I used LibreOffice Writer for my coursework the past semester, and when I used my spouse’s Windows computer to double check the images were correctly placed before submitting a paper they were on completely different pages. This was when I saved it as a .docx, because the only two options accepted were .docx or pdf. I wound up doing everything as a pdf if I needed images, but I think LibreOffice doesn’t have a save as pdf option? Or if it did I missed it, I just used Google Docs to save it as a pdf.
PDF is one of those weird "not for editing" formats, like STL. Hence why it's often in an Export As dialog rather than a Save As.
It used to be even hackier. You'd have to get some separate PDF authoring software which would present to applications like a printer driver, so to create a PDF version of your document you'd start with the Print command, not Save or Export, then instead of your printer you'd select your PDF authoring software, then when you clicked Print it would create a file on your hard drive instead of hosing data down a parallel or USB cable to one of Satan's Own Favorite Contraptions.
I am on Linux but haven’t needed to use office software in nearly 20 years, how do you access the pdf printer? Is that different from saving as a pdf through the menu?
You literally 'print' to pdf. Instead of a physical page appearing from the demon box, it will give you a prompt of where to 'print' your file. Windows has it too, though I always use the pdf export and not the print. But in a pinch it's good.
export is typically better as it preserve selectable text, if you print as pdf it will be as flat as a real paper (modern readers will still let you select text but you will be prone to any errors the text recognition can make)
Submitting anything as an editable format like docx or odt is a bad idea. The moment a document is finished and I give it out of my hands, I turn it into an pdf.
It's $150 for a "perpetual" license - but that's not including any one drive storage. The Office 365 SaaS (I think now it's Microsoft 365?) starts at $99/year.
I know this because I've been trying to find a solution for my sister who absolutely needs office to get a workable solution for Linux. Supposedly, she has to submit papers/writing as docx and can't trust LibreOffice not to fuck up formatting.
People aren't paying for Word, they're paying for Excel and getting all the other goodies included.
Yeah, LibreOffice is fine for home use, maybe even really small businesses that don't have to trade spread sheets with external customers, but Excel is the killer app.
Calc's a fine spread sheet program, but it's frustrating as hell after using Excel for 30+ years. You can't trust that it will properly import an Excel sheet and it sure won't do macros.
100% for real. I simply can't do freelancing Excel work with LibreOffice because I know the 1:1 compatibility falls apart quickly. Basic formulas are about as far as I can trust it.
Is there a decent FOSS alternative to excel? Libre has been my goto for years because I never needed anything more, but just in the last week I have a new client with some more rigorous needs, and I REALLY dont want to bite the buellt on 365
Not that I know. Grist and Proton Sheets are worth checking out.
Depending on your exact needs a more specialized tool like SmartSheets or AirTable (browser based, subscription) can be good. WPS office is a little better than Calc in some ways, but no full replacement for Excel.
The problem is everyone expects Calc to be Excel, including full compatibility with reading and writing of Excel's file formats. As Excel is a constantly moving target, following that path means you'll forever be a second-rate Excel that'll never quite be fully compatible.
I find Calc to be a fine spreadsheet program myself, though I'm hardly a power user. If you want to use Excel, then just go use Excel.
The main problem with LibreOffice as a whole is the vast install base of MS Office. If you can work from the beginning in LibreOffice and store things as ODTs and ODSs, you'll have a fine time. The second you need to work with someone who uses MS Office or deal with legacy documents made in Office, it beats your chin on the floor.
I straight up used draw.io to create a paper form. I needed high information density so I can't waste space formatting stuff the normal way, I need something more graphical and publisher got axed.
Also I don't see the problem with the other two.
Move image? Works fine if you select the right wrapping.
Ignore spelling mistake? Right click -> ignore once / ignore all / add to dictionary
From my experience with word, ignore spelling mistake is a lie, it always starts complaining again eventually (and changing spelling from us to uk almost never works)
I think from an end-user perspective it's realistic to expect Word to edit PDFs. It's just that the PDF format is an unbelievably complex clusterfuck and thus requires an entirely separate and expensive program.
because people who don't know computers can't learn to use the right file format.
pdf is a container format for code that is run by printers. it's not something that can be easily changed. pdf editors are hacks upon hacks upon hacks.
I got so frustrated trying to use Word to write a document at work that I just gave up and wrote the whole damn thing in LaTeX. Lots of nested bulleted lists (or worse, numbered lists) and Word do not play nicely.
Sucks to be the guy who has to edit it when I'm gone.
I wrote things in a community college class in latex and they made me resubmit in word because their anti cheat software couldn’t read pdfs. Upsetting. I was 30. I’m not cheating on a heavily sourced psych paper.
Seriously, though. 9 times out of 10, markdown has all the formatting I need for the task at hand. On the rare occasion I need something more, I’m glad I have access to Apple Pages, but it comes with its own set of unique challenges.
I can wholeheartedly recommend Typst over Latex (if one does not depend on exclusive Latex packages).
The syntax makes sense, it is powerful and the compiler is fast.
