customer) and (b) lack of "taste".

MS Office is, for good and ill, exactly what you get when you give users what they ask for and have no taste.

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Office 2013, specifically Excel and Word are fantastic.

Except for my use case, which is when you have a 1,200 page document with hundreds of tables, lists, and pictures. The thing grinds to a halt and has all sorts of problems. Yes, I know that MS Word is not the best choice for documents that big, but it's not up to me.

"which is when you have a 1,200 page document with hundreds of tables, lists, and pictures"

This is like saying that SQLite is not a good product because you are using it on a Terabyte database having 1,000,000 hits at the same time... It might work but it would have problems because wasn't designed for that scenario.

I sympathize with you though... since it is not your decision :/

Have you tried the 64-bit version? People still normally install the 32-bit version (mainly for add-on supportability), but if you're working with very large documents, the 64-bit version should work better for you.

That's weird you can't break it down into smaller parts? I worked on a big book, about that size with several people and the major, mainstream publishing company wanted it in individual documents mapping to individual chapters.

We actually did break it up into several parts when making and editing it, but for the "official release" of the document (It's a big-ass test procedure document), they wanted it in one file. And of course there's always some changes you find after you release something.

Honest question, why can't you split the document and work on individual chapters?

A document that large must have some kind of a structure that you and your team can use to break it apart into smaller, more manageable chunks. One thing to consider is to place the content into a content management system of kind (a wiki comes to mind) to allow the content to more easily be maintained and grow without the limitations Word creates.

The decision may not have been up to you to keep it all in one Word document but making the case to either break apart the document or find a better system in which to maintain it ought to be easy in the face of the usability issues you mention.

Deleting my long rant here. It’s not really on topic for this thread. Suffice to say, I think MS Word is a pile of junk. For the curious: http://pastie.org/9297613

> I could go on and on. In about 2005, I decided I’d never again use Word unless I absolutely had to.

So you're saying you haven't really used Word 2013 then?

I used Office 2010 for a while and it was crashing 4+ times a day, so I tried 2013 and easily recreated some of those crashes. I have not used it extensively but it does not take long to discover it's still trash.

PS: Office 2013 still has bugs from word 97, which is what happens when there is zero competition.

"There’s no good way to collaborate with multiple authors without hellish document synchronization effort."

Based on just that, I don't think you have used Office in a really long time.

[Sorry that this is all quite off topic for a conversation about surface.]

So imagine you have 4 authors: person A writes a document, and person B makes one set of changes, while person C makes a different set of changes, with person D working off of C’s version. Now person A wants to accept some but not all of C’s changes, and some but not all of B’s changes, and person D wants to “rebase” his document to add the changes that A approved from B and C, but not the changes that A did not approve...

How do you handle it? You’re saying MS word now has a solution for this that avoids conflicts? I guess I’m not enough of a power user to know about it.

Okay, now imagine that you want to both want to open and type on the same document at the same time, real-time-collaboration style. You’re saying Word has a solution for this one too?

Not sure about the first but for the second Office online does that now. Not sure if you can do it completely in the desktop app but the online UI isn't horrible from what I've used of it.

The first is basically a rather complicated workflow that is handled for instance with plain text documents in git. I doubt Word can do that (wouldn't know, haven't used it for a long time), after all it's core thing is being a word processor. Now I didn't read your rant, but ranting that something is a pile of junk and then using a rather far-fecthed missing feature as an example of why it is a pile of junk, as a counter-argument to someone questioning your reasoning, is not proper logic. Can't think of a proper analogy atm, but claiming git is a pile of junk and then coming up with git diff not being able to deal with Word files as one of the reasons would probably come close: it makes no sense.

No, actually, collaborating in office as compared to google docs or tex + git is hell.

Misleading troll is misleading.

Word has great co-authoring support if you use Word Online (free equivalent of Google Docs which the desktop/tablet/phone client can work with natively), SharePoint, or Office 365.

I like Excel as much as the next guy, but even in 2013 when you open a delimited text file it makes you manually tell it what the delimiters are. A computer should be able to guess whether a large text file is CSV, TSV, etc. This is an example of something Apple would get right, but Microsoft does not, even after more than a decade with this heavily-used feature. A tasteful implementer would make it do something reasonable by default, rather than making thousands of users click "Next" repeatedly and get presented with nonsensical defaults.

You might be vastly overestimating the correctness of files being imported.

Some coworkers of mine have to deal with CSV/TSV imports from enterprise customers, and the amount of clearly broken scripts is pretty bad.

