Submitted by “With the release of StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org, and the rumors about MS Office 12, office suites are making their rounds in the press again. Microsoft’s office suite is certainly the most popular on Windows, but there are competing suites from Corel and IBM. On GNU/Linux we have KOffice, GNOME Office, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and more. But no matter if they are free or proprietary, expensive or cheap, and regardless of what platforms they run on, the one thing that all software suites have in common is that they suck.”
No piece of software could suck as much as this whiny piece masquerading as an article.
Well, I think he’s kind of right. Office apps are a bit of a muddle sometimes. Is Word really optimized for someone who wants to do text entry? Not… really. Microsoft sort of threw everything and the kitchen sink into it.
Whenever you mention this in a public setting (where geeks are inevitably involved) someone brings up LaTeX. Yeah, ok, but is that really a consumer-level, easy to use piece of software?
I’ll agree with this guy, that I haven’t run across a piece of software that’s optimized for consumer-level word-processing. I guess OOo has to emulate MSO, because MSO is the target they hope to displace. That’s fine. I understand that.
I too would have to agree with that summation.
I haven’t run across a piece of software that’s optimized for consumer-level word-processing.
I have an idea – Microsoft could distribute simpler versions of everything:
Word———–Wordpad
Excel————Simple users don’t create spreadsheets
Access———Simple users don’t create databases
Powerpoint—–Paint
They could call it “Microsoft Office, Windows Edition”. Just kidding!
I’d agree on wordpad if only it had a few more features. A spell checker would be nice as well as some more advanced layout control and tables. Wordpad already has a simple user interface, it just needs to have a few more important features added in without adding too many.
What about that Apple office suite, iWork; Pages looks fairly simple enough, in fact I wouldn’t mind giving that a try but I don’t have a Mac 🙁 .
Wordpad would also need endnotes, footnotes and easy table of contents and index generators and yes, it would meet my needs.
Line numbering, a freaking simple stupid thing like knowing where you are in a document, who would write two entire editors without this, only MS.
Excel————Simple users don’t create spreadsheets
Actually I have many times whished for a simplistic Spread Sheet to do quick copy/paste-analyse(-report) jobs. Usually I end up doing it in some calculator applet because I don’t feel like fireing up a complete office system.
Whenever you mention this in a public setting (where geeks are inevitably involved) someone brings up LaTeX. Yeah, ok, but is that really a consumer-level, easy to use piece of software?
I think that some of the programmer-centric text editors like Pe/Pepper, BBEdit, EditPlus, etc, are a good middle-ground. And often much more useful as actual *writing* tools than most word processors.
Anyone can figure out Latex. They simply need to have the patience to try it and a nice little tutorial.
Now, doing advanced things in Latex is much more difficult.
That said. Latex isn’t meant for the people who write the documents. The idea is that the people who write just write, plain text. And someone else, like an editor/publisher puts in markup. So someone came up with a markup language that didn’t require much marking to format the document!
By the way, the host seems to be down for this article.
LaTeX is entirely inappropriate if you want your documents to have any sort of custom format. Like, say, in a business, where your documents probably have a corporate “look” that doesn’t match the canned formats from LaTeX.
– chrish
If LaTeX isn’t flexible enough for you: Try ConTeXt. LaTeX is just an API ontop of TeX, and you can do anything with TeX
TexMacs is sort of a consumer ready solution for LaTeX. It’s still very emacual in it’s keybindings and there’s still an outstanding bug in rendering straight to PDF. Other than those annoyances it’s a great app, considered it’s competition involves writing out all the LaTeX directives by hand.
… but, I dunno if the author understands software development, or how the entire supply chain may work.
He seems to be saying that there should be very-stripped-down versions of Word, Excel, etc. available to sell to the general public,
More advanced features would require a higher price, etc.
But, the entire production-supply chain dynamic probably prohibits such solution. It’s probably not cost effective.
Exactly. He who knows the least is most likely to write jaded and cynical reviews.
But, the entire production-supply chain dynamic probably prohibits such solution. It’s probably not cost effective.
I think it might be *extremely* cost-effective.
Product-differentiation is a major cashcow for airliners, train companies, etc. It’s the only way they can expand their product line. Airliners have economy and business class– from an economic viewpoint exactly the same as two different versions of Word.
I’d be very interested in such a cut-down version. Then again, I have iWork. Too bad no one else I know does :/.
I’d be very interested in such a cut-down version.
Microsoft already has many levels of its Office Suite:
—–Developer Edition
—–Professional Edition
—–Small Business Edition
—–Standard Edition
In addition, they have Microsoft Works – 2 versions, one which uses Word as the word processor. Last, you can also buy the idividual components of Office. I don’t think there should be any more editions.
All of those “levels” are pretty much just different combinations of different components of Office. What would be nice is if MS decided to offer both “Home” and “Professional” versions of all of their office programs. The home version could be made to read documents created in either, but only the professional version would have the entire feature set. Student licenses could still be offered for students that need a more robust feature even though the document isn’t being created for commercial use.
How many people really need pivot tables in a spreadsheet? Do you think the average consumer would ever create a macro for a database they use to keep track of CDs, DVDs, books, recipes, etc.? Most people don’t have a clue about all of the automatic formatting options in Word.
One of the reasons that so many people use the wrong program for the job is because they don’t always have the best program for the job. Including Access with a reasonably priced “Home” Office package might actually help people learn the difference between a spreadsheet and a database and the advantages of each.
I have iWork also. To date, I’ve really only used the Pages application as I haven’t had a need to create any slide presentations lately.