I thought Typst looked interesting, I just have too many years of LaTex mental patterns and Vim shortcuts to be bothered to try it. I've suggested Typst to a couple of friends who later said,"thanks."
I won’t say it was the best (why were there no pivot tables in numbers?? And why is the current implementation shit requiring manual refreshes that you can’t rely on?), but the software worked very uniformly and was straight forward.
If he hadn’t died he would still be yelling at them to make keynote and numbers work, and he probably wouldn’t have missed the collaborative editing boat.
I feel like Microsoft products steadily get worse over time. It's like they spend money to have their programmers seen how bad a product gets before people will get fed up and dump it.
Microsoft products can be quite good, but you’re right that they are severely hampered by boneheaded decisions.
Microsoft Office is still very good overall. Definitely one of Microsoft’s better products. The ribbon UI was revolutionary and is still great.
The Mac version of Microsoft Office is also a good example of how good and bad versions alternate. Office for Mac 98 was terrible. Office for Mac 2004 was great and and in many ways better than the windows version. 2008 dropped support for Visual Basic. 2011 reintroduced it. Microsoft’s email client for the Mac changed between Outlook, Entourage, then Outlook again with various changes and supporting different features.
My favorite versions of Microsoft operating systems are: DOS 5, Windows 3.1, NT 4, 98, XP, 7, 10, Phone 8.
I’m still mad Microsoft canceled their fantastic flight simulator.
That was my first thought too. Somehow they seem to be able to make the shittiest possible version of everything they attempt, and yet it almost always becomes the standard that everyone uses.
I felt so happy to remember this >20 year old image when I saw the title of this post. I remember finding it very funny back then. Anyway, what's the appraisal? Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.
I agree lots of things about word sucks. But FYI single page landscape is achieved by using two section breaks. It's not ideal, but its somewhat understandable given how styles are prioritized.
I've tried others that work well, but they also suffer on things that word does well that we take for granted.
To be fair PDFs are not meant to be edited (especially not by Word). PDFs are the product not the source. It's like trying to "edit" the ingredients of a cake after it's finished. You don't edit the cake, you edit the recipe and make a new cake.
I edit PDFs all the time for work. It's a pain in the ass, but perfectly doable. Trying to prevent people from editing files by making it annoying is not in any way a sane strategy.
As said it's possible to edit PDFs but of cause it's a pain in the ass because that format doesn't have a lot of semantics information about the original source. PDF doesn't understand how to reflow text to the next line.
It's a bit like having a Photoshop file with many layers, saving the image as PNG, sending that PNG to someone else, they open it in Photoshop and than complain about why Photoshop is trying to prevent the PNG from being edited.
You can edit the PNG but it's a pain in the ass because the original layer information is lost. Same with PDF. Nobody ever tried to prevent anyone from trying to edit PDFs but of it's more that fixing some minor typo is certainly is a pain in the ass because thats not what this format was designed to do.
It's also not feasible to deconstruct a PDF. It doesn't have a concept of paragraphs and lines. Almost all semantic relations and information is lost while saving a PDF.
At one point, Microsoft was maintaining three different word processors.
Word, the top of the line component of the flagship Office product
Works, their "for home and small business" product that was honestly good enough for basically everyone, to the point you have to ask why anyone would buy Office, which is almost certainly why Works got canned, and
Wordpad, because a GUI OS is basically useless without a rich text editor.
Let me Wikipedia that for you...It was rolled into Wordpad circa Windows 95, and that write.exe is present in newer versions of Windows but it's basically just a link to Wordpad.
According to Wikipedia, MS Write uses .wri files, which can be opened by LibreOffice 5.1 and later but not by any Microsoft software from Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later.
If my memory serves, Write supported full text justification, but Wordpad only supported left, center and right justification. So any easy win for Write imo.
As someone that recalls using Word 5.5 in DOS for a book report in 5th grade, as with all things, the peak has come and gone.
IMO, the enshittification curve started about 2010ish when MS demanded internet connectivity for features that didn't work. Saving PDFs was its peak. RIP Word 2007, which I used well into 2015.
Editing PDFs is not a feature the format natively supports (or supported?).
To me the crappiest "feature" is that M$ intentionally disregards their own document standard to EEE the ecosystem and vendor-lock their consumers.
I remember WordPerfect when it was still a DOS program. The simplicity of "this format code affects all text after it" was elegant.
And then we got Word foisted on us, with "this format code (which you have no way of viewing) affects the block of text before it" so if you accidentally delete or move that format code then you screw up a seemingly random bunch of text. And here we are.
I was using LibreOffice Calc on my work PC with a Threadripper CPU, and somehow it still chugs at times. Scrolling was very laggy with larger spreadsheets for example. I ended up using Google Sheets instead, which is way more responsive for me. If it was for personal use, I'd probably try IronCalc.
Perhaps you work for geek squad, or at USPS, or a mill.
You won't get it until you've been working at big companies that use Excel extensively. Shifting priorities, support people to support the products they're using, skeleton crew for IT staff, a support lifeline if needed, etc. Or you haven't met many managers of said orgs...