That excel import preview dialog helps non-programmers try to fix these issues beforehand. If that wasn't there, it'd likely be impossible for these people to know where to begin trying to fix the import.

The preview dialog is useful, but the default option for the delimiter could be guessed and the preview dialog used to confirm it.

I usually just drag tab-sep files into an open Excel window, and it opens just fine. I only get the import wizard when I try to use file -> open. There are a couple of "gotchas" I regularly experience- the worst of which is the automatic formatting- which unfortunately converts a number of gene names into dates (I'm in Bioinformatics). It's enough of an issue that papers have been published about it [1]. For example MAR1 ends up formatted as 1-Mar. When you have a list of 20,000 identifiers, it's quite annoying to deal with. I see the transformed strings show up in biological databases all the time. I don't know why there isn't an easy way to disable autoformatting. Even if I avoid incorporating Excel into my own workflow, when I send documents to scientists, they're going to want to use it, and we end up with the same results then.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15214961

My rage point recently- Why for the love of plain text can Excel not bother to encode csv exports as UTF-8? You can up and then download with google sheets to "hack" around this but I bought numbers.app out of spite since you can specify output encoding there.

When I open a CSV file in Excel 2013, it correctly delimits the file.

You may have non-standard CSV files (or at least delimited files that are not properly escaped)

There are no standard CSV files. There's even no "Excel standard": Excel uses different delimiters in different locales. It's a huge pain.

It's important to point out that there is no standard for CSV files, only conventions.

There is RFC4180, but that came way after people were using it in lots or ways incompatible with the spec, so it isn't a huge help when paraing arbitrary files. I'd recommend following it if you're generating files though.

Whatever are you complaining about? Little as I am a fan of the WYSIWYG philosophy, Office is a genuinely spectacular product.

Office, like Excel, was mostly complete years ago. The iterations on file format and ribbon bar? Not so useful for most users.

As a casual user of the various Office apps, the ribbon bar is what made it usable. Before that, I'd make every attempt to keep out of Office.

Those who use it with any regularity likely know the keyboard shortcuts for things they use regularly, and the ribbon should work for finding the less common things in the same way it helps me as a casual user find everything.

The ribbon bar made it more usable? I just found it annoying. Word 2003 still seems like the best form factor to me.

It did. I couldn't find anything before the ribbon bar, frankly, and using tools took significantly more time because I had to search for them in overly long menus, or even submenus. Now they're mostly laid out directly in front of me, logically and visually ordered. I don't feel that menus are a good UI to anything.

It would seem that most UX people now agree with me, as traditional menu bars have been de-emphasised across nearly all the apps I use. Word was the only app which required me to delve into the menus in common use.

Why do you think the ribbon bar has a worse UX than a menu bar?

Don't you know that change frightens and confuses people?

For anyone for who changes do just that, check this out, which I think is the most impressive example of data-driven UI design ever documented even remotely this well: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/table-of-...

I love the ribbon. If you don't, try one of two things. One, try double-clicking on one of the headers - it'll make the ribbon hide unless you click it. This makes it effectively work like the old menus, except more horizontal and graphical instead of vertical.

The second is to scroll your mouse wheel while hovering over the ribbon.

Change does frighten and confuse people which is why the principle of least surprise is part of the human interface guidelines, but nobody seems to care about that anymore.

I don't know if I'd really say it's worse, except for that it breaks the standard expectation and user interfaces are supposed to follow a uniform design on one environment, but it's a change and I prefer interfaces not to change.

Indeed, apart from that WYSIWYG. If Word were focused only on text editing (at which it is peerless) and not at all on design and typesetting (at which it is execrable), it would be a nearly perfect product.

I've learned there is one rule when it comes to design in Word: Thou shall only use styles.

Once someone tries to muck with settings for individual pieces external of the style then it just goes to hell. I wish they'd take all the formatting tools out of toolbar and only have them accessible via the style formatter.

I said for "good and ill". If you can't see the problems in Office then you aren't looking very hard.

What exactly are these problems? My only problem has been difficulty forcing it to get down to "advanced options" on certain parts where something needs a minor adjustment that doesn't work through the normal channels

"Actually MS has always listened." Really? http://www.jax184.com/projects/filenames/filenames.html

Your one link to demonstrate Microsoft "don't listen" is where the person refuses to report it through the proper channels, gets it reported via an unofficial channel then after Microsoft have listened, doesn't like their answer therefore pretends it didn't happen?

Convincing.

Indeed. Also, I thought for sure that 8.3 file name creation was off by default starting in either Win8 or Win7. Maybe it depends on whether you upgraded from an older version or which SKU you install?

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