Anyway, so far, my experience with Pages has been *very* positive. What I especially like about Pages is that it seems to do exactly what I want without surprising me with bizarre behavior. When I insert graphics or apply styles or insert page breaks, Pages responds in a very stable, predictable fashion. Having used other word processers where I’ve learned to do “Save”s before attempting anything that might blow up my document, using Pages has been an absolute pleasure by comparison.
Another thing that I’ve found very nice in Pages is that it although it doesn’t support OLE compound documents, Pages does have an understanding of Excel’s data such that decent copying and pasting is available from Excel to Pages.
Lastly, Pages seems to be part word processing software and part page layout software. In other words, Pages provides some powerful yet very easy to use graphics insertion and text flowing capabilities that other word processors don’t have.
Even though I bought iWork only as an experiment and had no expectation of being able to use a 1.0 product as a replacement for any of my regular applications, Pages has become exactly that. I now use Pages as my word processor.
And the next time that I have to give a presentation I will probably spend some time with Keynote to see if it is just as good as Pages. Having poked around in Keynote a little bit already, I have found some interesting features. For example, it’s possible to save Keynote presentations as quicktime movies. This means that it would be possible to save presentations and play them on a video iPod. Another thing is that Keynote seems to leverage Core Image for transitions. This opens up a whole realm of interesting possibilities.
I have iWork also, and for me Pages is near perfect. As you say, it is predictable and much simpler to learn than Word. I mainly use it for writing coursework and as such, it is nearly perfect.
I like the easy integration of simple graphics, and I love the fact that it’s a word processor where (most of the time) Styles actually work and make sense.
I’m really looking forward to version 2 in January. I just hope that they don’t try and expand it to DTP areas, but instead make that a separate application. One that uses the same “Inspector” model as Keynote & Pages.
Oh, and on the subject of the Inspector, please, please, please, please Apple give me an iWork spreadsheet app soon please. That way of working with a spreadsheet would be far superior to Excel.
GeoWorks Ensemble under DOS, for example. Most people back in the 286/386 days had to run one program at a time and flip back and forth between them, but GeoWorks came with the PC/GEOS GUI and provided a complete environment for drawing and word processing as well as managing files and folders in a drag-and-drop manner that Windows couldn’t touch.
http://toastytech.com/guis/geos12.html
Yea I don’t what planet that writer lives on but planet earth has used Office “suites” since the PC was invented. AppleWorks was a standard “suite” as well as GeoWorks as you mentioned.
As for all the features he doesn’t use in the named wp’ers – just don’t use them and learn the keyboard shortcuts (like in the days before the mouse). There’s also Notepad in windows for a real barebones text program and several various text editors in the *nix word. That is what it sounds like he wants a word processor to be.
Was great. It was small and fast.
For the audience and level of complexity it addresses, the iLife suite from Apple seems to be worth every penny.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/
Do you mean iWork?
Or, oh, you’re just claiming it’s a “software suite” which is good. It seems the author is specifically targeting office suites.
(Assuming you really mean iWork) The problem with iWork is that it isn’t an office suite. It’s a word processor and a presentation program slapped together in the same box.
Throw in a spreadsheet and an illustration/drawing programn, and then I’ll be willing to callit an office suite.
Poor attempt at trolling, by someone who doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.
Nothing to see here, move along.
This is very true….quite the troller.
I have no idea what the Author believes he is going to accomplish. I think his opinion, is shared by few.
I like my office suites, and I am not suprised at all how he explains his utter failure at simple computing. “Dur hur, I bought outlook and it doesn’t work” and he writes in a tone that he expected for outlook not to work the way he wanted.
MY BIGGEST! Annoyance with his article, his little rant on Spreadsheets…
HE HAS NO IDEA, what people do with excel and programs alike obviously. I have seen some amazing stuff produced with spreadsheet programs to show data, keep lists, and etc.
I sure hell needed it just to finish a big assignment in 10th Grade Biology. Then incorperate it into a table and graph into Word, and it was not a pain, I just had to read up and troubleshoot a few problems I had…but now that I know how to do it, it’s a snap.
I simply can not believe he harped on one of the coolest programs ever. I have used Power Point many simply to present either data, keypoints and pictures. History class is a blast with power point on hand for the teacher. Maybe the author just has a different learning style. We can all see how far he has gone with it too…*rolls eyes*
But I think he failed, to adress uhm AbiWord? If he loves just one application he should go ahead and get that. Then he will have something else to complain about.
Lets see what else, oh yes. His complaint about toolbars was funny. In Word I know you can get rid of buttons you don’t want and I have never bothered on Office 2000 for Mac OS9 and Open Office. Toolbars are used everywhere so whats his problem with them? Especially when you do not have to use them, you can click on “View” lol.
“Show me a PowerPoint presentation and I’ll show you a useless company meeting.” (from the article)
Show me an article on hating suites and I’ll show you bad article. God…and then he plays with an idea that it is law that the more bells and whistles in power point the more useless. Maybe he should review every buisness that uses power point and rewrite his paragraph. There are bad presentations but this is not a suites fault.
Well that about sums up my thoughts, I look forward to more posts completely bashing this guy.
There are so many suite choices for people, I am pretty sure everyone can find one they like. Especially if this guy can live with his hated suites.
After working in corporate America for the last 10 years I can say that the PowerPoint comments he wrote were dead on. I’ll never get the countless hours back that I have spent watching someone show a presentation, read it out loud, and give me a print out of the presentation. It’s not the softwares fault, it’s the lack of communication skills these days.
The only other kernel of usefull information in this article was the information regarding installing Outlook as a stand alone product.
After working in corporate America for the last 10 years I can say that the PowerPoint comments he wrote were dead on.
