The New Word Processor Wars: A Fresh Crop of Productivity Apps Are Trying To Reinvent Our Workday (geekwire.com) 193
Nearly 30 years after Microsoft Office came on the scene, it's in the DNA of just about every productivity app. Even if you use Google's G Suite or Apple's iWork, you're still following the Microsoft model. But that way of thinking about work has gotten a little dusty, and new apps offering a different approach to getting things done are popping up by the day. GeekWire:
There's a new war on over the way we work, and the old "office suite" is being reinvented around rapid-fire discussion threads, quick sharing and light, simple interfaces where all the work happens inside a single window. In recent years, the buzzwords in tech have been "AI" and "mobile." Today, you can add "collaboration" to that list -- these days, everybody wants to build Slack-like communication into their apps.
For notes and docs, there's Quip, Notejoy, Slite, Zenkit, Notion and Agenda. For spreadsheets, there's Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet, as well as Airtable, Coda and, although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello. The list goes on seemingly ad infinitum, largely thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud. "Work has totally changed," said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, the online storage company that is building its strategy around unifying data and messaging from a dizzying mix of cloud apps. "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
For notes and docs, there's Quip, Notejoy, Slite, Zenkit, Notion and Agenda. For spreadsheets, there's Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet, as well as Airtable, Coda and, although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello. The list goes on seemingly ad infinitum, largely thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud. "Work has totally changed," said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, the online storage company that is building its strategy around unifying data and messaging from a dizzying mix of cloud apps. "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
Never heard of 'em (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never heard of any of these apps. Do they do anything that currently existing apps don't? Or is this a slashvertisement?
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Re:Never heard of 'em (Score:5, Informative)
Yes! They integrate messaging so you have to use whatever messaging system + interface they think you should! And they're in the cloud so they can spy on you! But you can do everything in one window, just like the good old days of single-tasking workstations! Retro style!
Re:Never heard of 'em (Score:5, Informative)
Ugh...."messaging"...I want LESS messaging so I can actually get work done, without an endless breaking of my concentration.
Collaborate belongs mostly in short meetings, only when it actually serves a purpose.
I shut off IM most of the time, so I can actually get work done without constant interruptions.
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Not to mention that I don't want Yet Another Messaging Program that can't talk to all the other messaging programs that I "have" to run to connect with people.
Re:Never heard of 'em (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, I've come to find out that pretty much everyone has email.
I converse almost exclusively that way.
It has a better CYA paper trail, is more searchable going back years, etc....than for any IM I've had to try to use.
It is more asynchronous too to me, than IM, so, it doesn't interrupt me and I can look while on break.
And email works with email...so, not having to worry about which IM app works with which.
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It has a better CYA paper trail, is more searchable going back years, etc
That's just great.
It's because of people like you that I've had to set up my own email server in my bathroom closet.
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But Waffle Iron's Emails!!!
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Yeah, and many people hate e-mails. :(
Re:Never heard of 'em (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't understand. A modern economy is composed of a few percent of people who actually do the work, and the rest who "organize," "supervise," "plan," "administer," or similar. You may be part of the former, but if the majority concentrates too hard they might figure out that their purpose is to add to the N in the phrase "I have N people under me."
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Beware of dirty telephones.
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Talk about getting everyone on the same Page...geeze...
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I've never heard of any of these apps....
No one has heard of them, yet, oddly (or predictably) there have been Emacs modes to emulate them since the late 80s.
Re:Never heard of 'em (Score:4, Insightful)
Forget 1992. The first version of Lotus 123 was released in 1983.
It'd be interested to see a comparison of time for moderately skilled operators to do a set of routine tasks on the current version of Office vs these new productivity apps vs Lotus 123+Word Perfect+Eudora+Power Point running on MSDOS6 vs emacs. Wouldn't surprise me at all that the "modern productivity apps" came in a distant fourth.
