Now. Why am I wrong for Libre
I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown.
The thing I really hate about modern word processors and everyone’s obsession with PDFs is that the vast majority of the time things will never be printed, but everything still focuses on paginated formats. Nobody seems to get this but you can literally send someone a .HTML file that they can just open in their browsers. Even when I tell developers about this they say dumb things like a single file will load slower. Buddy, it’s loading from the disk, it’s not querying shit, it is okay to make it a single HTML file.
But no, fuck you, just pages and PDFs.
The silver lining is that at least Google Docs (I don’t use other editors often) now has a “pageless” mode. But the amount of times I’ve run into weird things like accidentally backspacing the last character of something with special formatting only to undo it, add extra characters temporarily, then backspace in front of it… Fucking hell. Just let me write Markdown. Just let me write Markdown! JUST LET ME WRITE MARKDOWN!
Obsidian. Great notes app with a ton of features and is free. Open source too, I think, but could be wrong on that. I usually am. But it’s all in markdown baby! I use it for my dnd world and notes.
There is LaTex which I would recommend for any kind of longer document.
Yeah, sure, but Microsoft Word web app scrolls smoother than native LibreOffice Writer on my laptop (on Linux), and there are also other bits of LibreOffice that sucks and have sucked for years.
I think the main difference here is: You don’t have to pay for libre office.
Wanna know something fun about Office?
The keyboard shortcuts are localized.YES, REALLY.
If you press Ctrl+S when running in Portuguese, it doesn’t save, it underlines the word instead (Because the word for it is “Sublinhar”).
Whoever is responsible for this decision won’t die, when their time comes they’ll be swallowed alive by the earth and welcomed into the 10th circle of hell, created for them exclusively.
The 11th circle is reserved for he who decided to localize the Excel Formula Functions too.
The commands in Excel are localised too, and if you want to change languages you’d have to install some language pack. And I think that due to admin lockdown policies in Windows, if you have to work on a restricted company machine, you won’t even be able to do that because you don’t have permission to install stuff
I HATE this. Got absolutely shellshocked by this on a work computer recently.
Luckily, you can “just” change your locale! This is a process that took me a whole hour to figure out, required admin access as well as a system reboot. And it didn’t even work properly.
The same day I ran into a quirk regarding the filename field. Fun fact: Word pulls this directly from the OS. This almost makes sense, except if you want to decide whether or not the file ending is displayed (ie .word). Then you need to set this IN YOUR OS?! There is no other way to set this, and it is broken. When you finally figure this out and set it back to not display the file ending, word keeps doing it, seemingly forever. Yes also through reboots. This issue was fixed over 10 years ago, and then promptly reintroduced and never addressed again. Libreoffice just has another field, this took me all of 30 seconds to discover. But then you have to save in odf, because the word format is ass apparently.
Well, Ctrl+S is def what I would expect my programme to do for saving. But for Italics I want nothing else but Strg+Umschalt+K. English hegemony can get bent.
So the Japanese version would require
Ctrl+ほ?I sure am glad I just use English on all my devices despite it not being my native language.
Many such wacky cases in Windows. Like where you install your software (“Program Files”) is localized too.
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.
I haven’t used a localized version of Windows so I don’t know for sure, but sources I can find says it’s actually different in different languages: https://www.samlogic.net/articles/program-files-folder-different-languages.htm
I thought my respect for Word had troughed.
Microsoft has had a monopoly on office software since the 90s. They illegally leveraged this monopoly to try to destroy competition in other areas. Most infamously, they destroyed Netscape to try to kill competition in the early Internet space. That resulted in a trial for illegally abusing their monopoly which they lost. Then George W. Bush was elected president, and somehow Microsoft effectively got off with essentially no punishment. Admittedly though, part of that was that the judge in the case was so outraged at some of the stuff Microsoft pulled (submitting falsified evidence, having Bill Gates lie under oath repeatedly) that he talked about it in public when he shouldn’t, which opened a door for Microsoft to try to weasel out of the loss.
The “evil” in Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” was widely viewed as being Microsoft. Google was an Internet company in an age where Microsoft was on trial for using their power to make everything about the Internet shitty so that they could control it. In the early days of Google, people weren’t even allowed to use Microsoft software, including Windows, without a special dispensation from the higher-ups. Microsoft effectively avoided any kind of punishment for their abuse of their monopoly, but it distracted them and made them cautious, so they weren’t able to crush Google before it could get going. Before anybody chimes in about how Google is evil, first read up in what Microsoft did. Google might be a bit shady, but where Google got its monopoly by spending hundreds of billions to make its search engine the default, Microsoft used tactics to destroy potential competitors and drive them out of business.