Hell yes. I can’t count the number of presentations I’ve seen that began with “You probably can’t see it from where you are, but…”
I think I’ve personally seen something that was produced in PowerPoint that I would considere a “good” presentation. Amusingly enough, it was a presentation given by a Sun Canada rep, who also gave out StarOffice CDs afterward.
In fact, of the best two presentations I’ve seen, one was made with Macromedia Director and the other with images + HTML (presented in a fullscreen browser).
Definitely Trolling. I can tell by his attack on Dreamweaver. I would not be in business without this program. Sure build a little website with a few pages and you can hand code to your hearts delight. But to really have to put together a large complex site in a short period of time on the customers deadline. Well your going to need something do the heavy lifting for you. I’m not claiming the code Dreamweaver produces is perfect, but you can easily go back and fix what needs to be fixed. This leads me to believe he’s just shooting off his mouth in the rest of the article.
Troll, troll, troll!
He complains about the silly details of interface, and (sigh) complains that he doesn’t need tables and graphics in a word processor! LOL! If i don’t want features like those, i use Notepad.
And he contradicts himself, first saying that programs should really do ONE thing (well) and then whines about having to use three or four programs do draw something (dotted lines in Flash?)
Yep, Gobe was freakin’ fantastic. I still long for it to be resurrected. As it is, all my friends think I’m insane, when I rave about some long-gone office suite which was not only functional, but actually a joy to use!
To me iLife is as close to Gobe as you can get. I like both of them quite well.
http://www.gobe.com/
Seems like they are still around; not sure about the current relase, but they still make a word processor.
I totally agree. I haven’t used Productive more than a handful of times, but from the few times I have used it, it impressed me as having probably the best thought-out UI for a word processor/spreadsheet that I’d seen. The menus that you can drag off as palettes are a great idea, I find it’s styles features to be *infinitely* easier to use than Word’s/Office’s, and the frame-based approach it uses pisses all over Word when it comes to arranging complex documents.
Of course, it’s missing some features that are considered pretty basic these days (automatic bullets/numbers in the word processor, auto-sum feature in the spreadsheet, etc)… but given its vintage, I think it’s still one of the better examples of how a piece of software can be extraordinarily easy/simple to use, but still have a lot of utility.
“Programs like word processors, spreadsheets, and drawing programs were never designed to be integrated with one another.”
The author of that article had definitely never used GoBeProductive then; GP’s integration was its brilliance. I got a job as a training specialist for a vitamin manufacturer a few months ago. I have Office 2002 on my computer. I use Word to create simplified training instructions derived from the manuals. Word can be infuriating to say the least. I asked permission to use my registered copy of GoBeProductive on my work computer, and the IT department said NO, even though I have a certificate that allows use on one computer at work. Aaargh!
“How about a word processor that is made for writing — wouldn’t that be something? As a professional writer, I can’t remember the last time I needed to insert a table into a document, or draw vector graphics in a manuscript, or change the background color, or a lot of other things that Writer 8 does.”
I mean, come on, this guy thinks that the only thing you have to do in a program like Word or Writer, is writing plain text documents. Physics/Mathematics/Chemistry reports anyone…? I seem to do a lot of those, and I would very much like that functionality, please.
math reports? those are written in LaTeX 🙂
As should most other things which you’re concerned about the typesetting of 🙂
and not having a timeframe of any sort.
Latex is unusable to most humans.
You’re right about his tables complaint, that is a little excessive. I’ve written a fair number of training material/documentation in Word and tables are quite useful for that. Not that I’m particularly fond of Word’s table handling, I often find it’s less hassle to do more complex tables in straight HTML or in Dreamweaver, then paste them into Word.
However, I do think he has a valid point in that Word often feels like it’s meant more for document layout than document creation. And there certainly is a lot of superfluous garbage in Word (the auto-summarize tool, anyone?), along with features shoehorned into Word that Word isn’t ideal for. I’ve always found Word’s label/envelope printing to be clunky for instance, I imagine it could be much better handled by a standalone program.
And Mathematic/Physics/Chemistry papers are almost always writen in some form of TeX, as most science journals require this. Also TeX is extremely easy to use for mixing raw text with perfectly formated equations and symbols.
And Mathematic/Physics/Chemistry papers are almost always writen in some form of TeX
As a chemist I would like to sadly point out that while this is true for mathematics and physics, most chemists live in a MS dominated world. The major journals (apart from those at the very physics end of physical chemistry) require articles to be submitted in MS doc format.
Most organic chemists tend to use proprietary structure drawing software for windows (though there are good cross platform and Linux open source programs for this) and then embed the resulting drawings as OLE objects in Word so the recipient can then edit the structure drawing. And so it goes
You do physics reports in a word processor? That seems to be doing things the hard way. Most physicists use Latex for this purpose as making formulae with a word processor is painfull and results are ugly.
Physics/Mathematics/Chemistry reports anyone…? I seem to do a lot of those, and I would very much like that functionality, please.
Try Lyx or TeXmacs. Or if your really brave try hand coding LaTeX in Emacs or Vim.
can someone explain why MS uses different file formats for word .doc and excel .xls etc rather than just one format say “ofd”
Gobe stored everything as one file, and Gobe all the components was integrated.
um, because, strangely enough a text document and a spreadsheet are wildly different things. Since Word and Excel are different programs have one file type for different kinds of document is just confusing.
Consider right, on Windows you can assign one program to be the default for a particular type of file. You cannot persuade Windows to remember which program opens which individual file.
Therefore to cope with a single file type that handles all the different kinds of applications, you’d have to create a mini application whose job it is to open all documents and “hand them on” to the correct application – very confusing to use!
while i do agree it could be confusing, my suggestion would be to a program that opens to something like a word document, which has “modules” of word processor spreadsheet etc
Therefore to cope with a single file type that handles all the different kinds of applications, you’d have to create a mini application whose job it is to open all documents and “hand them on” to the correct application – very confusing to use!