That's kind of a funny statement... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive
That would be great, except that it takes an infinite amount of time to evaluate an unlimited number of productivity apps. :-)
Re:That's kind of a funny statement... (Score:5, Funny)
I know! I'll write a productivity app to evaluate productivity apps to determine their level of productivity. https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
Yo Dawg (Score:3)
I'd like to help but I can't. I tried adding "write a ToDo app" to my ToDo list but I can't because I don't have an app for it.
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But what about the ToDo app to make the list of apps to test? You'll need to write one of those, too!
https://xkcd.com/1906/ [xkcd.com]
If only Office had improved any since 97 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
For Fill -> Down it was easy - Ctrl-R. But no standard shortcut has ever existed for Fill -> Right. And playing hide-and-seek with it doesn't make it better either.
Re:If only you'd spend your time productively... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are you sticking to their software? There are so many others around.
There's no real replacement for Excel.
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I'll admit I don't use spreadsheets for much fancy work. So educate me. What vital functions does Excel do that LibreOffice Calc (or Gnumeric) doesn't?
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I'll admit I don't use spreadsheets for much fancy work. So educate me. What vital functions does Excel do that LibreOffice Calc (or Gnumeric) doesn't?
In my case, I can use LibreOffice for >90% of my spreadsheet work. The missing function though is that it does not always reliably open or export MS Office formats. Being as my colleagues use MS Office, I absolutely positively have to be able to handle their files and deliver files to them that open correctly for them on the first try without them having to think about it at all. Importing from another format is not acceptable for them unfortunately and it's a hopeless endeavor to try to get them awa
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The biggest piece missing from LibreOffice Calc is a visualBasic interpreter. It pains me to say it, but a lot of people want it, and it's necessary for interoperability.
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I actually took a crack at developing such a beast back in the day. But it was both too early and too late. APL for microcomputers came along too late to be available, and by the time it did, there was no room for such a product except as free software for the nerd market segment.
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I actually took a crack at developing such a beast back in the day. But it was both too early and too late
How was it as an actual (or potential) product? Do you have any insight as to what might work and what doesn't? (not worrying about market acceptance, that is)
Re:If only you'd spend your time productively... (Score:5, Insightful)
Excel lets you do far more dangerous macro programming that the others don't support. That's awesome for people who want to think that they're being more productive burying business logic in fragile, hidden macros than if they were to actually code it up correctly.
Pretty much what everyone "has" to have Excel for are things that could be done better, faster, and more robustly in something like Python or R with proper comments and a CVS. And which could thus be properly backed up.
Excel provides tools to half-ass this analysis work, and if you're a spreadsheet warrior to begin with, it's hard to resist that lure. A bit of googling later, and you've now got a nice cut-and-paste macro to do something. However, lacking any real exposure to proper programming, there's going to be no comments, no CVS, and the code that does this is hidden in a spreadsheet in such a way that a casual user may not even know it's there.
Let this nasty habit pick up steam, and a few years later you end up with someone dependent on fragile, unbacked-up Excel macros, and it all goes to shit when they leave or the spreadsheet gets corrupted. Or another version of Excel comes out. Or someone accidentally deletes the macro, or changes the structure of the spreadsheet.
Re:If only you'd spend your time productively... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok its very valid and I have personally had that happen multiple times, but your solution of "program in python or R" is laughable. Do you honestly think most offices have programmers on staff? Are you asking office workers to learn a programming language, what, in their spare time?
People use excel and VB macros because its easy to learn, its available in literally every office in the land, and there are many online resources available. And if you can write python code that needs no maintenance for 15 years i applaud you. I am not sure a "real" programming language would help the regular office worker at all. All code needs to be maintained, or its the exact same trap. And you think they will put their code in version control? Repeat after me, office workers are NOT programmers! They would have the exact same sloppy habits and zero documentation no matter what language they are using.
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Excel lets you do far more dangerous macro programming that the others don't support. That's awesome for people who want to think that they're being more productive burying business logic in fragile, hidden macros than if they were to actually code it up correctly.
