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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

Everyone talks about how great the alternatives for office are. Buy they are good. Not great. Even office word online is better than Google docs.

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Comparing Google Docs to MS Office oh god. I mean i always found Google Docs and Word Online aweful, mostly I need Docs Offline. There aren't many times where I need them only or need Collaboration and even for that there would be lots of Toolings. Libre Office should be compared and if you are a Office 2003 User you wouldn't have a hard time to go to LibreOfice. Also on Mac LibreOffice is really really lightweight compared to MS Office. Okai there are two things missing, which are used a lot. One is Excels preinstalled Table formats (on LibreOffice you need to define all of them by yourself, so no quick design). And second you can't easily migrate Mail Merge Docs from Office to LibreOffice.

I'm nearly the opposite.. I uninstalled my office 360 version from work when I left the job (validation failed anyway) and only used it for outlook for work anyhow... that said, I needed to update my resume. For that I have Libre Office... that's about all I use it for.

For me, google docs works well enough... I use the sheets more than the docs actually, as I keep track of my current bills with it. All of that said, there are a lot of tiny features in MS Office that LO doesn't have.... I don't need them, that doesn't mean that nobody does. I know plenty of people that can't give up their use of excel or word in favor of LO.

I also would love to see a fully free/open solution that works as well as Exchange+Outlook ... I've seen lots of alternatives and options, none are nearly as clean or well integrated. And for that matter, most are a bitch to setup/maintain on the server-side of things, or simply aren't actually free, there's usually a critical "plugin" that's only available with a support contract.

It really depends on what you are doing. If it's formatting documents for printing, you're right. If, however, you want a document all 30 participants in a group can collaboratively edit, Google is the way to go. I've used it for ad-hoc voting on group issues (every voter would add a character to the list item they favored) and it held well up to 50 people.

What is "better" about MS word than google docs? The only reason I see to use word is if you're using files from 1999 that don't work anywhere else.

Google docs is a much simpler system, especially for places like schools because of the "cloud" nature of it. Google docs has all the features the average person needs.

MSWord is for specialty cases, google docs and the open alternatives are for everyone else.

I'm about to earn a masters degree and I've never needed to use MS word. Double spacing, page numbers, and aligning text work in just about every processor. I've rarely received a word document from a professor that used advanced features of word, they're always poorly formatted.

I think you missed the word "online". https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx

In my experience, Docs can't even reliably align the cursor with the position between characters (problem described here[1], except my zoom is at 100% already).

Thankfully all my documents have very light formatting, so I can just write in Vim and then upload them.

[1] http://www.podiohelp.com/google-docs-cursor-misaligned/

I've seen this happen before, but only very rarely and refreshing would always fix it. Does refreshing not work for you?

Unfortunately not.

I get this as well, and I have another problem. I usually work in Word but one company wants things in Google Docs. OK, I create the document in Word in Times Roman and paste it into Google Docs.... which converts it into Arial.

If I copy something else from the same Word document into the same Google Doc, then Google keeps it in Times. How does that work?

Is there a "smart paste" feature I've missed?

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...

Sorry if I'm being thick, but I'm using the same clipboard to paste between the same two documents, so I still don't see why GDocs should interpret them differently....

I can try clearing the clipboard between pastes: would that make a difference?

It's true that the average user uses maybe 20% of Word's features, and Google Docs have 50% of them. The problem is that each person uses a different 20%.

One feature I personally needed and missed was to generate a table of contents with page numbers for each heading. I ended up exporting the doc to Word to do it, and in the process discovered that the exported document had a messed up layout in a few places.

Yeah this is a super common experience among people I talk to. For me, it was not wanting any headers or page numbers on my title page. (I ended up making two separate documents to get around it)

would like to report that I just used google docs the other day for something where I also needed a title page, and that google now supports this

Tables and images positioning to begin with. Text flow around objects as well. Oh and typography.

Google Docs isn't even in the same league as MS Office. GDocs is basically slow, web-running (I mean that as an insult), glorified Markdown editor that saves your data in an unknown format somewhere you can't access directly.

About the "features average person needs" remember that users adapt their workflows to the featuers you give them and make do, not the other way around. Give them more, they'll use more.

If somebody out there has a reliable way to measure resource consumption in Windows (Mark Russinovich?), I'd be interested in a comparison between (say) a thousand word document in Word and the same document in Google Docs in Chrome.

I think you could probably add "resource hungry" to your description of GDocs....

That's probably the case, but does it matter?

Ask the people who spent years attacking Word for being "bloatware" ;-)

It chops off a solid 30-45 minutes of battery life on my laptop, in Safari (to say nothing of Chrome, at which point it becomes a campfire on my lap), so yeah, I think so.

Any sort of styling control: if there's a particular style I want applied to certain portions, I have to recreate it at each use. God help me if I decide to change it halfway through the document.

Orphaning of content: GDocs will very happily strand a section header at the bottom of a page, dropping a page break right between the header and the content.

The cursor will occasionally just go where it pleases.

Revision history (compared to diffing git commits) is incredibly frustrating. Click on a revision, read the whole doc, repeat…

As a sibling says,

> Oh and typography.

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