Confusing! This is how it’s supposed to work! If I open a document I want a couple thing in this order:
1. A quick and usable presentation of the data. There shouldn’t be an application dependence for this. What the OS decides should do the rendering (libpoppler or gecko or whatever…) is of no interest.
2. Availibillity of assorted tools to work with the data.
I don’t think the application model does this very good. The inherent bloatedness of applications makes number 1 harder and harder to accomplish in a satisfying manner the more potent it gets in 2.
It may seem that the application model sacrifises 1 to be bettar at 2. But it sucks at that too. It’s impossible to implement all the tools anyone could ever use in one application.
The tools should be free. The OS should assist you in having them in reachable places. That could be by restoring the last tool pile for each and every uniqe data file. It could be by managing “perspective” as the Eclipse IDE does it. Much research has to be done to find the best way to do this.
The important thing is that the current model sacrifices 1 to do a very bad job at 2. This has to change.
The difference between airline companies and companies selling software is that once you buy the software once you don’t have to buy it again.
But with airlines you have to buy a ticket each time you use it. Because of that you have to keep coming back and back and back and they have to do something to have you buy form -them- instead of the “other guy.”
I do agree that wordprocessors are just setup wrong. Compared to Word I loved WordPerfect. But now I use a Mac and WordPerfect doesn’t exist for that. So now I use AbiWord and Nisus Writer (Macs only) and Nisus is probably the best.
Just because someone cannot effectively use a presentation tool doesn’t mean the presentation software sucks, the user has a problem! This stems back to the days of the overhead projector and the “user” who puts whole pages of text on clear material and blasted people out of their seats by the reflection from the screen! If you want professional results, get a professional to do it.
And there is nothing like user training. Jem has a few points in his piece, but this was not one of them.
Whatever points he had were completely lost by rambling. About the only valid point he had was that users often make stupid decisions about software and how they use it.
This is little more than a rant.
Just because someone cannot effectively use a presentation tool doesn’t mean the presentation software sucks, the user has a problem! This stems back to the days of the overhead projector and the “user” who puts whole pages of text on clear material and blasted people out of their seats by the reflection from the screen! If you want professional results, get a professional to do it.
While you have a vaild point, I also think it’s true that PowerPoint does little to encourage decent presentations. In some ways, I think it does the opposite – the features and relative flexibility often ends up being enough rope for users to hang themselves with. “Hey, look, eighty kajillion transitions – I should use a different one for each slide!” For the type of Joe Sales Manager types that PowerPoint is primarily aimed at, I think that a simpler, less “free-form” program would be much better.
Anyone who actually needs, and would be able to make proper use of, the whiz-bang multimedia features in PowerPoint is probably using a better tool like Director or Flash anyway.
He starts off complaining about Word having too many features, and he ends up by complaining about not enough features in other software. The solution to his complaints actually seems to be integrated software. In software suites you have various programs that each has a specific feature set. They are also integrated in a way that if you need a feature that isn’t specifically part of the program you are using the feature can be used through another program within the same suite.
His actual frustration seems to come from the UI and feature bloat that MS Office has not dealt well with up to this point.
Either the writer missed the point of copy/paste buttons along with them being in the Edit menu a well having shortcut keys or I missed the point of the article.
These things are about choice. I don’t particularily like most of the Office suites out there, the author should actually figure out how to use them before complaining too much about them.
I don’t think it’s a supply chain problem exactly more that we are so used to developing software in a certain way. If we focused on componentised (is that even a word?) development rather than adding more to each release then the idea seems a lot more realistic.
Software feature bloat, and unneeded integration, is often a serious problem. I hate bloat and the extraneous complexity, bugs, and other annoyances that come with it.
Thus, I think some of the points in the article were spot on:
“Programs like word processors, spreadsheets, and drawing programs were never
designed to be integrated with one another.
I don’t know about you, but I have a tool box filled with tools that are each
designed for a single purpose — and they do that single thing very well. If I had
to replace them with an all-in-one tool I’d be pretty frustrated, to say the least.”
This is so true. In my experiece, programs that try to do too many things just end up doing all those things poorly. And programs that do few things tend to do those things very well. This is one reason why Unix has been so successful for 35 years – it has lot’s of separate, simple utilities that do few things individually, but do those things very well, and then they inter-operate seamlessly.
“I once had Macromedia Studio MX, and used it to create really annoying Web sites.
I’ve recovered from those terrible habits and now only use hand-coded XHTML/CSS or a
free software content management system for all of my sites.”
Couldn’t agree more – I absolutely detest websites that feature a bunch of Flash crap. That stuff adds nothing to the content of the site (which is what I’m after), and only make the site annoying, destracting, and slow. XHTML, DHTML, CSS, and perhaps a server side language (PHP, ASP, JSP, CGI, etc) are all you need to make an effective, attractive, fast, interactive website.
“The uselessness of a meeting is directly proportional to the complexity of the
PowerPoint presentation. If you want to quote me on that in the future, mark it down
as Jem’s Law.”
Bingo. I’ve been to many meetings, and seen many stupid PowerPoint presentations, and yes, “Jem’s Law” is most certainly an unfortunate reality. Absolutely, if a presentor’s content sucks, then he/she puts in lots of PowerPoint crap to make up for it. The same principle applies to Flash and websites.
“Word supposedly provided the functionality necessary for Outlook to function as I
had originally expected it to — or perhaps the mere presence of Word on the same
machine would unlock and enable more features in Outlook. Regardless of the cause,
Outlook XP was not really designed to be used standalone, even though it was sold
that way.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft’s way of continuing consistent revenue streams without providing any value or anything useful.