Pretty much what everyone "has" to have Excel for are things that could be done better, faster, and more robustly in something like Python or R with proper comments and a CVS. And which could thus be properly backed up.
Excel provides tools to half-ass this analysis work, and if you're a spreadsheet warrior to begin with, it's hard to resist that lure. A bit of googling later, and you've now got a nice cut-and-paste macro to do something. However, lacking any real exposure to proper programming, there's going to be no comments, no CVS, and the code that does this is hidden in a spreadsheet in such a way that a casual user may not even know it's there.
Let this nasty habit pick up steam, and a few years later you end up with someone dependent on fragile, unbacked-up Excel macros, and it all goes to shit when they leave or the spreadsheet gets corrupted. Or another version of Excel comes out. Or someone accidentally deletes the macro, or changes the structure of the spreadsheet.
Good lord! You need to work on your sensitivity training. Some of us have PTSD from using CVS. Please at least switch to SVN so that we don’t all end up crying ourselves to sleep tonight. Not that CVS was terrible, but there were so many simple ways that an incompetent person could mess it up. So if you want to be more generic then say Version Control Software or VCS rather than CVS. It could save a life.
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Noted. I'll try to move to use VCS.
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I think I had that client, and losing them saved your company.
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I once had a problem where one version of Excel couldn't open a spreadsheet that a different version of Excel wrote out. I had to open the spreadsheet in OpenOffice, save it as Excel 95/97, then open that copy in Excel. So if you want interoperability between Windows and Windows, sometimes the best choice is Linux.
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Not a devotee of "The customer is always right" I take it?
Regrettably 'The Customer' frequently needs saving from themselves. Especially when it comes to choice of software.
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Dollars to donuts the file would've opened Just Fine if exported Just Right and the customer Just Was That Much Less Of An Idiot and actually somewhat qualified to use software. I don't think I'd even want customers who're that prickly. Cool down already.
You're absolutely right that the customer probably could have been coached through how to open the file, but it's worth noting that they probably wouldn't want to be coached on how to do that. The customer could well resent doing that, or view the shop that sent it in a non-MS format as being some sort of "fringe" group or "fly-by-night" operation.
These file formats aren't ment for interchange, and in fact even microsoft often enough isn't compatible with itself.
It is certainly true that MS file formats have been known to eat shit in transfer, or to indeed just not be compatible between what should be very close versio
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If you want to break something, you're going to need more than macros. You're going to need to write some DerpBASIC or whatever they call it these days.
And even then it might still work unless you were careful to find a feature so awful nobody is willing to copy it.
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These comments are proof of a person who isn't any good at using spreadsheets.
Using weird niche features that save 2 out of 200 keystrokes on an operation you do once a year isn't anything advanced.
The advanced part is actually going to be in how you organize your data, not in what application features you use; but that said, Calc has all the fancy math. The feature differences are things that have nothing to do with that.
Usually the people who say this sort of thing are beginners who were following a tutor
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Indeed, nothing else pisses off Data Scientists quite as much as Excel. Without Excel how else would people mix up data and logic in an incomprehensible mess and then expect them to magically transform it into a production ready system.
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There's no real replacement for Excel.
I think the main point damn_registrars was making is that Excel 2019 is, for most intents and purposes, just Excel 97 with a bunch of the interface bits moved around. And the only thing I remember Excel 97 offering which the earlier version did not was being able to accommodate 64K rows in one spreadsheet.
Heck, I remember a few years ago I fired up an old Apple II or some such and launched Multiplan... that app, from 1982, already seemed to do almost everything an Excel user typically needs.
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I don't understand where people get this. It's great as simple spreadsheet as well as many other software and then it falls apart when people try to use it as anything else. I used to spend so much time trying to fix errors in peoples spreadsheets where they thought that their budgets worked but when entering the numbers in a true accounting system the numbers didn't work. Seldom were they balanced.
