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Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

I know a lots been said about WP's "reveal codes", but I just realized it was the last time using a word processor where I felt like I was actually in charge and not just cajoling the thing to make things look how I wanted.

I've gotten very proficient with Word over the years, but there are still times where GUI reveals itself to be a leaky abstraction. Things where table formatting can vary wildly depending on seemingly inconsequential change in the order of making changes.

What makes it worse is that there's always some hidden setting or configuration somewhere to blame, so you never really can blame Word.

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Microsoft word:

all tables change size

page delimiting format is lost

several dozen other images with footnotes on other pages are now on different pages

in the distance, sirens

I guess all I can say is I understand why scientific papers are laid out using LaTEX.

When I joined CERN in 2003, most people were either using Word or FrameMaker, there were few surviving users of LaTeX.

I bet the number of LaTeX users in Geneva has hardly improved during the last 20 years.

That pretty weird. You’d assume that CERN have LaTeX templates, meaning that you could just sit down and start typing.

At university we created a template first semester, tweaked it a bit the second. After that it wasn’t something that you needed to think off. You could just start typing, run make to build a pdf if needed, and everything could just be pushed to subversion (it was 20 years ago).

So few people truly know how to use Word. Most just mess around with fonts and spacing until thinks look about right. I sure that even few is actually able to use Google Doc as anything beyond a web based Wordpad.

I never saw them on my department, now documents in Word and FrameMaker lost count.

> This can be a PDF file or a Word document, in any format or lay-out that can be used by referees to evaluate your manuscript

https://www.elsevier.com/journals/results-in-physics/2211-37...

> so you never really can blame Word

Absolutely, you can. Microsoft has long stopped improving the basic word processing features. When there is no competition Microsoft stops improving their products.

When there is no competition Microsoft stops improving their products.

Coincidentally, at this very moment I am re-creating an old paper form for another department in the company. They need it as a PDF.

The people from the department sent me their best effort as a Word document. It's a disaster of mismatched styles, misaligned boxes, things that get cut off for no discernible reason, and stuff that won't print right because it's past Word's margins.

I'm almost done re-creating it in Pages, from which I'll output a PDF. It's gone swimmingly.

Pages isn't yet a replacement for every single little thing that Word does, but for the things it does do, it works well, quickly, predictably, and fast. But that may be Word's downfall: It took the kitchen sink route and became a mess.

Pages is a good basic word processor for those who are interested in processing words. It's less "powerful" at doing all the thousand other things that people use Word for that they should probably do in Acrobat.

The most important word in your comment: predictable.

Even when Pages completely changed when they redid the engine for web, iOS and Mac, Pages stayed predictable. If you turn invisibles on, you basically know everything of what’s happening at all times.

Google Docs is the competition, not Pages.

And Google Docs has its fair share of issues too. I've seen many Google Doc documented with the issues described here for Word.

Verily

A processor that is at the level of Word 2.0 is hardly the competition, unless being a better typewritter is everything one expects from a word processor.

Pages is really frustrating to me: until around 2012, pages was an extremely good tool for desktop-publishing and general writing. Sometime around then, Apple did a whole UI update and cut it down to a much more basic word processor that has slowly been improved.

I personally adore Pages and especially Numbers.

I spend most of my professional life designing and dealing with spreadsheets and Numbers’ table-based paradigm is simply orders of magnitude more elegant that Excel’s everything-is-a-sheet approach. Why? I can modify tables (inserting row and columns, changing attributes, & cetera) without affecting other tables.

The one thing I miss and that infuriates me is Numbers’ lack of iterative solutions to circular references. Circular references are bad, you say, and I agree, but unfortunately in corporate finance they’re unavoidable when creating business plans because short-term debt depends on interest to be paid and interest to be paid depends on short-term debt. That means that Numbers can only take me so far until I have to export to .xlsx and then slog it out with Excel from then on. It’s a real pity they keep adding useless (to me) features such as collaborative editing and so forth when adding this functionality would take the whole application from being a toy to being a professional instrument.

One can hope, I guess.

In excel select the location of your table, select format as table and now you have a table that you can setup auto sum on, setup computed columns and automatically have everything extended when you add a new line.

You can also use it as basis for a pivot table so excel can make you a much better overview of your data.

Thanks (no sarcasm) but I know how it works.

My point was that in Excel this is an afterthought, whereas in Numbers it’s a consequence of how the application is devised from first principles.

Problem: once you have multiple such tables on a sheet, adding and removing rows or columns to such tables becomes hit and miss.

Numbers will happily shift down tables to make room, but Excel won’t.

Array formulas are another sort-of alternative for Numbers’ tables, but there, too, the implementation could be better. You can’t insert a row ‘inside’ a range of rows covered by an array formula, for example.

And it’s gotten worse, apparently.

Had to use Word and Excel for a few days, and there’s an obvious latency to almost any action, on a multi core multi GB computer.

Why? It shouldn’t have any delay, period.

I’m slowly forming the opinion that it’s been downhill since the Ribbon revamp. Office 2000 was pretty good, and aggressively snappier than 2016.

Are you talking about the smooth moving cursor? That's the first thing I disable in the registry with any new install.

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/office-2016-smooth-curso...

No, he's talking about an obvious latency to almost any action, on a multi core multi GB computer.

Do you think it's due to some kind of network call? I think the licensing in general is extremely painful. I've definitely paid like $450 over the last 8 years for various microsoft stuff and I just don't like that. I wish you could easily get device-portable single use licenses that don't just evaporate after the licensing period ends. Word/Excel is decent but has become an immeasurably huge piece of shit over the last two or three years compared to previous eras

> Do you think it's due to some kind of network call?

Good call! (No pun intended.)

I often wondered why my fancy Xfinity DVR is so sluggish when I press a button on the remote. It finally connected when my Internet kept going down after some improvement they made and when the Internet could not be reached, the system stops responding to the remote. Can't even pause or exit. It's clear that every button press must make a round trip to Comcast' servers before it is acted on. It's Craptastic!

European user here, with an Android based fiber-TV (Orange top box?) set with the similar slugginness issues.

Thankfully LibreOffice performance and compatibility is getting there. If you have the means, support them.

LibreOffice has its fair share of problems (Impress performance on Windows is especially bad), but honestly they're great projects regardless. The UI is simple and customizable (want ribbons? sure! dropdown menus? yep!), most of the options are where you'd expect them to be and it just works.

The open and free nature helps the project greatly, even though the corpse of OpenOffice still lingering around is a bit cumbersome, since all of the efforts/attention aren't necessarily redirected to LibreOffice.

Of course, when there are problems, they can be pretty interesting, like when the bibliography for my Master's thesis broke pretty horribly: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/libreoffice...

I often use Word97 and Excel97 through Wine on my Linux laptop. They are fast and snappy, and it's often more than enough for my needs.

Agreed re Word 97.

TBH I never found anything I needed Excel for that I couldn't do in LibreOffice Calc, so I install only Word, nothing else.

It's small and very fast on 21st century hardware. Works perfectly on WINE, including installing all the MS Service Releases.

> What makes it worse is that there's always some hidden setting or configuration somewhere to blame, so you never really can blame Word.

Yes you can.

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