It's not about what's better. It's about what's familiar and what translates well. Pets say a law firm receives an excel file with all kinds of shit done to it (macros and other excel things), and nobody can open it because they all use Excel. And like I t or not, it is presently the dominant product so you are going to run into less issues using it, unfortunately.
The only thing why this is still the case is because microsoft is bundling everything in a single subscription and is also providing you with software that automatically keeps everything updated.
The software is shit, but companies using the entire ecosystem probably save money. Sadly.
Libre office doesn't offer you sharing and interactivity with role and user based access, pii and phi scanning, on top on the idp they offer you that can be used in just about any compliance situation.
Nobody is paying for just the notepad editor. They just don't have to deal with any security whatsoever.
Want to move an image but you don't know how text wrapping works? Want a .DOCX editor to edit a file format from Adobe? Don't know to R-Click? This memes for YOU!
Honestly, I don’t think it’s the standard anymore. I wish it was, because as bad as Microsoft is, Google is even worse. But I feel like most people use Google Docs nowadays.
I’m not a great example since I’m a lemmy user, Linux user, and a million other things that makes me weird as a computer user. But I do have to exist in the modern world and file paperwork and shit just like everyone else, and I honestly don’t think I’ve had to interact with a docx file in at least 6 or 7 years. It’s all PDFs and web forms. Work is all Google Docs and confluence and that type of shit. It’s probably been 10 years since the last time I even opened an MS word client proper, once I left academia.
Anyway, I agree with you. Word seems deader than a door nail in terms of any text editing zeitgeist
I have no idea where they got that from. Maybe it's something related to Office 365 or they are forced to use Word instead of something else they believe is superior. I've been using Word for over two decated and simply can't understand the hate it gets.
Can you give me a more detailed description of what identation bug you ecountered? The options to set indentation seem straight forward. Were you using multiple nested lists? Were you working on someone else's document?
As fore pagebreak and empty pages, you kinda have to enable "Show paragraph marks" and see if there is something like an invisible paragraph that is inserted before the pagebreak symbol. It's stupid, but nothing unmanagable.
I was going to say that the only way to make it worse is if it showed ads while it autosaved, but autosave itself is literally an ad for onedrive.
If you try any of the other decent options, some of them free, you might come to understand the contempt people have for word, because there's nothing special about it that the others can't do, and you have to put up with design decisions made because they have market dominance and can use that to push people towards other shit that makes them money.
I am on Office 2019 and autosave just saves the file where you created it. There is an option to go to OneDrive, but nothing is forced. Is your problem related to Office 365?
I mean you may not realize it but if you've been routinely using it for that long, at this point you pretty likely have well-established workarounds for the annoying bits that barely register for you as workarounds or annoying by now.
Not too different from the phenomenon where the average subject matter expert over time grows unable to relate to or communicate effectively with people having substantially less expertise. Just cuz so much foundational stuff (lacked by novices) is just implicitly baked in, to the point it becomes invisible - water to the proverbial fish or whatever.
It's true, but you have to learn a piece of software and how it works to be able to use it effectively. I hated Linux for all its quirks and how stuff works differently from Windows. After putting work into it and learning stuff, I am no longer bitching about it as much. It seems to me that this is the same situation with Word and mostly because Microsoft are the way they are.
At least for me, 99% of the time, Even for work applications, a plain text editor gets the job done. And if I need something fancier, Markdown solves that remaining 1%.
word documents are compatible with open office and I've been able to switch to open office at home with no impact on my ability to save them as .doc files and use them at work or school.
It's basically an abysmal text editor combined with the worst page layout software the world has ever seen. Creating documents with it very much resembles masturbating with a blender.
99% of issues people have with Word are because they never bothered to learn how to use it. Remember those IT classes back in school where they taught you how to do a mail merge? Yeah I bet you can't remember how to do that now.
The normal user still uses multiple spaces and newlines to format their documents instead of tabstops and pagebreaks. Doesn't use automatic Table of contents or knows how to use sections to make the page numbers show up where they want. It doesn't help, that the online version doesn't support section insertion. I pretty much never use Word, but it's an incredibly complex piece of software, people don't know how to use. Even the elusive positioning of pictures isn't all too hard if you know what anchors do.
PDF is not meant to be edited, it's meant to be a digital representation of physical paper.
The other problems are just people who don't actually learn to use Microsoft Word, you certainly can add more words to spellcheck and you can change how images and text interact, the only thing I can think of that caused issues is at one point they changed the default, too many people never learned how to change the layout and keep expecting the old behavior after the change.
These people don’t want to hear it. They’re obsessed with the cult of hating Microsoft. If they said, software should be libre/open source and LibreOffice is superior in that regard, I could take them seriously.
For me, it isn't that it doesn't work, it works fine enough most of the time. It's that it's so heavy! My work PC is just an office special and it can chug with all the bloat from the office suite. Especially Outlook. God I hate Outlook.
Carving animals on the wall of the cave is just fine. I assume most of the hate is for caves because carving animals on the wall works just fine for most ungabungas' use cases.