Then you have the issue of interoperability. It doesn't play well with other software. There is no standard.
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I don't understand where people get this. It's great as simple spreadsheet as well as many other software and then it falls apart when people try to use it as anything else. I used to spend so much time trying to fix errors in peoples spreadsheets where they thought that their budgets worked but when entering the numbers in a true accounting system the numbers didn't work. Seldom were they balanced.
ok, so what spreadsheet program currently available is a replacement that doesn't have that problem?
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As long as spreadsheets use floats, they're not going to produce the same results as accounting software.
People think spreadsheets are good for that stuff, so they must be vital to any office, but they're really only good for back-of-the-envelope type of stuff, and making charts for presentations.
The actual work using numbers should really be done using real numbers. Floats are great for graphics, and often acceptable for statistics, but they're just not realistic for money.
In my experience, most of the spr
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I will say this about Excel. It can do a crazy amount of stuff. It, by itself, can do almost all the stuff a SMB needs when it comes to finance, and it can be added on with macros and add-ons. Excel may not be as edgy as whatever people to try to replace it with at crazy prices, but it has stood the test of time.
There are programs which can do most of what Excel can, like Libre Office's Calc, or Apple's Numbers, but Excel tends to be the standard when it comes to this stuff.
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I just don't bother installing a new version. I've got Office 2003 on three of my computers. Does the job as well or better. No ribbon interface, and no missing features that I need.
Our IT told me that they were unhappy security-wise, but some years back I gave our security guy data as to what exploits there were in the wild with what prevalence, and I convinced him that the data supported my contention that because there are fewer attacks against old Office versions, one is more exposed running new version
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Brother, I still miss my old version of Nota Bene. I knew all the shortcuts by heart, and it did footnotes and endnotes like a champ.
Now, my word processor is LaTex and I have a literal onion hanging from my belt.
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How far we have fallen. In a sight full of hard core Unix users, you seem to be the only one using LaTex how far have we fallen.
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It's funny, because I was just recently marveling that all the interesting tools support LaTex these days, without there ever having been a fad-adopter period. Just slow steady adoption in the tool backends.
Lots of stuff uses it. If you use some gui app that has an "export to foo" option, it might be using it! But you won't know unless you're writing some sort of extension, because nobody cares.
It holds the same position that Postscript once held! Except that Postscript got noticed more for it in that earli
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Emacs/make/LaTeX is my goto toolset for creating documents that are supposed to last (i.e., technical documentation for systems, software, and procedures, etc.) and LibreOffice for crap that I have to share with others (via ".doc" format). I tried--really, really tried--to do large bits of documentation using Word back when using master documents was supposed to be the way to deal with large documents but after a week of wasted time I said
WordPerfect Function Keys (Score:3)
It sounds like you want to have stable function key access for all the features, which was one of the awesome features of WordPerfect. I remember the templates that everyone taped above their function keys. I even had a keyboard with a built-in template holder that included templates for WordPerfect and several other popular programs of the day.
The problem now is that everything is mouse based. The majority of users never learn keyboard shortcuts, so the shortcuts aren't so short.
Re:WordPerfect Function Keys (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds like you want to have stable function key access for all the features, which was one of the awesome features of WordPerfect.
And one of the others was "Reveal Codes". It made child's play of figuring out what unprintable dreck was screwing up your document.
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Alt-F4 for the win!
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Reveal Codes was necessary because WordPerfect was really dumb about placing those codes.
In any nontrivial document you'd end up with incorrectly nested codes, start codes whose end code had been deleted, multiple identical (or worse, different) codes applied to the same bit of text etc. You could spend hours cleaning up the mess WP made.