So, the article is not completely a troll or flame bait. It makes some good points
It is very hard to really gauge how much “feature bloat” exists in many applications such as Word. As an example, think of the 15 or so features you use in a word processor and compare them to many other people. You will find that about 5-10 of the features are used by everybody but the other 5-10 features are different for almost every person. In other words what you do with a word processor is quite different from what other people do with them. This means that the software writers have to add these 5-10 features that vary widely in order to make people happy.
The problem here is that “a program that tries to do everything” isn’t the same as “separate programs that work well together.” The article is setting up a straw man and bashing it to death. Microsoft Word being able to embed Microsoft Excel spreadsheets may well be perfectly appropriate if — and believe it or not, this actually does happen in real life — you’re doing a report that you want to embed an Excel-generated chart in.
On a more general level, there’s a certain “blame the tool” mindset going on here which is fundamentally silly. The poster you replied to, and you in your response, are confusing Macromedia Studio MX with Flash. There are web sites created using Fireworks and Dreamweaver as part of the work flow that are not only completely free of Flash, but are 100% valid XHTML and CSS. (And shocking as it may sound, there are websites that use Flash intelligently, just as there are, in fact, PowerPoint and Keynote presentations that don’t suck.)
I don’t think the article is intentionally a troll, either. I think it’s just wrong.
I should be able to embed an editable Microsoft Excel document and a Nisus Writer document in my Keynote presentation. If you want to criticize the lack of standardization and cooperation that prevents me from doing that, great. But most of what I hear from people like the author suffers from Slashdotthink: I don’t care why LaTeX is better than word processors and how many bad PowerPoint presentations you’ve suffered through and how Lotus Improv for NeXT was the best spreadsheet ever. None of that means my desire for integrated functionality is invalid.
++
Unfortunately, I think that the majority of large commercial software developers believe that it’s counter to their interests to make it easy for their software to share functionality (and in many cases, in formation) with other pieces of software.
It seems like that’s something that’s largely been lost in the move from CLIs to GUIs.
“Programs like word processors, spreadsheets, and drawing programs were never
designed to be integrated with one another.
I don’t know about you, but I have a tool box filled with tools that are each
designed for a single purpose — and they do that single thing very well. If I had
to replace them with an all-in-one tool I’d be pretty frustrated, to say the least.”
This is so true. In my experiece, programs that try to do too many things just end up doing all those things poorly. And programs that do few things tend to do those things very well. This is one reason why Unix has been so successful for 35 years – it has lot’s of separate, simple utilities that do few things individually, but do those things very well, and then they inter-operate seamlessly.
I don’t think you shoul look at it as a one-tool-fits-all kind of thing. It would be more appropriate to look at it as the tool box it self.
An integrated software suite is a tool box. The problem is that the tools in the toolbox can never leace the box and can thus only be applied to things that fit inside the box. As this article tries to put it, a box is a rather poor working envrironment. Imagine trying to stuff your car into your tool box and still have room to work on it….
What has to be done is to develop an environment where the tools are not stuck to the box. And where the user can choose what to apply the tool on free from the assumption of the tool designer. I have used hammers to crush ice. Cups to draw circles. Knifes to pick my teeth… well you get the picture, tools should be free from the box.
Your comment:
“Couldn’t agree more – I absolutely detest websites that feature a bunch of Flash crap. That stuff adds nothing to the content of the site (which is what I’m after), and only make the site annoying, destracting, and slow. XHTML, DHTML, CSS, and perhaps a server side language (PHP, ASP, JSP, CGI, etc) are all you need to make an effective, attractive, fast, interactive website. Couldn’t agree more – I absolutely detest websites that feature a bunch of Flash crap. That stuff adds nothing to the content of the site (which is what I’m after), and only make the site annoying, destracting, and slow. XHTML, DHTML, CSS, and perhaps a server side language (PHP, ASP, JSP, CGI, etc) are all you need to make an effective, attractive, fast, interactive website. ”
Shows that like the Author you know nothing about Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver does not create Flash, Flash Studio creates Flash. Dreamweaver integrates all of the technologies you mentioned are so great. You also don’t know anything about action script and some other techs that macromedia has come out with that makes all AJAX look like tinker toys. Now add onto this that you can complete a complex web application in a short preiod of time and you’ve got a great solution.
I guess he is referring to Office Suites because Final Cut Studio rocks.
Ehh,because you say so in a crappy article hosted on a even worse web-site?
GNOME Office ? What GNOME Office ? There is no GNOME specific Office suite. Just a few Applications like Gnumeric and Abiword (which last named is not GNOME centric at all).
True, but the combination of Gnumeric and Abiword is none-the-less still called Gnome Office (don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it is).
I so much agree with Jem Matzan.
Nice to see I’m not the only one having serious doubts about the whole office suite-trend.
I prefer a solution like we know from browsers, email clients and ftp-clients. This way one could assemble his/her own suite made of the right tools to the right tasks.
I like this article. More of those please
Finally someone brings common sense to Office suites! If Linux wants to be a major player … make office apps that don’t suck! It’ll be a first!
Yes, I am a writer myself and I do find Word to be an encumberance. Much of it has to do with the GUI rather than the number of features involved however. I found the most efficient wordprocessor for the way I work was always Lotus Wordpro: I could simply type in all of my work with readily accessible tools.
It still had the formatting and DTP options but these were contained in a floating palette and were applied in realtime. With a huge amount of visual feedback, it was easier for the user to see the changes being made (assuming his primary skill was in writing itself and not necessarily in layout.)