I'm not sure about charts but code snippets and blocks are handled the same as standard markdown:
function myFunc(arg1, arg2) {
const test = 'This is a string';
return null;
}
It also supports exporting to a variety of formats, although I can't speak to the accuracy when reading them in other applications as it's not a feature I've used.
I’m not sure which is worse, the fact that you thought this was clever and relevant or the fact that other people upvoted it and helped to validate your unbounded idiocy.
Once you've tried VIM, you'll never go back.
Mostly because you won't be able to exit VIM.
I would use word for this, but I can’t close vim. I guess I’m learning LaTeX.
Last night, I was talking to my brother - who's a mathematician by trade - and learned the following from him:
I've never used it, but for around fifteen years I've been working around people who do ... And yet I never knew that.
I used it a lot for university… and I did not know that.
I did migrate to pandoc and markdown for a lot of stuff, with custom template files.
An abyssal panda using pandoc. Who could have seen it coming.
Markdown is very useful, but I don't think I've ever written enough to earn template files.
My brother is one of the two smartest people I know and knows a lot of things I didn't know I didn't know. He's earned a lot of respect from me.
I wrote latex template files that the markdown rendered into, that way I could use my own macros and styles.
That is some professional grade typesetting there.
:termyour way to freedomSend help, I ran
:term vim, now I'm double stuck:q (my face in reaction to this)
It'd be more impressive if you went
ZZ.You called?
What a strange emoticon...
:qa!Ya, the first few times I used vim (well neovim) I exited by closing the terminal
Use LibreOffice
I used LibreOffice Writer for my coursework the past semester, and when I used my spouse’s Windows computer to double check the images were correctly placed before submitting a paper they were on completely different pages. This was when I saved it as a .docx, because the only two options accepted were .docx or pdf. I wound up doing everything as a pdf if I needed images, but I think LibreOffice doesn’t have a save as pdf option? Or if it did I missed it, I just used Google Docs to save it as a pdf.
IIRC you have to use the "Export as" option instead of the "Save as" for a .pdf file.
Good to know, at the time my brain was absolutely fried so it doesn’t surprise me that I missed it, lol
PDF is one of those weird "not for editing" formats, like STL. Hence why it's often in an Export As dialog rather than a Save As.
It used to be even hackier. You'd have to get some separate PDF authoring software which would present to applications like a printer driver, so to create a PDF version of your document you'd start with the Print command, not Save or Export, then instead of your printer you'd select your PDF authoring software, then when you clicked Print it would create a file on your hard drive instead of hosing data down a parallel or USB cable to one of Satan's Own Favorite Contraptions.
LibreOffice has a native export to PDF. And, if you use (almost) any Linux, you have a PDF printer included.
I am on Linux but haven’t needed to use office software in nearly 20 years, how do you access the pdf printer? Is that different from saving as a pdf through the menu?
Edit: thanks for the help everyone!
You literally 'print' to pdf. Instead of a physical page appearing from the demon box, it will give you a prompt of where to 'print' your file. Windows has it too, though I always use the pdf export and not the print. But in a pinch it's good.
export is typically better as it preserve selectable text, if you print as pdf it will be as flat as a real paper (modern readers will still let you select text but you will be prone to any errors the text recognition can make)
You hit print and select the PDF output. It probably works everywhere you can select a printer.
Windows also has that, but you have to navigate your way out of OneDrive folders.
The PDF printer would be accessed via the Print functionality. It's a virtual device that renders output to a file instead of a physical printer.
Even better, you can create a "Hybrid PDF" which embeds a second copy of the file in ODT format inside the PDF. This makes it re-editable.
Word supports ODT but it doesn't support reading these ODT files embedded in PDFs though.
Hello! Thanks for the tip!
Print to PDF is the way!
There's a button in the toolbar to export to pdf
Submitting anything as an editable format like docx or odt is a bad idea. The moment a document is finished and I give it out of my hands, I turn it into an pdf.
You can export to pdf and the hiccup you encountered is M$ intentionally not following their own format.
LibreOffice is as good as Word. Which sadly means there are still no really good document editors out there.
Yeah but it's free.
Also there may be no good document editors but there is a good typesetting language.
I've been enjoying OnlyOffice myself! (LibreOffice is fine, I just like the UI of OnlyOffice more.)
Only Office > Libre Office
$150 a year, you mean
And unwanted AI features!
Software as a disservice.
Saad ='(
It's $150 for a "perpetual" license - but that's not including any one drive storage. The Office 365 SaaS (I think now it's Microsoft 365?) starts at $99/year.
I know this because I've been trying to find a solution for my sister who absolutely needs office to get a workable solution for Linux. Supposedly, she has to submit papers/writing as docx and can't trust LibreOffice not to fuck up formatting.
OnlyOffice?
I've never used it, does it handle docx authorship better than libre?
Honestly, I'm not even 100% sure they need Word or if they're just being told that by their boss.
People aren't paying for Word, they're paying for Excel and getting all the other goodies included.