Then Word came along, and all these problems went away because Word had far better handling of code placement. The result was that you didn't need Reveal Codes any more: al
Re:If only Office had improved any since 97 ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution to this is simple. Let the user select the layout. If you want to add a snazzy new Ribbon interface, knock yourself out. But there should be a simple menu option which lets you easily and immediately select "Layout - Office 97 classic, Office 2003 (bubbly), Office 2007 (with ribbons), Office 2013 (with rearranged buttons), Office 2016 (I don't know what's new because I haven't yet found the buttons I lost track of in 2013), custom." Then each user can easily and immediately select the UI layout that works best for them. But it seems like UI designers' egos can't stand the idea of people not using the snazzy new interface they designed. So they force everyone to use the new interface with no way to revert to the old one.
And it's not just Microsoft. Google has been vacillating between allowing or blocking Dark Mode in its Android apps (it's currently blocked). This isn't even a user preference thing. OLED displays use more power when displaying white, which seems to be the predominant theme with Google's apps. So switching to Dark Mode can add several hours of battery life. It's a functional change which objectively impacts the usability of many devices. But some Google designer with a stick up his/her ass can't stand the thought of people using the apps in a way that looks different from the way they designed it to look so keeps getting Dark Mode blocked.
Clue to designers: Your design is not successful when you force people to use it. Your design is successful when you give people a choice and they willingly choose your design.
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This problem extends to Windows as well.
Don't get me started on that shit-show. I need to bring an air sickness bag with any time I have to deal with an install of Server 12 or Server 16 for the first time - who the fuck thought those default layouts were useful or sane? The MS engineers that signed off on those should be beaten, starved, gorged, starved, beaten, hanged, quartered, duct-taped back together, drawn again, and then burned at the stake for good measure. I'm pretty sure the default layout violates some part of the Geneva Conventio
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I had a server that needed Office 97. This server has been upgraded time and time again, running Office in 2017 I was amazed on how fast that loaded I clicked on the icon and the app was running awaiting my input.
However I had this server so protected and locked down because of that. Because Office 97 is a security nightmare. In essence it came out before people knew how to take advantage of buffer overflows, and macros were enabled by default. Over time a good portion of Office is just security features,
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I haven't installed a modern Excel in forever. The last one I have is 2003. The height of MS Office.
The Ribbon-crap is pushing me away from it even more so. Fuck that worthless retard-UI. I don't care about tablet babbies, I want to Get Things Done.
The funniest thing is Microsofts OWN research pointed this out and they TOTALLY ignored it! Toolbars and context menus are vastly superior to Ribbon with ease and sheer functionality contained in them.
Ribbon was developed for one group of people and one g
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And by the way, the ribbons still really, really suck.
Yes. Yes they do.
I cannot comment on the current state of Multiplan, err, Excel (yes, I remember when Microsoft rebranded Multiplan) since I abandoned when the ribbon was pushed on us and have only ever used LibreOffice since (unless I am doing Pandas in a notebook).
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Yeah the "ribbon bar only UI" is shit. i.e. Resizing the window hides/shows buttons. At least with the main menu bar all options are always visible so can learn where menu entries are.
Office on OSX / macOS is nice in that you get BOTH a menu AND ribbon bar so YOU get to pick what works for you. It's too bad MS doesn't have a clue about good UI design.
I too noticed there is less emphasis on hotkeys / shortcuts now too. Thank God AutoHotKey exists so can automate some of this crap.
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Maybe they realize power users are stuck with the product regardless and are focusing on luring and retaining the next generation of users. You may complain about Excel changing things around, but it probably pales in comparison to switching to a competing product altogether, if in fact a suitable replacement even exists.
I agree about menu jumbling being annoying. Some of the changes in Office products are welcome though. The format painter is nice. The style selector is also great. With the style classes a
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One of the features I really like with newer Excel versions (compared to 2003) is improved filter options. As well in Word I like built in PDF export with the table of contents and links.
There was a major step change with 2007 and the introduction of the Ribbon, but after that I thought it was fairly stable afterwards as far as location of functions. On the positive they added more customization of the interface. On the negative they lowered the number of colors to match current trends (leaving functions on
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Office 2010 was the peak of productive MS Office. Now much time is wasted navigating the horrible UI.