If the US (and the world) had effective enforcement of the anti-monopoly laws, Word would actually have to compete on its own merits. But, because it’s a monopoly, Microsoft can just sit back and keep collecting rent.
Microsoft hurt Netscape, but it was AOL that killed it. At the height of the dotcom bubble, Wall street handed AOL more money than they knew what to do with so AOL bought Netscape. Of course they didn’t have any idea what to do with it (they still kept putting IE on the discs they mailed out to people even when they owned Netscape) and it eventually withered away and died.
The people that ran Netscape correctly predicted it would go this way, but it was a ridiculous amount of money AOL was offering. Luckily they made releasing the code as open source as part of the deal.
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.
Microsoft did lots of shady shit to leverage their quasi monopoly on PC operating systems. However Microsoft Office was actually better than the competition in many aspects. The main competition for Microsoft Office was IBM’s Smart Suite. Excel left industry leader Lotus 1-2-3 in the dust pretty quickly in the early 1990s. MS Word was also better than market leader WordPerfect. Then in the late 1990s Outlook became leading and is still unmatched by anything else. Softmaker Office is the only office suite that still exists from back then.
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.
There is currently* nothing Microsoft Office does that I can’t happily do in LibreOffice
The only thing I miss is Excel. Nothing even compares. I use other stuff now, but man my spreadsheets used to be beautiful. Lol
MS Word is significantly worse than WordPerfect. Reveal codes FTW.
Capitalism? Or nice things? Your decision.
You prefer feudalism?
Plenty of nice things in capitalism
In its gut, being digested, sure
lol “edit your expectations” got me :D
Want to automate your office document? Enjoy making your business dependent on a language
- that will be a dead end for your developer career
- where arrays can start at 0 or 1
- where checking for an array involves ignoring an error and resuming
- that is guaranteed to be broken a future patch
- that has to be given permission to run in a security center
Whoever stole my MS office, I’ll find you. You have my Word.
I hate you so much.
Have my upvote.
PowerPoints at you, enthusiastically.
You Excel at this
I cannot Access the words to describe this.
Excellent!
deleted by creator
I have made so many thousands of dollars in consulting fees because people don’t know about the “align object: over text” option. I would even show them, and they’d still call me back the next week offering money.
Everyone complaining here about not being able to have unique footers or moving images or ignoring spelling errors just doesn’t know what they’re doing. You’re literally the bad workman blaming the tool. I can do all of those things in Word.
If you prefer another tool, fine. But please stop shitting on things just because you don’t understand them.
And PDF was never meant to be edited. Its sole purpose is to give you a document file which comes out exactly the same on computer screens and printers everywhere. Compact, reliable, compatible. If you need to replace parts of a PDF document post publication, it should be prepared using the Forms tools that are readily available in all good PDF suites.
By the way: I paid 30 Euros for an Office 2019 lifetime license. If ever that should not receive further updates then I’m ready to fork over another 30.
I was working on my thesis a couple days ago using Word, and it permanently deleted a whole line of text when I pressed ctrl+Z to undo a mistake.
That happened with every line on the page until i copied everything to a different text editor and then copied it back to Word.
I respect your take but I will never respect Word.
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
“I love typing in ten thousand pounds of syntatic sugar”
– me, an idiot who used embedded images for formulas in a markdown file which gets converted into a PDF
“Totally way easier than LaTeX, I swear”
You may benefit from checking out Typst which gives all of the benefits (and some more) of LaTeX, but without all of the syntax garbage.
Actually learned about this recently too and it looks really cool, but haven’t had to use latex in a while so I’ll defnitley give it a shot next time I have to do document generation
I actually wrote most of it in Obsidian, just copied all of it to Word for final edits because I have to use my school’s docx template.
Definitely trying LaTeX if I end up getting another degree, only learned about it a few days ago. And I just now realized that I could’ve used git with Obsidian this whole time…
because I have to use my school’s docx template.
For a thesis. wtf.
My condolences. I’ve heard good things about LaTeX for scientific papers even though the UI seems a bit daunting.
The “UI” is a text editor.
lol imagine blaming paid users for ms shit workflow
Imaging people complain about how shit the software is and in response writing 4 paragraphs that amount to “skill issue, get gud.”
You’re holding it wrong
Yeah, it’s so weird seeing all the ones being proud of their tech illiteracy.
All because, right clicking.
Is too much for their small brains to handle.
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.
And PDF was never meant to be edited
Lol what kind of dumb shit is this to say? There are tons of pdf editors out there, its fucking 2025 and we have incredible technology. Your entire post comes across as a pathetic apologist for multil billion dollars companies.