Yeah, LibreOffice is fine for home use, maybe even really small businesses that don't have to trade spread sheets with external customers, but Excel is the killer app.
Calc's a fine spread sheet program, but it's frustrating as hell after using Excel for 30+ years. You can't trust that it will properly import an Excel sheet and it sure won't do macros.
100% for real. I simply can't do freelancing Excel work with LibreOffice because I know the 1:1 compatibility falls apart quickly. Basic formulas are about as far as I can trust it.
Is there a decent FOSS alternative to excel? Libre has been my goto for years because I never needed anything more, but just in the last week I have a new client with some more rigorous needs, and I REALLY dont want to bite the buellt on 365
I will just leave this here in case you need to go the MS route.
I went over the powershell script out of boredom,
Found this
Anyone knows why they are trying to do 2 tasks that actually do nothing?
A line immediately after that: "Windows Powershell failed to load .NET command. Aborting..."
So presumably some of those commands will fail if .NET is missing.
Beautiful. Thank you.
Not that I know. Grist and Proton Sheets are worth checking out.
Depending on your exact needs a more specialized tool like SmartSheets or AirTable (browser based, subscription) can be good. WPS office is a little better than Calc in some ways, but no full replacement for Excel.
That's fair. Imagine if people invested that much time into calc. A person can dream...
The problem is everyone expects Calc to be Excel, including full compatibility with reading and writing of Excel's file formats. As Excel is a constantly moving target, following that path means you'll forever be a second-rate Excel that'll never quite be fully compatible.
I find Calc to be a fine spreadsheet program myself, though I'm hardly a power user. If you want to use Excel, then just go use Excel.
This is a valid point for sure. If I didn't receive ms office for free I'd use LibreOffice. I do use it on a personal level though.
The main problem with LibreOffice as a whole is the vast install base of MS Office. If you can work from the beginning in LibreOffice and store things as ODTs and ODSs, you'll have a fine time. The second you need to work with someone who uses MS Office or deal with legacy documents made in Office, it beats your chin on the floor.
LibreOffice Writer has eaten comments on documents several times for me. Word handles comments much better.
I straight up used draw.io to create a paper form. I needed high information density so I can't waste space formatting stuff the normal way, I need something more graphical and publisher got axed.
Exactly. Excel is the workhorse. The combo between Exchange and Outlook is the other major major strength of MS Office.
expecting word to edit pdfs is like expecting excel to edit compiled matlab programs
Also I don't see the problem with the other two.
Move image? Works fine if you select the right wrapping.
Ignore spelling mistake? Right click -> ignore once / ignore all / add to dictionary
From my experience with word, ignore spelling mistake is a lie, it always starts complaining again eventually (and changing spelling from us to uk almost never works)
Those without tech literacy love to blame the software.
A bad workman blames his tools after all.
I think from an end-user perspective it's realistic to expect Word to edit PDFs. It's just that the PDF format is an unbelievably complex clusterfuck and thus requires an entirely separate and expensive program.
i mean, it's equivalent to using a typewriter to edit a printed page. pdf was not designed to be edited.
What? If pdf wasn't designed to be edited, why are there pdf editors?
because people who don't know computers can't learn to use the right file format.
pdf is a container format for code that is run by printers. it's not something that can be easily changed. pdf editors are hacks upon hacks upon hacks.
LaTeX supremacy has entered that chat
Overfull hbox has left the chat un formatted
I got so frustrated trying to use Word to write a document at work that I just gave up and wrote the whole damn thing in LaTeX. Lots of nested bulleted lists (or worse, numbered lists) and Word do not play nicely.
Sucks to be the guy who has to edit it when I'm gone.
You know it's bad when I prefer a nice markdown editor to word lol
I'm preferring pen & paper over here.
To each their own, I've had to come back to hand written notes and even I can't understand them 💀
You can't understand other people's handwriting? Or you can't even understand your own handwriting?
I meant my own lol
I wrote things in a community college class in latex and they made me resubmit in word because their anti cheat software couldn’t read pdfs. Upsetting. I was 30. I’m not cheating on a heavily sourced psych paper.
TGFM - Thank God for Markdown
Seriously, though. 9 times out of 10, markdown has all the formatting I need for the task at hand. On the rare occasion I need something more, I’m glad I have access to Apple Pages, but it comes with its own set of unique challenges.
My choice of file-format for documents sorted by complexity of the content:
I have not come across 2 & 3. Very interested in Typst after a quick look…
I can wholeheartedly recommend Typst over Latex (if one does not depend on exclusive Latex packages).
The syntax makes sense, it is powerful and the compiler is fast.
I thought Typst looked interesting, I just have too many years of LaTex mental patterns and Vim shortcuts to be bothered to try it. I've suggested Typst to a couple of friends who later said,"thanks."
I wish Markdown had better support for tables.
I miss the Steve Jobs era of iWork.
I won’t say it was the best (why were there no pivot tables in numbers?? And why is the current implementation shit requiring manual refreshes that you can’t rely on?), but the software worked very uniformly and was straight forward.