Probably the major problem with MS Office and OO.o is the need to hunt for features in menues. Many of the graphical formatting tools are too upfront whilst other writing options are buried in sub-menues. By centralising all of these formatting tools in a single multi-tab palette that could be activated once writing was completed, the problem was neatly solved.
Another issue is that of priorities. Microsoft, for example, has all too readily added “tacky” features such as the atrocious Word Art to their wordprocessor yet it still cannot handle ligatures or other stanrdard typesetting procedures in the way that LaTeX could twenty years ago.
For your information: In OO.o, one can make custom pallets-tabs. You can mix and match *smiles*
I’ll have to explore that feature. I’ve used OO.o on and off for a while now but haven’t had the time to explore all of it yet. If it can be made to have Lotus-style palettes that update the formatting in real time, than I will be well and truly sold on it!
I’ve just tried it a little since you pointed it out to me. Yes, it isn’t bad and it is certainly highly customisable but it is still a little clunky compared to the Lotus system in which everything was a series of tabs and all formatting was in real time. With OO.o, depending on what is selected, some features are launch their own dialogue boxes, so not everything applies instantly.
Since word processors are intended to aid in the writing process, you would figure that Word would be geared toward writers—you know, people that write contiguous blocks of monochromatic unstylicized text while composing letters, authoring books, and writing articles for their websites.
Office costs a good $500 per license, so you might expect for that sort of money it would meet the requirements of this obvious target audience and eschew the inclusion of such misplaced tools as Excel, Access, OneNote, FrontPage, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Visio. If there’s one thing I know it’s that when engaging in copyright infringement you have to get the entire bloated suite, then install all of its components, and then use them.
I can’t remember the last time I needed to make a diagram, take notes, manage a spreadsheet, or send e-mail. Who does that sort of thing? This bundling simply won’t do! Further who inserts images, tables, or (Heaven forbid!) embeds other objects into documents?
If there’s anything my website has proven unequivocally, it’s that there’s absolutely no use for complex spatial formatting, embedding images, or embedding rich content (like say Flash, for example).
If only there were ways of configuring these enormous suites to not present all sorts of options I never use, or if only there were some software out there somewhere that simply edited text in a simple manner, with the same lack of coherence with other programs that the GIMP and Inkscape have with each other.
Alas, there are simply too few tools for the editing of text.
“If only there were ways of configuring these enormous suites to not present all sorts of options I never use…”
If you are writing large amounts of continous text, which you want to break up into sections and manage – the typical outliner application – then have a look at some of the more writing oriented programming editors. Kate is excellent. Leo is very interesting. This is on Linux. I’m sure there are lots of Windows equivalents.
You can also consider tree type organisers. TreePad is excellent in Windows. In Linux I would look at Gjots, Tuxcards or Treeline.
What you won’t get, at least not always, is ability to do footnotes and ability to insert graphics. There are ways around – many of these packages support links or bookmarks – but probably the real answer is two stage writing. Get it written in a text editor, then copy it over to some other package to to page layout.
Take a look at 3d modelling programs. There’s so many tools shoved into 3d Studio, it is impossible to figure out what tool you are talking to. Instead of just writing a collection of tools to manipulate a common file format, they wrote a freakin’ operating system.
I TOTALLY agree with this comment by Jem… MS Word UI BLOWS CHUNKS!!!!
PLEASE! NO MORE “ME TOO” SOFTWARE!!!!!! Instead of cloning the crappy MS software, how about some originality!?!?!?!?
btw, to the Gobe fans, it’s included in Zeta.
Been one for thirty years. The author of this article is dead right about word processors. I won’t even get into spreadsheets or presentations. All I wish for is a simple word processor that I can write with.
I still pine for WP 5.0 for DOS. It did everything I needed. It would still do everything I needed and do it brilliantly. For that matter, MS Word for DOS did everything a *writer* needed. The extra features were not put there for writers to use, they were put there for DTP work, etc.
Nothing wrong with that per se. Not one thing wrong with piling on all the features the traffic will bear. But a simple writing tool would be nice to have too.
Is there any nice programmer out there willing to point me at an open source word processor that is as simple and bloat free as WP for DOS used to be. Pretty please?
Don’t mention Abiword I beg. It isn’t even close to MS Word compatible. I have had no fewer than three documents raped by different versions of that program on two different machines. Abiword is not an option.
Anybody know of a simple writing tool for a simple minded old writer who has no interest in impressing his professors? All my professors died of old age before most of the readers on this forum were born. I am retired and too old and senile to cope with complexity that serves no purpose other than proving how clever the programmer is, by showing how he was able to cram fifty pounds of shit into a twenty pound bucket.
I just want a word processor. Anybody got one?
P.S.
No MAC. Either Linux (preferred) or WinXP. Sorry. Don’t have one. Can’t afford one. Wish I could. Alas.
“Don’t mention Abiword I beg. It isn’t even close to MS Word compatible. I have had no fewer than three documents raped by different versions of that program on two different machines. Abiword is not an option.
…
I just want a word processor. Anybody got one?”
so uh, wean yourself off .doc?
I just want a word processor. Anybody got one?
You might jus want to look at Ted a basic and very “unixy” RTF editor for Linux/Unix.
http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/
Hi
Forgett Word and Co. YES! Word&Co S-U-C-K-S- !
My Name is AlexZOP. I wanna say to all People at OsNews: GeoWorks is NOT dead! GeoWorks was renamend in 1995 to NewDealOffice and since 2000 to Breadbox Ensemble. Since 2000 it comes from a very Great Company from Florida!
