PowerPoints at you, enthusiastically.

Wait till you hear about localized Visual Basic

It's only half localized though, the actual path is still called program files. It just displays the localized name. Which is somehow even worse.

Nah Ctrl+F is "Finden". Bold ("Fett") ist Ctrl+Shift+F

download?

I'd rather use a free alternative than run a script off a random website

Using word for a thesis sounds like a nightmare I would never dare to do

For big projects like that, stuff like LaTeX is so much better in my experience, you could even set up version control for it with, say, git, or similar

You know ctrl+Y is 're-do' though right? Just brings it right back.

My condolences. I've heard good things about LaTeX for scientific papers even though the UI seems a bit daunting.

Imaging people complain about how shit the software is and in response writing 4 paragraphs that amount to "skill issue, get gud."

I don't think it's unreasonable or noobish to expect intuitive functions like drag and drop to work properly.

Word is fucking terrible because the workflow is terrible.

It's not the end users fault when you consider that literally any alternative works properly.

No, for another license that will last me another seven years or however long their service period is. I think I actually have an LTSC license so it might be longer.

The web was also never meant to be dynamic. And yet.

its fucking 2025 and we have incredible technology

Yes, and we can modify a VW beetle to turn it into a space ship but why would we?

It was a apologist statement without a doubt. It was the equivalent of nuh uh.

Word is garbage for what people pay for it. Still charging for the same old software decades later only everything has been rearranged for your convenience err I mean vendor lock in.

I use SwiftKey - so that's legitimately true.

No, your revisionist history is wrong. By the time AOL acquired it, Microsoft's damage had already been done. Its stock price had fallen 50% from its peak value.

The reason AOL didn't know what to do with Netscape is that it was no longer a viable business due to the interference from Microsoft. Up until Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer for free as part of the OS, the plan for Netscape was to charge for the browser. That was perfectly normal. People charged for every piece of software up until then. But, when they had to compete with Microsoft's price of free, they had no real business model anymore.

That's the whole reason that Microsoft was charged with violating antitrust law. They leveraged their operating system monopoly to enter a new business and destroy their main competitor. Even with their falsifying evidence and Bill Gates lying on the stand, it was an open and shut case.

WordPerfect was the leading word processing program under DOS. When Windows was released Microsoft screwed with them by not giving them full access to all the Windows APIs (something Microsoft was notorious for). Surprise, surprise, at the same time Microsoft was not giving WordPerfect the API info they needed, they were releasing their own competitive word processor in Word.

But, once WordPerfect got access to the APIs, they produced a word processor that was superior to Word. The only reason that Word took off is that Microsoft aggressively bundled it with everything.

As for Outlook, I've never met anybody who actually likes it. The only thing it has going for it is that it's available by default and it's the only thing compatible with emails from other Outlook users. There's a reason its nickname is "outhouse". Outlook did the same things that Microsoft did with HTML and HTTP: embrace, extend, extinguish. They took de-facto and de-jure email standards and modified them so that only other Outlook users could use the email properly. They made sure that if you tried to use anything other than Outlook with Microsoft Exchange, that it wouldn't quite work right.

With Microsoft it's always about taking their monopoly in one area and squeezing another area, driving their competitors away. It's what they're now doing with developer tools, like github and visual studio code.

MS Word is significantly worse than WordPerfect. Reveal codes FTW.

There is currently* nothing Microsoft Office does that I can't happily do in LibreOffice

Outlook is unmatched by anything else? What do you mean? Any email client you take is as good in my experience.

Plenty of nice things in capitalism

You prefer feudalism?

Even easier, for a markdown (text) file, you could just tell someone the line to go to.

If people used markdown instead, then everyone would have nice text editors installed which would make this easy.

Not to mention how much faster searching through a text file is compared to a word doc (eg, you could ctrl+f the headings name and have a result instantly).

If stuff like this was adopted, integrations could be very nice (with easier solutions than saying "go to x page and look for x header", I could even imagine links being a thing assuming this feature is developed).

Nahhhh, you gotta think outside the box. You can tell people section 3, subsection 2, etc. even without pages. I'm addition, check this out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_element#Anchor Click that. See the little but at the end? #Anchor? We can already use URI fragments to link to specific sections.

"But JackbyDev, I'm not linking to a specific section of something in an outline, I need to link to a specific part of long form content, like a novel. I can only do that with pages."

That's a good point, but modern browsers have a way to deal with that too. This is where text fragments help: they allow the link author to have full control over what text to link to, without requiring any special markup in the target document. You can use #:~:text= to link to specific blocks of text.

Edit: Lemmy is reformatting that for some reason and makes it not work. Try copying and pasting the below for a working example.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#%3A%7E%3Atext=This+is+where+text+fragments+help%3A+they+allow+the+link+author+to+have+full+control+over+what+text+to+link+to%2C+without+requiring+any+special+markup+in+the+target+document.

Edit 2: Apparently Lemmy reformats links in preformat snips. Amazing. 🫩 Maybe slap this into the URL bar en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#:~:text=This%20is%20where%20text%20fragments%20help%3A%20they%20allow%20the%20link%20author%20to%20have%20full%20control%20over%20what%20text%20to%20link%20to%2C%20without%20requiring%20any%20special%20markup%20in%20the%20target%20document. after pasting https://developer.mozilla.org/ Nothing more frustrating that trying to show people a very cool and useful feature of browsers only for a different tool to just ruin it.