If he hadn’t died he would still be yelling at them to make keynote and numbers work, and he probably wouldn’t have missed the collaborative editing boat.
iWeb was pretty sweet too.
That's how I feel about most Microsoft products actually.
I feel like Microsoft products steadily get worse over time. It's like they spend money to have their programmers seen how bad a product gets before people will get fed up and dump it.
Microsoft products can be quite good, but you’re right that they are severely hampered by boneheaded decisions.
Microsoft Office is still very good overall. Definitely one of Microsoft’s better products. The ribbon UI was revolutionary and is still great.
The Mac version of Microsoft Office is also a good example of how good and bad versions alternate. Office for Mac 98 was terrible. Office for Mac 2004 was great and and in many ways better than the windows version. 2008 dropped support for Visual Basic. 2011 reintroduced it. Microsoft’s email client for the Mac changed between Outlook, Entourage, then Outlook again with various changes and supporting different features.
My favorite versions of Microsoft operating systems are: DOS 5, Windows 3.1, NT 4, 98, XP, 7, 10, Phone 8.
I’m still mad Microsoft canceled their fantastic flight simulator.
That was my first thought too. Somehow they seem to be able to make the shittiest possible version of everything they attempt, and yet it almost always becomes the standard that everyone uses.
[email protected]
I felt so happy to remember this >20 year old image when I saw the title of this post. I remember finding it very funny back then. Anyway, what's the appraisal? Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.
would you send that to my mom please?
Want to edit the header just on page 6? Or feel like being sexy and having a single page in landscape or a different size?
Easy! Just make a bunch of separate documents, export them as PDFs, and merge them in Adobe Acrobat.
I agree lots of things about word sucks. But FYI single page landscape is achieved by using two section breaks. It's not ideal, but its somewhat understandable given how styles are prioritized. I've tried others that work well, but they also suffer on things that word does well that we take for granted.
The way it should be handled is to just let me rotate a single fucking page. It's 2025 and there is zero excuse for that bullshit.
Like I said, I agree it sucks. I've had the exact same thought many times.
To be fair PDFs are not meant to be edited (especially not by Word). PDFs are the product not the source. It's like trying to "edit" the ingredients of a cake after it's finished. You don't edit the cake, you edit the recipe and make a new cake.
And yet... libreoffice does it pretty ok
I edit PDFs all the time for work. It's a pain in the ass, but perfectly doable. Trying to prevent people from editing files by making it annoying is not in any way a sane strategy.
As said it's possible to edit PDFs but of cause it's a pain in the ass because that format doesn't have a lot of semantics information about the original source. PDF doesn't understand how to reflow text to the next line.
It's a bit like having a Photoshop file with many layers, saving the image as PNG, sending that PNG to someone else, they open it in Photoshop and than complain about why Photoshop is trying to prevent the PNG from being edited.
You can edit the PNG but it's a pain in the ass because the original layer information is lost. Same with PDF. Nobody ever tried to prevent anyone from trying to edit PDFs but of it's more that fixing some minor typo is certainly is a pain in the ass because thats not what this format was designed to do.
Well yeah, because it's not feasible to deconstruct a baked cake, not because "things that are made shouldn't be edited".
It's also not feasible to deconstruct a PDF. It doesn't have a concept of paragraphs and lines. Almost all semantic relations and information is lost while saving a PDF.
Except there are programs that can edit pdfs fine.
Used Microsoft Works in the early 2000's. Only discontinued in 2009 apparently.
At one point, Microsoft was maintaining three different word processors.
Where does Microsoft Write enter the equation?
Let me Wikipedia that for you...It was rolled into Wordpad circa Windows 95, and that write.exe is present in newer versions of Windows but it's basically just a link to Wordpad.
According to Wikipedia, MS Write uses .wri files, which can be opened by LibreOffice 5.1 and later but not by any Microsoft software from Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later.
I was just being silly.
Well tough shit, I learned something anyway.
We all did!
If my memory serves, Write supported full text justification, but Wordpad only supported left, center and right justification. So any easy win for Write imo.
This why LibreOffice called out Microsoft for using "complex" file formats to lock in Office users
https://www.neowin.net/news/libreoffice-calls-out-microsoft-for-using-complex-file-formats-to-lock-in-office-users/
Word is the proof that God exists and he's still real fuckin' pissy about that apple.
You can get word for apple
The real miracle isn’t Word’s features, it’s how it’s still the default after decades of collective pain.
![email protected]
Same reason Windows is still the default on desktop: EEE and vendor-lock.
As someone that recalls using Word 5.5 in DOS for a book report in 5th grade, as with all things, the peak has come and gone.
IMO, the enshittification curve started about 2010ish when MS demanded internet connectivity for features that didn't work. Saving PDFs was its peak. RIP Word 2007, which I used well into 2015.
Who knew being a monopoly and anti competitive would be so profitable.
So many open source options out there that if you think MS word is the only options out there then you're not looking hard enough.
Do you really think the multi billion dollar company I work for is going to switch?
You ain't paying. Why do you care?
