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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I've used Word before and I will if I'm required to, but otherwise I prefer to use a text editor and have gotten some strange looks from others for doing that/sending them a document as a plaintext file. I don't understand why people seem to always reach for it even when they're writing short unformatted pieces of text; it's rather overkill for that, and if you've ever seen things like RFCs, it is possible to create some very readably formatted plaintext documents too.

If I'm doing something that needs fancy formatting, then my tool of choice if TeX; but I still focus on the content first, and the formatting afterwards.

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I was curious about this myself recently and a conversation with my wife managed to clarify it a bit for me. She's very technically proficient but is not a hacker. She also uses Word for almost everything, which drives me crazy, but I think I understand why now.

To her content and presentation are not separate entities. Font choice, heading size, margins and spacing, and colors are secondary to the text and the document structure, but they're still semantic elements and carry meaning above and beyond the structure they present. Presenting a sentence in red, for example, conveys a different meaning than making the same sentence bold, even if in theory they're simply alternate ways of conveying importance. She judges the extra expressiveness to be worth the extra complexity, even for informal documents and notes to herself.

This is why I loved Markdown when I first discovered it. Even without it, a lot of my plaintext files do things like the * for emphasis, or using dashes to underline headers and so forth. It's been done in software documentation for decades (a lot of the Markdown syntax isn't even original to it); it puzzles me it took so long for someone to sit down and just write something to use it explicitly.

What enforced my appreciation for separation of concerns was software instability. How would she react if Word crashed randomly every 30 minutes (nothing unusual in 95-era). I couldn't stand formatting/layout bugs wasting the time to type. So I naturally delayed formatting until my whole text was in and save safely. Only then I would create a copy with added styles.

Wait until you get the people using spreadsheets as word processors.

I knew someone who used the spreadsheet of Microsoft Works (incompatible with Word or Excel) for almost all work - fax cover sheets; letters to clients; posters and notes.

Try working in Japan! :-) [1]

Fortunately, I haven't encountered any users of Microsoft Works, but use of Excel outside actual spreadsheet work seems to be so popular in Japan.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689411

As I discovered over various conversations with people, Excel support for Japanese blows away standard "plaintext" formats. There are a few standards for japanese encoding, which makes CSVs tricky (there's no standard way of specifying a codepage), but XLS and other formats explicitly state what encoding they use.

Yes, if the spreadsheet is actually spreadsheet, that's one thing. (And perhaps that works better than CSVs...)

What being circulated around is those spreadsheets with 1x1 grids used to create a document. No document structures; even TOC would be handwritten instead of auto generated from the heading.

It makes a certain kind of sense. It's sort of like working on flexible graph paper. It's the same kind of logic that lead to table-based layouts in HTML.

Hmmm... my experience differs: management/business types will use Excel to organize columnar data. They'd rather use Word for everything, but almost nobody thinks that Word's tables and formatting of text in tables, is sane, or even looks good. So: Word for text, almost always with no styles applied, and Excel for everything else. You want to give someone a subset of your columnar data? Take a screenshot and send a picture.

This does my head in at word. I write the database that the place runs on and the solution to anything to interact with the database is "another Excel to...". They don't seem to appreciate what a backward way of doing thing s this is, when you could have a proper web form, with half of the data filled automatically and proper data validation and error messages.

Because if you're not into tools, having one tool that works okay for everything is better than having several, each of which works very well for some specific thing.

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