• Sheridan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    65·
    21 days ago

    I consider myself a Word power user. I’ve spent 1000s of hours in it and I know just about every obscure feature and quirk. I’ve designed professional corporate template suites in it.

    I hate it so much. It is so fucking archaic and janky. It has so many modal dialogs. There are features I need to get to regularly that are like 6 modal dialogs deep, and I have to close them all to see if the change I made was good; if not I have to go through them all over again.

    It has a sort of stylesheet, but it has built in styles that you can’t delete if you don’t need, and the inheritance hierarchy among them is a mess. Then there are “font themes” which are conceptually separate from the styles but can impact them.

    I could go on. All the Word alternatives aren’t much better because they imitate Word too closely in my opinion. I think the approach to word processors needs to be rethought at fundamental level.

    • balsoft@lemmy.ml
      21·
      21 days ago

      I haven’t seen any WYSIWYG document editors that are any good. Markdown/Org for simpler stuff, LATEX for more complicated stuff, or mix them together with pandoc.

      • Sheridan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        21 days ago

        I know that workflow style is good for like dissertations and academic journal articles, but the sort of templates I have to design and work in are more splashy and dramatic. The look and structure is more akin to what you see in artsy magazines and books—pages with dark background colors, decorative stock images, vector shapes, etc. Can Latex be used for that?

        • balsoft@lemmy.ml
          5·
          21 days ago

          Ah, it’s not the best for cases like that, especially if you need to make different layouts all the time. You can get it to do anything with enough packages and positioning hints, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore. If you just need a dozen of layouts and then fill them out with different content, it’s doable.

        • ranzispa@mander.xyz
          2·
          21 days ago

          I would not use latex for any document that should be a template for other people to fill in. Unless you’re a peer reviewed journal.

          I wouldn’t use latex for anything that requires precise positioning of images and elements. InDesign and similar are a much better option.

          I do like to use markdown for any document that does not fall into those categories. I like to use latex for any document I’m writing which I want someone else to style.

          Latex is very cool for styling, but in my experience most of the time you do not really need that amount of configurability and the added time to correctly make a styled document in latex is way more than what it would take you in word, even when you have to fight word to make it. That is unless you need equations, but then again: just write markdown with latex equations.

    • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml
      13·
      21 days ago

      Yeah, word processors are garbage.

      Oddly, Google Docs is the least junky one, probably because JS had a bunch of limitations at the time it was started, and Google had to limit the features.

      I’ve been pretty happy with Pandoc, some LaTeX, and scripts. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          21 days ago

          Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the “hide the menus” concept as hard as I’ve always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.

    • RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world
      4·
      21 days ago

      God the style presets in OnlyOffice are driving me insane. Sometimes they apply, and change the style accordingly, sometimes not. Sometimes they need a double click to apply all of the styling. They reset with any page formatting change. The list is comically absurdly long, and yeah, some aren’t deletable. What the fuck are T1 through T94? Why can’t I just create a few custom header and footer styles for my document? It’s just a piece of fiction. It doesn’t need 307 different header styles, and every possible variation of footnote, goddamn.

    • ranzispa@mander.xyz
      2·
      21 days ago

      When I have to work on docx I generally can do it with LibreOffice and I’m quite happy with that. Sometimes I can not, I had for example this pesky thing which wouldn’t let me edit parts of the document as it was locked, especially on tables. No amount of conversations across file formats fixes that for some reason.

      That is when I have to open up the office365 webpage. What a fucking piece of garbage. Most things you mention do not even exist in there. You can write a document and add comments, managing styles is already a bit too much for the yearly fee they charge you.

      I hope they make it possible again to install the office suite on Linux.

      And in no way I’m saying I like LibreOffice better than word, they’re both quite terrible; but at least one of them runs on my system.

    • binarytobis@lemmy.world
      5·
      21 days ago

      Somehow my boss at my last job added a page break that didn’t show up when I turned on show hidden characters. It took me about six hours to figure out how to remove the final blank page. Online help forums were useless because he did it in such an unusual way. Looking back, even I think that surely I must have been mistaken because it’s too absurd that it would be that hard to delete a page, but I vividly remember turning on the hidden characters and getting nowhere.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    21 days ago

    Trying to explain to my wife that millennials are the most technologically savvy generation in history, but she just keeps yelling back “give me the Netflix password, the TV won’t turn on”

  • chromeleon@lemmy.world
    5·
    21 days ago

    While we’re hating on Word, can someone tell me why MS Office products insist on opening documents in a 16:9 rectangle and also changing the previously last used Word doc I opened to 16:9 as well? Like, not only will it not let me open a new document in the window size I want, but it also insists on fucking me over on my other Word documents that I’ve set up the way I want.

    Every other application I use keeps the last window size I used. It’s crazy. Have I missed a setting?

  • Pofski@lemmy.world
    4·
    21 days ago

    I usually just put the cursor behind the last word on the previous page, hold shift and click just at the end of the white space. Then press delete. Usually works.

  • Redkey@programming.dev
    3·
    20 days ago

    People can hate on Microsoft all they want, but I use LibreOffice on a regular basis and it does the same thing, for exactly the same reason.

    Cheers to the person who linked to the “font - hide” solution. I didn’t know that one and the equivalent works LO as well.

  • kubica@fedia.io
    3·
    21 days ago

    My problem is usually how to NOT delete the blank page because I put it there on purpose, but any moment I delete something I end up going too far and having to add it again, but then try trim some of the extra trailing lines and there we go again.

      • kubica@fedia.io
        1·
        21 days ago

        That’s what I mean (Ctrl+Enter), but I keep deleting it accidentally. But come to think I could have misinterpreted the meme because I don’t remember what specifically ms word does in that case. I haven’t used it in a long time.

  • marcos@lemmy.world
    3·
    21 days ago

    That one is easy. Page breaks are just some hidden code you can delete.

    Go try extending a numbered list with paragraph breaks inside it.