– have a look on the REAL New “GeoWorks”! Since 2000 the brand new Name of this real cool Integrated Office and Internet Package FOR ALL PCs and ALL PEOPLES -E-A-S-Y- is BREADBOX ENSEMBLE ! It Comes from Florida and is THE EYE OF ALL HURRICANS THEY BLOW WORD&Co AWAY! Have a nice “Frustration blow away” look at:
http://www.breadbox.com
“Robin Miller” from “The-Netly-News” wrote at “Writers-Write-Journal”: “… A new $2000 computer and $500 worth of software won’t make you write any better than a $100 used computer running NewDeal’s $79 package.”.
“Fred Langa” from “Windows-Magazine” wrote in “Information-Week” from the “The Assumption Killer” NewDeal-Office: “… The software is an amazing example of tight coding and a careful selection of product features: It doesn’t try to do everything, but it does the most important things very well. Rather than a “kitchen sink” approach (with every feature and function any user might every need), it’s a collection of the features and functions most users need, most of the time.”.
– have a look on the German “GeoWorks” Wikipedia:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC/GEOS
Greetings from a none English Language Speaker from
Germany. Hope you have understand what i wanna say:
BreadboxEnsemble RuLeZ !!!
BreadboxEnsemble ReAlLY -I-S- the BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BEST!
And: THIS PACKAGE R-E-A-L- BRIDGING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE ALL OVER WORLD!
Go Breadbox! Go Happy!
Another OSNews rant. Give us some meat man! We’re starving here.
Okay, so, you think all those features in Word are useless, eh? Okay, I need those features you’re complaining about. Just about the only docs I write are technical in nature. I can’t write a doc without outline numbering to describe processes, tables to detail and organize information, and Visio diagrams to lay out complex processes that are a bear to describe in English. Then I need Headings to keep track of the different sections of the document.
So yeah, I need that stuff. And we tend to use spreadsheets for the “wrong reasons” because keeping a short list of 50 variables is too small a job to build a database, to big to deal with a chart in Word. Hence, spreadsheet. I can get the data in, and then print it if need be, and everyone can read it.
I think what the author is really getting at is that there has been ZERO innovation in these apps in, what, 10 years now? Seriously, Office 95, or the Novell Office Suite that competed against it (what was it, Novell Office 6.0 or something) was about the same thing we have now.
THIS is where Microsoft has really screwed up. The lack of innovation. While they could be redefining how we use email and store documents and work with our data, instead they were auditing companies in an attempt to get some $$ when regular revenue streams dried up. And ditto that to the OSS community, that has repetedly missed its opportunity to give us something truely new and innovative. From the OS that’s just a copy of unix, to the desktop that’s just a copy of Win95, to the office suites mentioned here, email, web browsers (Firefox is great and I use it but it was no innovation), filesystems (we’ve had journaling FS for years folks), clustering, you name it, just free copies of what was already out there.
Where the OSS community could really shine is to create something the private sector doesn’t have the hairy ones to go for. So, let’s do it, let’s build it. What do you want in your office apps?
So, in Word, do you format your document as you type, hence the frustration with the UI, as it distracts you from your thoughts?
Silly me, I write it all out first, and then worry about the formatting while I proofread.
To that end, Word is Perfect for me, pun vaguely intended. :>
Ideally, you shouldn’t be doing any formatting beyond the initial creation of your styles for the document and applying the styles to the document’s content.
The whole idea with office suits and office computer desktops feels like an anachronism. They are little more than glorified typewriters and file cabinets used in year 1900. They are a reminicense of the time when the most important information carrier was paper.
What’s needed are more task/process oriented tools. They should be more focused on content than on presentation. They should simplyfy, structuring and organization of information. They should help office worker work more effektively together.
Tasks like selekting the right font, or form of presentation is often a result of the work process and should as much as possible be handled automatically and not need to be handled by the ordinary office worker.
The task at hand often determines how things should be presented, so if the systems were more task oriented it would be easier to select presentation form automagically.
I just don’t get all the comments about Word being an encumberance to simple writing? Install Word, set up a default template that suits your needs, then open Word and start typing. Where’s the encumberance? Simple text entry is simple text entry, it pretty much works the same regardless what text editor you use.
I don’t use an office suite in my personal life, but at work I really like the Word/Access interoperability. The ease of integration and increased productivity give me time to surf sites like this one…
I posted this on his site but thought I’d leave it here as well:
Hi Jem,
I think you’re making a great point but I think I’d argue in that what we need is even more integration. In fact I’d argue that we need one, yes one, document format that van be edited by a variety of different tools. To add to the “I Hate…” list: I hate having to open to different programs to work on a single job being a graphic artist. I’d much prefer being able to open the tools I need to get the job done on a single document than worrying about the variety of programs I need to edit and manipulate a particular document of a particular format. I’d call this a universal file format with a simple extension like “.one” that I’d always know would be read and opened simply without complication. Then I’d be able to call the variety of different toolsets I needed for the job and leave closed the ones i didn’t. This solves the disliked feature bloat you were mentioning as well as many others.
I think it best to look forward and not back. Software integration is a good thing, not bad, and represents an evolutionary step in application development. That is to say that the more transparency between applications the better which allows for more productivity in a variety of ways.
Microsoft Office was one of the first attempts to create a “holon”(a whole that is composed of parts that are also wholes) of software. Much like the evolution of the first multi-celled organism that could beat out the rest of those single-celled amoebas (which would represent individual “opaque” applications).
Where I think things are going are very much in line with what the late Jef Raskin’s Archy project wish to accomplish-no more applications, just tools. Use the ones you need and don’t worry about the rest until you may need them. This would also solve many issues with current monopolies and increase innovation and democratization of the desktop.
Just some thoughts-I’d love to know what you think.
