Charles Stross replaces MS Office 2011 for OS X with LibreOffice | Hacker News Reader

Charles Stross replaces MS Office 2011 for OS X with LibreOffice

theregister.co.uk

17 pointsdavidgerard32 comments

This is about Microsoft Word on MacOSX - many people may not know that Microsoft Office on Mac is a different product from Microsoft Office on Windows.

It is a much smaller market so bigger problems are to be expected. Glad that LibreOffice works for him but the current title of this submission is just a flamebait and misleading.

It's the actual title from the page.

Ergo the actual page linked to is a flamebait.

Yes, the register relies on shitty linkbait titles and pisspoor "journalism".

Office for OSX is definitely an inferior product to its' Windows counterparts. Office 2016 for OSX seems to only be a slight improvement (It is still in beta).

However most of the problems I have encountered with 2011 have been related to performance and it forgetting its' serial key after the Yosemite update.

I don't think we should be rewarding people for turning 3 tweets into an article without actually adding anything to them.

Stross expands on the tweets in the comments.

Maybe Stross has different needs as a writer, but I work for a company that provides RHEL laptops to their employees as a rule, and we also get Windows VMs just to be able to run Microsoft Office, even though Libre Office comes preinstalled. There's no way they would go through the trouble of licensing RHEL, then licensing Windows, then licensing Office if it wasn't any better than Libre Office.

This article is almost completely useless. What does it matter what tools an author uses, especially when he's very opinionated on the topic? You can't even extrapolate this to other authors due to that fact.

I don't use MS Office because it's better; I use it because people keep sending me bloody MS office documents, and they complain if I send back anything that isn't an MS office document.

LibreOffice can read and save .docx and other MS Office formats just fine. And MS Office can read and save .odt files. So what's the problem?

Have you ever opened a PPT in Libre Office? Or a doc with pictures? Or a spreadsheet with any advanced features?

Just because they're capable of opening each others formats doesn't mean they're good at it.

His complaint is about change tracking in particular. "Fun fact: MS Word for OSX 2011 can't simultaneously display insertions and deletions while accepting/rejecting changes! Broken!" https://twitter.com/cstross/status/571052363982766080

This article is terrible.

The comments, where Stross mentions that he uses Scrivener to write then submits a doc to an editor who'll mark changes, and another editor will use red pen on a printed page and then he has to recombine these edits back in (if he choses to do so).

So, authors (and not just this opinionated author) don't want to use word. They only do so because the publishers do. But even there some people don't use word (printing the ms and marking it with pen).

It seems like this niche is being poorly served by the existing tools. There's probably a pithy pg quote about that somewhere - find a problem that people have and fix it.

Maybe it's a matter of opinion. My opinion is that Office has its faults, but having written hundreds of <30 page documents and numerous >100 page ones, nothing comes close to being as...acceptable as Office. Google Docs, for example, is utterly unusable past 30 or 40 pages. Latex is beautiful but often not worth the hassle.

In my experience (yours may differ a lot) working with LyX combines the best of a graphical editor and LaTeX typesetting. Especially when a lot of formulas, references and figures are involved. It largely reduces the hassle of page layout and code scattered throughout your document.

I did one thesis in Latex (I can't remember which IDE). And although I absolutely adored the output, and although I hated using Word's formula creator recently, I just had too many hours and days wasted trying to debug errors. Sometimes it would turn out to be things like a space character in a place where a space character wouldn't intuitively be an issue.

I've used it again since, and every time I run into similar time-sink issues.

Google Docs is also incredibly limited. It's like using Wordpad. I can't believe how often it's suggested as the Word killer, when it's absolutely useless for anything but plain text with some headings.

I love its collaborative aspect (which is impossible to use when the document is longer than 30 pages), but you're right, it's not even close to being a Word killer.

I have been using Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php) for writing I do, it is cheaper than MS Office and seems more geared towards authors. But I don't know if it solves his change tracking problem.

Stross also composes in Scrivener. He explains the workflow in the comments. http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/02/24/utterly_u...

My apologies, I didn't see that. Now the article makes a lot more sense.

Well, for writing a novel isn't markdown more than enough? I usually use LaTeX and I don't know much about the tools around markdown, however I wouldn't suggest LaTeX to a SciFi author right away. I assume it's kind of easy to handle with pandoc.

Change tracking is quite easy this way: use your favorite diff utility. You can even version control your documents if you want.

Also, what publishers do with the resulting .doc or .odf files anyway? I assume they throw away all formatting the author did and they do the typesetting in some more professional tool. If this is the case the author shouldn't care about typesetting at all and just pour the contents of his/hor novel in a text file. Markdown is suitable for this.

You totally miss the point: authors do not want to use MS Word. Stross only uses Word because it's what his publisher forces him to use. He apparantly uses Scrivener to write with Word as a final step for the publisher.

(This is why the Register fucking sucks: their empty article failed to mention this; it's all in the comments and the comments are hidden.)

TBH the shitty article tricked me to think that Stross uses Word (or from now Libreoffice) all alone. I do not know Scrivener, it could be a really good product and it seems that it works well for him for dealing with editors who are only willing to use .doc files.

Although I missed the point I still have a point. And that's is that the author and the editors shouldn't mess with formatted documents since it only makes change tracking significantly more complicated compared to plain text files or markdown files. Of course you have to bump into editors who are willing to deal with plain text files or markdown files (I assume it's not going to happen).

Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's likely that Stross knows 100% more than you do about what tools a working novelist needs to use or stay compatible with.

One of the older blog comments talked about problems opening Word 5.1 files in Word 2011 for Mac. It wasn't difficult to find files that would cause problems myself.

MS Word is really bad at compatibility with itself. LibreOffice does ancient Word files much better than MSO.

I am talking about the Word 2011 for Mac version only though. The Word 5.1 files open fine in all the Windows versions I tried after the format is unblocked.

It's pretty interesting how a story about both Charlie Stross and software usability, complete with Charlie Stross providing additional information in the story's comments, was inexplicably knocked within minutes (the time it took me to read the story and comments here) from the front page to the third page (at 12 points and less than an hour old), following an interesting pattern related to stories that shed any sort of negative light on Microsoft or the company's products.

People flag the register because, as this examples shows, the titles are link bait and the articles are worthless.

This article is not "worthless." It's a popular writer whose blog is notably popular here on Hacker News talking about writing software usability.

But the only value is in the comments where stross explains his workflow and explains why Word is broken. This shitty article fails to provide any information that can't be got from Twitter.

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