The web was also never meant to be dynamic. And yet.
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.
Again, I can fully understand if you like other tools better. More power to ya, competition is healthy and all that. But the complaints I specifically addressed are simply unfounded.
I’m not a fanboy nor do I get paid to defend Microsoft. But I have worked with Microsoft Office for 30 years now, and I do get paid to train people how to use it.
99% of users just don’t have the fuckingest clue how anything works in Word. Most can’t even tell a line break from a paragraph break and people still use their PC like a typewriter to indent text…in 2025 🙄
Word is like any other word processor nowadays. Pretending it is something special is patently ridiculous.
I was around before Word ever existed and I was never impressed because it was never impressive. In fact, I have been continually disappointed by the changes they have made to promote vendor lock in.
I remember when their was a difference between the return key and the enter key.
Pretending it is especially unusable, you mean? Hard agree. Absolute cringe. In fact, that was my entire point.
Nowhere did I write a glowing recommendation of Word as the superior word processing software of today. In fact, I acknowledged several times that there are other valid options out there.
And I’m getting mighty tired of this bad faith argumentation style.
there
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?
That would be dope as hell, someone should do that
$150
Per year, by the way
massgrave.dev that’s all I’m gonna say.
I’d rather use a free alternative than run a script off a random website
Would you prefer their GitHub?
I also use libreoffice but these people are far from a random website.
It’s just the command that launches Microsoft’s own official activation mechanism. It’s hosted on GitHub, which Microsoft owns. Not technically legal, but also not some sketchy Internet crack.
I think you’d find more agreement stopping at “I’d rather use a free alternative”. I agree with your sentiment. Repacing proprietary tools built by rent-seekers with volunteer/community run projects whose developers hold user freedom and choice in high regard is categorically better for most people.
Corporate requirements, vendor lock-in, and the friction of momentum make that tough for some people though. I’d still ask they give the alternatives a shot, of course, but I can understand why some might still choose the ideologically inferior option.
For those people? Having options like the open source circumvention tools mentioned allows them to continue using what they’ve paid for (and ought to ostensibly own) without being forced to pay extortion money to do so.
I think you got voted down due to your out-of-hand dismissal of that well engineered alternative with an uninformed value judgement.
tl;dr: you’re correct on the first half but too hasty on the second half.
Want to work with .docx files written in English from someone who lives in a country whose main language isn’t English? Better enjoy all your English words being marked as mispelt because fuck you.
Or maybe it’s they were too stupid/lazy to Select All and set the text language to English? Even so, you can do that at any time as well.
The specific files are generated automatically through some process based on a template, so I think they’d need to fix it there. I don’t really deal with them myself, just remember seeing a coworker struggle with one.
Want to make the header or footer on this page unique? Eat a bag of dicks.
Want to add a letter to an item in a table without fucking up the formatting of every document ever created across known time and space? Guck you.
Spell checking for this comment coming to you from Microsoft
I use SwiftKey - so that’s legitimately true.
Y’know, you can turn off auto correction. It’s the first thing I do with any keyboard on any smartphone.
I’m a Microsoft user. I don’t want solutions - I want to bitch about stuff.
It’s still a damned shame that they killed Microsoft Works.
I actually miss Encarta. It was obviously killed by Google earth/maps but it was one of the only maps that allowed you to search for a river and it would highlight the entire thing from mouth to ocean , which google has never done. It was a nice feature that let you see just how big a given tributary system really was.
Is this a feature that could be implemented in one of the open source map projects?
WYSIWYG editors are often the worst thing to ever exist. (See: Dreamweaver) I don’t know how Word has managed to stay alive for so long.
I remember a blog post about about how WYSIWYG editors should be called “what you see doesn’t prepare you for the eldritch horrors that lurk below the surface” editors.
What exactly is the alternative?
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.
markdownwhat 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.
Go on?
There is absolutely no way that I am teaching Jan in accounting to use Latex.
Does Jan in accounting make a lot of documents beyond a simple text block?
Yes. She needs to add images, format text by highlighting and click an easy button, and insert an excel table.
That sounds like very much not her job. But hey, if this mythical Jan from accounting actually does need to do all that, the company should provide a template.
For precise, intricate layouts I’ll take InDesign or Quark XPress any day. That said, it’s been a while since I last used those.
What exactly is the alternative?
I’d bet the rent that the Microsoft critics prefer a command-line text editor.
Guess I’m no longer an MS critic, but just a hater now.
I use GUI text editors.
Just not the MS stuff.Yep can see it already. > Just use Vim
Was looking for this comment and was not disappointed:-)
Defending Word and conflating programming and a command line in a single sentence.
