Comments on: MS Office Addiction

by: Luke Maciak

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:43:01 +0000

@Mats Rauhala: Well, I guess it depends on the level of abstraction. For example I could say “OSX is Unix” too - after all it is based on a BSD kernel, no?

In fact I would venture a guess that OSX is more unix than linux is unix, kernel wise. But, you know… Linux behaves like unix, and both are POSIX compatible - so yeah. You could argue that linux is unix meaning “like unix” to some degree. The codebase does not intersect though - nor it can because of GPL restrictions.

by: Mats Rauhala

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:17:09 +0000

Although he apparently uses linux, but can’t discern between linux and unix.

“Linux is Unix” a quote he said today

by: Luke Maciak

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:36:59 +0000

@Mats Rauhala: This just goes to show that having a PHD in Computer Science does not mean one possesses a clue.

Also this is the reason why I think that all computer science equipment should be running some flavor of Linux and should not include Open Office or other productivity suite. I mean, computer science students and professors should be using LaTex anyway.

Also, there is like 10 billion UML modeling tools out there. Why the hell is he using a drawing program and exporting, importing and etc?

by: Mats Rauhala

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:56:26 +0000

I’m studying computer sciences at Turku University of Applied Sciences. At the moment we are studying UML-modelling, and our teacher shows us how some things are done and the results. He made an uml-diagram with Magic Draw, exported is as an image, imported it to word, and showed it at screen.

Made me want to bang my head to the table

by: Daosus

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:07:02 +0000

Yeah, the nice thing is that most places will now take a submission in PDF, and LaTeX outputs to that just fine. Of course, if someone else has to edit your stuff, you still have to use Word .

by: Luke Maciak

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:07:47 +0000

I stopped using Word Perfect around the same time submitting your homeworks electronically became an accepted practice. I was forced to switch to Word. Then around my Junior year in college I was introduced to LaTex and never looked back.

by: Geoff

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:55:53 +0000

WYSIWYG or no, any word processor that doesn’t allow the user to “reveal codes”(in WordPerfect speak) is defective. Unfortunately this includes OpenOffice too, they seem to think that since Word doesn’t offer users the ability to see the markup codes, that it’s not a feature anyone actually needs or wants. Which sadly is another example of why MS Office is bad for humanity - just like all other Microsoft products, they’re designed to keep the user stupid and hapless. And since they’re the de facto standard, all the alternatives (well certainly at least OO.o in this case) model themselves on crap like Office and when people clamour for years to get some useful features included (search OO.o bugs for “reveal codes”) the response is “Office doesn’t do it so neither do we”. *sigh*

by: feeshy

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:35:18 +0000

I dropped MS Office about 4 months ago along with Windows. I still miss PowerPoint. There is nothing that comes close to it. And I do most of my work creating presentations. I am learning to deal with Impress.

I’m indifferent between Excel and Calc and I actually find that Writer is a lot better than Word. If I get any .docx or similar I just return the document and explain that many corporates don’t have Office 2007 and to please save in Office 2003 format.

Regardless of the Open Document and MS Office Open XML hype, we are going to struggle with formats for a long time still.

by: Jake

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:40:07 +0000

What bugs me even more is when people use Word for everything… even when they have the whole Office suite.
Things I have seen done with Word:

1. Webpages (my school) - Frontpage
2. Tabular data and only tabular data - Excel
3. Greeting cards - Pulisher
4. Composing e-mails (from Outlook- introduces even more problems that regular HTML emails because of Word’s bad HTML export) - Integrated HTML mode in Outlook
5. Saving images (I see people do this all the time at school, even teachers- copy the image from IE, paste it into Word, and then save a doc) - No extra software needed
6. Copy and paste a paragraph or so of a webpage where File>Print, Print Selection would suffice. - No extra software needed

And so on. It bugs me beyond belief.

by: Daosus

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:19:05 +0000

While I think that Word isn’t the best tool for many things, it is often good enough. Even for something like writing reports (which really SHOULD be done in LaTeX), Word has powerful tools that allow auto numbering of sections and figures, quick formatting of all section headings, automatic table of contents and figures generation, and so on. The problem is that no one actually uses these things. I cannot tell you the depths of my rage when I am working on a group project, and have this conversation with teammates (again):

Teammate: “Hey, just so you know, when you reformatted the entire paper, you messed up on the auto-numbering feature you said Word had. I put in a new figure into the middle and labeled it “Figure 17,” but every figure after that had the number wrong.”

Me: “Did you label the figure in the way that I showed you so that the computer knows that it’s supposed to include it in auto-numbering?”

Teammate: “Uhhhhhhhh……”

So, really, the problem isn’t that the features aren’t there, but that they’re unused. Of course, the fact that the metadata is invisible allows people to do these stupid things in the first place. I think the Not so Short Introduction to LaTeX gets it right when it says LaTeX will not allow you to write “unstructured and disorganized documents.” The problem is that people go by the way things look rather than the logical structure. No one (apparently except engineers, scientists and CS guys) seems to think on a hierarchical outline level.

PS. - I really do wish people wouldn’t pretty up their stuff with unnecessary markup. Plaintext really is good enough most of the time.