I use 2010 on the home machines (and Windows 10 with Classic Shell). At work I suffer with Office 365 (it's a pain in the ass all year 'round!).
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But then how do you find the time to get any work done?
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Oddly enough people who are good at the command line interfaces can be extremely efficient in getting their work done. However it also makes them very resistant to changes, a small update to the command line parameters could in essence put such people into a productivity stand still.
The GUI Office tools are less efficient for the expert then a command line expert. However small changes are easier to adapt to.
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The thing is, once you've done something with a CLI it's a small step to totally automating it.
Of course, sometimes you can't remember the command, forgot to put it in your usefulshit.txt file and when you need it again it's dropped out of your history.
So if anyone knows how to extract the ISBN using pdf2txt (or is it pdftotext - see what I mean) grep and sed, I'm all ears.
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That is great, there is already a good collection of some rather powerful text editors you can use.
For some other jobs a Word Processor is a better tool.
Moving Beyond MS Model (Score:3)
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R with the Shiny package will get you close to something like SPSS and Tableau.
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Is Excel + PowerPivot + Power BI very distant from what you are after?
Fad vs productivity (Score:2)
In the old days, people chose tools according to what they needed to do.
Now, the tool is designed by someone who studied user interfaces, instead of how users interface with the tools, so they feel no compulsion to make it work the way users normally work.
"rapid-fire discussion threads" tend to be unfocused explosions of verbosity, so that is a bad user interface to model.
Long Term compatibility (Score:2)
thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud
The flip-side to this is "easy come, easy go". When one starts storing their stuff in somebody else's space, it might go away if the provider closes shop. Even if you are able to download your data, you still need to find another app that can read it.
For all the grumbling about MS Office, they do a great job with backwards compatibility and offer "read-only" versions of their apps for free.
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Hell, what about short-term compatibility with the bazillions of existing MSO docs out there?
I'm currently evaluating MSO "competitors" in yet another attempt to lose that MS connection in my life, and so far it's not going well. I suspect I'll be stuck with MSO for yet awhile longer.
And please, no one try to convince me that LibreOffice is "just as good as MSO". (I've tried making that switch multiple times over the years, and it just doesn't work well enough to rely on it as my sole office suite.) If y
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To be fair, this isn't a recent problem. (The format lock in, not the "stored in the cloud and then the cloud shuts down.") I have stories I wrote when I was young, but since I wrote them in MultiMate for DOS, no modern word processor can translate them into something intelligible. I keep the files around just in case, but will likely never get those files back.
OpenDocument format... (Score:1)
Foo foo... (Score:2)
Maybe these collaborative things work well for some people, but I can tell you that for software development - even Agile - the lure of tools like these are dangerous. Because faster isn't always better. You can't sacrifice sound engineering principles and system design for speed.
Full disclosure: I have been working on a project for a year now that has been going on for 2.5 years... that was supposed to release in 6 months originally. The original team that built it has been fired, and we are left holdin
appFatigue (Score:2)
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I just don't care anymore. I've got appFatigue
If you think that's cool, just wait until you see the new features we're adding to appFatigue 2019, currently in CTP 1.4 !
Wait - say what? (Score:4, Funny)
"... although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello"
It appears that, by "very different take on the spreadsheet", the author means "not useable as a spreadsheet by any stretch of the imagination".
Has the author never actually used a spreadsheet?
Jupyter Notebook (Score:2)
The fact this doesn't get a mention is baffling.
Word and GDocs split the cream of the market (Score:2)
There is still absolutely nothing that comes close to MS Word when it comes to a WYSIWYG Word processor and as a Review tool for multi-version, multi-author (asynchronous editing, not collaborative, synchronous multi-author editing). And even though Word has been "dealing with it" with cloud features, Sharepoint/365 and whatnot, there is nothing that comes close to Google Docs for collaborative work. ...except maybe git combined with LaTeX. Although for purely synchronous authoring, especially working on ve
"Unlimited way to be productive" (Score:2)
> "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
Sp after having 30 years of (de facto) standardization, we're moving back to 5 billions ways to do anything, all of which are mutually incompatible with each other and all trying to get customer lock-in so that it's harder for people to switch away, and thus forcing everyone to either purchase multiple subscriptions for multiple tools or be stuck.