Editing PDFs is not a feature the format natively supports (or supported?).
To me the crappiest "feature" is that M$ intentionally disregards their own document standard to EEE the ecosystem and vendor-lock their consumers.
My favourite feature is the insanely counter-intuitive indenting and bullet points.
Never understood the attraction. It sucks.
I expected Lemmy to be less repost-obsessed than Reddit yet here we are.
I'm old enough to remember Microsoft Works.
I miss the simplicity of those days...
I dunno, having two different word processors was kind of confusing
Three. Wordpad also existed.
I member Corel Word-perfect...
I remember WordPerfect when it was still a DOS program. The simplicity of "this format code affects all text after it" was elegant.
And then we got Word foisted on us, with "this format code (which you have no way of viewing) affects the block of text before it" so if you accidentally delete or move that format code then you screw up a seemingly random bunch of text. And here we are.
Apple‘s office suite is the closest thing to it we have today I think.
Why would anyone use that garbage over Libre Office?
I was using LibreOffice Calc on my work PC with a Threadripper CPU, and somehow it still chugs at times. Scrolling was very laggy with larger spreadsheets for example. I ended up using Google Sheets instead, which is way more responsive for me. If it was for personal use, I'd probably try IronCalc.
How does gnumeric work for you? That's my spreadsheet goto, but to be fair I have very simple demands.
I'll try it out! I totally forgot it exists.
Because businesses have been using it for decades, they have old spreadsheets with all kinds of functions and shit that may not easily port over, etc.
The unfortunate reality.
Who cares? Still doesnt explain it. Libre Office is way better
Perhaps you work for geek squad, or at USPS, or a mill.
You won't get it until you've been working at big companies that use Excel extensively. Shifting priorities, support people to support the products they're using, skeleton crew for IT staff, a support lifeline if needed, etc. Or you haven't met many managers of said orgs...
It's not about what's better. It's about what's familiar and what translates well. Pets say a law firm receives an excel file with all kinds of shit done to it (macros and other excel things), and nobody can open it because they all use Excel. And like I t or not, it is presently the dominant product so you are going to run into less issues using it, unfortunately.
For business, they need Excel.
I love Libreoffice but the dictionary on there is abysmal. Like fully wretched.
I'm sure there's a way to add others but I just haven't discovered it yet.
Anyone who needs to do something serious
The only thing why this is still the case is because microsoft is bundling everything in a single subscription and is also providing you with software that automatically keeps everything updated.
The software is shit, but companies using the entire ecosystem probably save money. Sadly.
Microsoft office is why I use iWork.
If you don't use \LaTeX, that's on you.
Survival of the
fittestinescapable.It's free (aaaaar) and it does everything I need it to. The pdf editing is a dream though. Use something else.
Word works fine and has just about every feature business users needs. This stuff hasn't been true in a long time.
Word has long since become a low value comodity. Why pay at all when Libre Office does everything well for free.
Thanks to US enshittification, governments and corporations around the world are de-americanizing their tech stacks. FOSS for the win.
Microsoft will eat dirty ass.
Libre office doesn't offer you sharing and interactivity with role and user based access, pii and phi scanning, on top on the idp they offer you that can be used in just about any compliance situation.
Nobody is paying for just the notepad editor. They just don't have to deal with any security whatsoever.
Libre office does offer sharing, and RBAC can be handled at the storage level.
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/scalc/01/shared_spreadsheet.html
There are other tools for PII and PHI scanning and this is part of foundry, not Office. You pay more for that.
Oh, so it's more expensive for less features. MS is so cooked.
Want to move an image but you don't know how text wrapping works? Want a .DOCX editor to edit a file format from Adobe? Don't know to R-Click? This memes for YOU!
Honestly, I don’t think it’s the standard anymore. I wish it was, because as bad as Microsoft is, Google is even worse. But I feel like most people use Google Docs nowadays.
It absolutely is.
Looking at business users, 365 has 400+ million, whereas Google has maybe half of that.
Isn’t 365 a combo subscription for word plus a bunch of other stuff? I can’t imagine many of those people are paying exclusively to use word
I’m not a great example since I’m a lemmy user, Linux user, and a million other things that makes me weird as a computer user. But I do have to exist in the modern world and file paperwork and shit just like everyone else, and I honestly don’t think I’ve had to interact with a docx file in at least 6 or 7 years. It’s all PDFs and web forms. Work is all Google Docs and confluence and that type of shit. It’s probably been 10 years since the last time I even opened an MS word client proper, once I left academia.
Anyway, I agree with you. Word seems deader than a door nail in terms of any text editing zeitgeist
This comment section is like a hivemind. Can't go a day without a circlejerk.
It’s almost like a lot of people think that MS Word sucks
I have no idea where they got that from. Maybe it's something related to Office 365 or they are forced to use Word instead of something else they believe is superior. I've been using Word for over two decated and simply can't understand the hate it gets.
I recently tried to customise the indentation of a numbered list and I kind of understand the hate it gets.
Documents where Word insists on appending an additional empty page that you can't remove.