Edit 3: Fuck me for suggesting something cool and interesting, I guess.

Unless they've open-sourced it in the last year or so, Obsidian isn't open source. That being said, it does have big vibes of open source. Like, there's more to open source than simply the source code being available — it's also about the general ethos of openness. When I was using Obsidian, I felt reassured that my notes were my own, and they would still function mostly the same if Obsidian went under. It's a big part of why I switched to it from Notion

I just wish that obsidian would let me self host a server with their software.

Obsidian is nearly perfect. My biggest gripe is the link format it uses, even when using Markdown style, doesn't use the full relative path to files, just the name of the file. So you can't click them in say, VS Codium and have them work.

My perfect tool would be something like Obsidian but uses the GitHub Pages approach while not being tied to GitHub. (The GitHub Pages gem fails in a few ways if the repository doesn't have a GitHub remote.)

Love obsidian.

Alternatively, if the business world can already handle PDF, then they can surely handle markdown. They're already easy to open, and just like a PDF is easy (???) to edit as long as you have the right software, Markdown's easy to get predictable printing out of even with the right* software. I think the PDFs are probably slightly easier for forms, but that's about it. Everything else is just a matter of familiarity, and imo, it's easier to get familiar with Markdown.

*If this somehow doesn't work out, they could surely make do with a standard print preview.

You find PDFs easy to edit? Also, there's no reason why you can't make a single HTML file the way you make a single PDF file. It's not done in the web for organization and optimization reasons, but it's still possible.

Also, what do you mean about resizable? Open a web browser, adjust the width. Look at the text. Watch as it moves. Do that with a PDF, absolutely not the same. PDFs have a static size.

Form filling with HTML is easy too. https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp

If LaTeX is being used to produce paginated output for people to view that will exclusively never be printing it then I have a lot of the same gripes. Though any sort of non-WYSIWYG format is more enjoyable in my mind.

I've used Inkscape for a lot of vector art. Using it to edit a PDF seems... overkill, but it's probably less likely to screw things up. I'll give that a shot next time, thanks!

Australian spelling is colour.

If it helps, I thought it was funny. Silly-ass British (Australians are just desert British) spellings. You'd think the group that seems to cut half the letters out of the pronunciation of any given place name wouldn't also be the group adding fucktons of unnecessary letters to words since they won't say them anyways.

Then again, French exists.

There's a lot of subjective differences between Word and Writer.

Image placement is not one of them. Writer gives you the anchor and asks exactly where you would like it put.

Excel is an easy to use IDE to run a business.

markdown

what lemmy uses

see the green little button under the comment? if you click it, it shows you the code that is used to generate the graphical appearance, including formatting and image embeddings.

Literally any typesetting software.

WYSIWYM in some form should be promising.

I could see that concept plus some variant of LaTeX or typst or markdown, plus version control a la git being a serious killer app.

What exactly is the alternative?

I'd bet the rent that the Microsoft critics prefer a command-line text editor.

Yeah but it's pretty limited and personally I could never get it to work, it couldn't handle larger files. Had to pirate some other program to do anything serious.

Have you ever tried to look under the hood and interact with a pdf programmatically? I assure you it only gets worse.

A while ago I tried to write a small script to scrape data out of some account statements that my idiot bank only made available in pdf format. As far as I could tell, the file was just a list of tiny chunks of text along with sets of x/y coordinates specifying where each one should be placed on the page. Answering seemingly simple questions like "are these two words on the same line?" Involved comparing raw y-coordinates because the file had no concept of a "line of text", and even spaces between words were often simulated by bumping the x-coordinate over by a few pixels instead of using an actual space character.

I suspect those files were generated by a particularly bad piece of software, and a more competent one could probably do much better, but knowing that its even possible to create a file that cursed is still infuriating to me.

At least you can play doom in a pdf.

https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf

I hate how it deals with lines in chart grids where it looks like different lines are bolded depending on your zoom level

Also, the entire web stack, the entire history of email, Javascript - the horrors of the universe just happen

Gimp is really bad with exporting large PDFs. Like 60 pages and it crashed my 16gb ram laptop because it ran out of memory after like spending at least an hour.

Yeah, I've been having trouble with that, because its is possessive. I never claimed to actually know what I'm doing, just that I am. Fortunately this time, I probably can't injur myself horrifically.

And I'm learning now that their's is incorrect.

Give him a break, typing with libreoffice. He didn't know

Is this a feature that could be implemented in one of the open source map projects?

I wouldn't mind some book writing features, like the ability to jump to chapters, and maybe text previews of each. I don't think Office does this either, but it would be nice. Also...why does it use an English dictionary that's missing like 30% of the language?

Collaborative editing is the main thing that puts it above Libre in a professional setting.

I use Libre at home, but at work MS Office wins 😕

Never used Word, eh?

To play devils advocate, why does LibreOffice get the pass that it needs customization for you to like it, but office doesn't get the same pass. I would love if we all used open software and standards, but if I ever have to give office documents to Linda in accounting, anything other than a Word or Excel document won't compute.