How many of these supp
Enough with the unproductive ADD crap! (Score:3)
I'm sorry, but the traditional word processor design hasn't "gotten dusty" at all. It's been a pretty established framework for decades because writers need an application that works that way!
This push to make everything "collaborative" with chat clients and ability for a whole group to add sidebar notes to everything creates a big distraction. A good document needs to be focused on by the person writing it. It can be reviewed after that, and marked up as needed with suggested corrections. But the editor doing the proofreading should ALSO be doing that by him/herself, while he/she can give it the undivided attention it deserves.
I remember when a lot of people considered it a "feature" when a word processor would take over the whole screen with almost nothing but the text being typed. Writers appreciated that lack of distraction or temptation to click around on menus to try out various features, rather than concentrating on the work at hand.
I find that even doing regular computer support or troubleshooting, the multiple IM client options just raise my stress levels and make things take twice as long to get completed. People keep barging in, asking for updates on where you're at with something, or for some information on why X or Y is down. I can't see how it would benefit anyone trying to write some technical documentation or anything else, having a whole group constantly interacting and suggesting things while you're trying to concentrate?
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Only 1 format is future proof (Score:3)
I try to use only future proof (25+ years) file formats : text (org-mode, Markdown, LaTeX,
This quote resume the way I treat MY data (don't remember where I read it) : I'm using apps against data, not housing my data in an app.
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Kudos for future-proofing your post by using a monospaced typeface. But points off for not limiting the text length to either 72 or 80 characters.
I like that quote about apps and data. That's going into my `quotes.txt' file.
Re: (Score:2)
Text files. I trying to use simple text files the more I can (my personal files are 95% text files). Then I export it to PDF, ODF, ... if required.
I try to use only future proof (25+ years) file formats : text (org-mode, Markdown, LaTeX, ...), PDF, PNG, ...
This quote resume the way I treat MY data (don't remember where I read it) : I'm using apps against data, not housing my data in an app.
And apparently you go out of your way to type your internet comments in monospace font as well.
For facilitation, not for data storage (Score:2)
In my experience some of this kind of tools may actually improve the productivity. However, the tools themselves tend to be relatively short-lived and/or have terrible data migration. Sometimes it may be that the data structure is too specific to the way the specific tool works. Much of the data stored within tend to get lost when switching to new tools
I believe that using them for day to day workflow *can* be useful as facilitators as long as any long-term useful information is stored elsewhere in common f
Now they have almost unlimited ways of ... (Score:2)
If by, "being productive" you mean spending more and more time trying to master all the different so-called "distraction^Wproductivity tools" that different teams--both internal to the organization and the external ones--have decided to use.
MS invented (Score:1)
They didn't. They copied lotus 123 and word-perfect. As they did later with Netscape. They always surfed existing waves....
Libreoffice (Score:2)
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Actually both .doc and .xls are obsolete formats and have been replaced by .docx and .xlsx a decade ago - these are xml based and compressed as well.
And yet... (Score:2)
None of them comes close to what me and my friends at work can do with orgmode on emacs.
Oodles of Apps are an Unnecessary Problem (Score:2)
As a software developer, I've long argued that the multitude of disjoined apps are a problem. I suggested that operating systems or desktop systems (like KDE and Gnome) provide a framework for services -- not applications -- so users can put together their own working environments, in whatever manners is most efficient for them.
When you open up a desktop like KDE or Gnome, not only do they work differently but the tools all have cryptic names that tell you little to nothing of what they are useful for. Ea
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. Pretty much this.