Or fighting with page breaks.
Yea I hate Word..
Can you give me a more detailed description of what identation bug you ecountered? The options to set indentation seem straight forward. Were you using multiple nested lists? Were you working on someone else's document?
As fore pagebreak and empty pages, you kinda have to enable "Show paragraph marks" and see if there is something like an invisible paragraph that is inserted before the pagebreak symbol. It's stupid, but nothing unmanagable.
Autosave requires the file be saved on onedrive.
I was going to say that the only way to make it worse is if it showed ads while it autosaved, but autosave itself is literally an ad for onedrive.
If you try any of the other decent options, some of them free, you might come to understand the contempt people have for word, because there's nothing special about it that the others can't do, and you have to put up with design decisions made because they have market dominance and can use that to push people towards other shit that makes them money.
I am on Office 2019 and autosave just saves the file where you created it. There is an option to go to OneDrive, but nothing is forced. Is your problem related to Office 365?
I believe that is the version my work has us use.
I mean you may not realize it but if you've been routinely using it for that long, at this point you pretty likely have well-established workarounds for the annoying bits that barely register for you as workarounds or annoying by now.
Not too different from the phenomenon where the average subject matter expert over time grows unable to relate to or communicate effectively with people having substantially less expertise. Just cuz so much foundational stuff (lacked by novices) is just implicitly baked in, to the point it becomes invisible - water to the proverbial fish or whatever.
It's true, but you have to learn a piece of software and how it works to be able to use it effectively. I hated Linux for all its quirks and how stuff works differently from Windows. After putting work into it and learning stuff, I am no longer bitching about it as much. It seems to me that this is the same situation with Word and mostly because Microsoft are the way they are.
That's fair and certainly a real phenomena, no argument there. I've prolly been guilty of it myself lol
Want to see them lose their minds? Tell them you installed Word on linux.
At least for me, 99% of the time, Even for work applications, a plain text editor gets the job done. And if I need something fancier, Markdown solves that remaining 1%.
word documents are compatible with open office and I've been able to switch to open office at home with no impact on my ability to save them as .doc files and use them at work or school.
Bring back Word Perfect!
It still exists.
Nowadays, it appears to be little more than a Word clone, though.
I read this on the "SpongeBob SquarePants" chorus voice
I switched to onlyoffice not looking back
At least in Word you can rotate an image by degrees. If you want custom rotation in Paint, do you know what's suggested? Use Word!
I honestly have more things against excel than word... or maybe im just mad about how ribbon was stupidly implemented in excel
Exactly. Right-click the word, hit ignore.
It's basically an abysmal text editor combined with the worst page layout software the world has ever seen. Creating documents with it very much resembles masturbating with a blender.
99% of issues people have with Word are because they never bothered to learn how to use it. Remember those IT classes back in school where they taught you how to do a mail merge? Yeah I bet you can't remember how to do that now.
The normal user still uses multiple spaces and newlines to format their documents instead of tabstops and pagebreaks. Doesn't use automatic Table of contents or knows how to use sections to make the page numbers show up where they want. It doesn't help, that the online version doesn't support section insertion. I pretty much never use Word, but it's an incredibly complex piece of software, people don't know how to use. Even the elusive positioning of pictures isn't all too hard if you know what anchors do.
I too respect the monopoly hostile aggressive territory power abuse into enshittification pipeline business strategy, fellow normal poor
Microsoft Word is just fine. I assume most of the hate is for Microsoft because Word works just fine for most people’s use cases.
All the issues mentioned in the OP are longstanding issues with word. It's not "just fine". It's really annoying.
PDF is not meant to be edited, it's meant to be a digital representation of physical paper.
The other problems are just people who don't actually learn to use Microsoft Word, you certainly can add more words to spellcheck and you can change how images and text interact, the only thing I can think of that caused issues is at one point they changed the default, too many people never learned how to change the layout and keep expecting the old behavior after the change.
These people don’t want to hear it. They’re obsessed with the cult of hating Microsoft. If they said, software should be libre/open source and LibreOffice is superior in that regard, I could take them seriously.
Intended or not, millions of people have to edit millions of pdfs every day.
For me, it isn't that it doesn't work, it works fine enough most of the time. It's that it's so heavy! My work PC is just an office special and it can chug with all the bloat from the office suite. Especially Outlook. God I hate Outlook.
Carving animals on the wall of the cave is just fine. I assume most of the hate is for caves because carving animals on the wall works just fine for most ungabungas' use cases.
I don't deal with that kind of file much but when I do usually Typora
I'm not sure about charts but code snippets and blocks are handled the same as standard markdown:
It also supports exporting to a variety of formats, although I can't speak to the accuracy when reading them in other applications as it's not a feature I've used.
I’m not sure which is worse, the fact that you thought this was clever and relevant or the fact that other people upvoted it and helped to validate your unbounded idiocy.
I think I have used word, like, twice in my life
Lucky you.
edit a pdf? lol? be a good person, never send pdfs, use a proper format, docx or even better odt, just fucking raw md