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When you write your academic papers in Word
(aussie.zone)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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At this point I'm curious: WTF is Microsoft Word even good for? It's like the worst-in-class tool for all things word processing, page layout, typesetting, embedding other stuff into the document, and more. Why are people still torturing themselves with this garbage? Just because it's there? I mean, Wordpad is there too (though maybe not for much longer) but nobody uses that. It's also garbage but still...
It's the most reachable thing. Markdown feels like a toy for many (not me) and people outside of academia look at you kinkily if you suggest latex and bibtex.
Oh yeah. Markdown. While it does have a place, the limitations on top of my head as to why I wouldn't use it in bigger projects:
It's fine for when you know what output you produce, like for Lemmy or in a wiki or whatever. But once you want more control, you lack options or need to rely on non-"standard" (is there was one) solutions to somehow achieve it.
I think, as an easy, yet powerful solution, AsciiDoc is better-suited.
skill issue
word is fine if you know how to use it
none of its direct competitors have the same feature set, and a word processor that can give me compile time errors is not one i'm going to use with much enthusiasm
But most don't.
I had to rewrite the CV my job coach gave me from scratch. She's a professional and used line breaks for spacing and texts blocks for grouping. Because she didn't know about some key concepts (like frames or line height) you learn from web editing.
That's what happened after i saved her mess (written in MS Office .docx) once in Libre Office and loaded it again. To be fair, this was the document formats fault.
Nobody knows how to use Word. It's unlearnable.
But hell, it's good in pretending to work the way people think it works. All the way until it blows and destroys all the work.
i learned it
i am built different
Word is not horrible as a word processor. The issue is that people try to use it to do typesetting, reference management, and all kinds of non word processor shit. And Microsoft encourages this. If you understand what the tool does it’s really a decent tool.
But most don't. Which makes it a bad tool.
A screwdriver doesn't become a bad screwdirver just because someone is using it to drive nails. There is a lot to hate about Microsoft, but its basic Office tools are really quite good, when used in the manner in which they were designed. There really are no meaningful competitors for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Outlook as an email client is not great, but its strength is calendaring.
But if it looks like a hammer...
Office loks like an extended text editor but hides the xml aspect. No wonder most people use it as an extended text editor, doing formatting wrong.
Words problem is partly because they tried to make it into a swiss army knife, but it just ended up being one of those goofy "multi-tool pens", that don't do anything good.
Okay, maybe thats an bit of an exaggeration, Word is amazing for text and pretty much any text related formatting you can think of*, but the second you want to add an image, it becomes a nightmare.
*from a non-technical person/ease of the GUI perspective. I know LaTek is much better getting your end goal efficiently, but Word can still get you there...eventually.
It's the best in convincing people they know how to use it.
What do you use?
https://github.com/typst/typst
Thanks!
People use what they know. Are there better (free) alternatives?
Yes. LibreOffice is better in every way.
And don't reply with "but it has problems opening Word files". That's cause the Word format doesn't follow any standards. Nothing but Word can correctly open Word files (and even that only works well if they were made with the same version of Word).
Hmm, I'll check it out, but my field passes around Word files quite often. Might be a tough sale if the user can't find a workaround. Still, can't be mad at free software.
It is the easiest way to let other people participate via comments and annotated changes.
Have you ever used Google Docs for that? Vastly superior. You don't even have to send your updated version to anyone... They can see it and work on it with you in real time.
SharePoint promised to make this same functionality work but never got it right. Same for the web version of office. They're horrible compared to Google Docs and there's supposedly even better collab word processing tools.
Google Docs does not integrate in the typical European (or German) company and can not be deployed on premise.
If you can not control the update path (besides other obv. shortcomings) of the product it is already in a bad light when considering within an enterprise environment.
Since the AI rush I now encounter American software named alongside in requirements like:
"isn't an american, russian or chinese product". These requirements are stated by lawyers and product owners explicitly beforehand.