-Paul
openartist.net
Sorry for any spelling errors but I didn’t feel like copying and pasting this email into a word processor(first having to open it), checking the copy, and pasting it back in…call me lazy.
“Sorry for any spelling errors but I didn’t feel like copying and pasting this email into a word processor(first having to open it), checking the copy, and pasting it back in…call me lazy.”
😀 MOSX4 (Tiger) checks your spelling as you type and will underline misspelled words as you go.
control + command + d also will bring up definition balloons of any word you mouse over.
I think he is on to something. I only use office to write letters or make a table.
Kudos to the author.
Remember OpenDoc?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
There are loads of people who need this extra functionality! And there are loads who don’t. They might as well use GEDIT/KATE/LEAFPAD/NOTEPAD/NOTEPAD Plus rather than rant about it.
Gmail’s DRAFT Service is also really a cool way to save documents!
Comparing the two (see title) is difficult and practically impossible. Both applications are useful. Any attempt to oppose Writer/Word to (La)TeX is pointless.
The strength of LaTeX, and this is the key point a lot of people do no understand, is that (La)TeX is aimed to write typographically correct documents. No more, no less. The corolarry of this, LaTeX generates “beautifuf” documents.
The question of usability of LaTex is something different.
Two applications, two different goals.
What the person is bringing up isn’t necesarily to bash Office 12, OpenOffice.org or Wordperfect Suite; he bought up a valid question; whe is a wordprocessor a wordprocessor, and where is that line where a wordprocessor stops being one, and starts becoming a desktop publishing tool?
It isn’t about slamming the products, its about getting the companies to stop trying to add on features that should in entirely new packages, and instead concerntrate on perfecting the existing features that all end users want rather than worrying about frivilous features that either only a small number of people demand or worse, adding feature in a hope that if they market the feature to death, they’ll eventually get some people to use it – aka, creating a feature and then creating demand for a feature that no one really wanted in the first place.
If Microsoft wish to make their next release a success, how about making it easier to use; not talking about using clippit, but instead, have a standardised menu etc. layout, have a shared preferences where by if I change my language in Word to UK English, and I open up Excel, it takes on that particular chosen language.
With the email client, have sane defaults and universally accepted standards for email and newsgroups; lord knows the number of people who top post or have the ‘numbers of charactors before looping’ set to the incorrect amount.
Its not about the big things, but the little annoying things that piss people off; stop trying to add more features, fix the problems that exist now; and if they wish to make a good reoccuring revenue stream, how about selling clipart and templates online via an easy to use interface – on a subscription plan of say $20 per month, per user.
Its time for companies to think imaginatively rather than trying to ram the same garbage down our throats, release after release.
Sounds like this guy need to be introduced to a text editor, he doesn’t want a word processor.
If you want to edit text without tables, graphics, font styles and all that should-be-left-to-the-DTP-program stuff, use Gedit or WordPad.
I must admit though, the other day I fired up OOCalc to add up some simple columns of figures, and had to fight with it trying to insert font styles when I was copy’n’pasting from Thunderbird and removing number formatting when I inserted a new row.
Office suites, like most software I guess, are just getting feature bloat, but how else do you expect them to sell, you have to add new features sometime. Of course, making it easy to turn features off would be a nice point – how about Word without that screw-it-up-as-you-type thing, or spellcheck-in-us-english crap?
I spent the last week at work sitting next to a dude from some MS-fanboy company swearing and cursing Word 2003 for repeatedly reformatting all the tables of figures in his 90 page document (how to migrate to Exchange 2003 or something) and breaking all his macros when he inserted an image on the page!
Office suites are basically one application trying to do too manys.
This creates bloat and instability. They usually contain too many features that 80% of the users will never use.
We have a bunch of practices which office suites fit into, and they are very counter productive, but its not particularly the fault of the suites.
One is the use of presentations as the basis for making decisions, without any underlying paper argument. The result is, the record only shows a list of bullet points, but mostly not what they were said to mean. You can only make very very simple points in the small number of words a presentation allows, so argument and evaluation is greatly impaired. And you rarely have to think through an argument as you would if you wrote a paper. The solution however is not to stop using PPT, the solution is to insist on papers as the basis for decision, and limit the number of PPT slides to (say) 5, used strictly to lead and focus the discussion of the paper.
Similarly with the use of Excel for business plans, you end up with endlessly detailed business plans in black box models written with macros, which evaluate only one case. The solution is not to avoid excel, its to insist on a number of one page models, covering different outcomes, with a paper discussion of how likely the very simple parameters are, and what other scenarios are possible for them.
The problem is that people in senior management circles are increasingly refusing to think, or require thought. But that is not the fault of the suites, any more than the idiotic accounting at Enron was the fault of their accounting packages….
One solution might be for office software to follow the Mozilla model. Ship it with a basic set of functionality and then if a user requires a more specific feature, they could download it via an extension just like firefox. That way everyone could tailor their software to their requirements; it could be as lean or as bloated as the user desired.
Exactly
<quote>So I installed Outlook XP and found out that there were three major problems with it: I could not receive attachments in email, my outgoing messages were limited to plain text, and no spell checker was available.</quote>
Oh please! You should only be ALLOWED to send plain text e-mail. If you want nice html or anything else, use attachments! MS managed to screw up this standard also…
Well the author clearly does not seem to understand anything he is talking about….
or does he at one point advocate stripping all features out of something and making one tool for one purpose, and then later complain about how flash/dreamweaver/etc. do just that?
Whole article was more of a hissy fit by someone too lazy to go through a custom install and adjust his toolbars manually. His rant against word can be DONE in word with some simple adjustments…
I mean, you can tell the writer is a nutjob just from this statement:
>>I actually bought a legal standalone copy of
>> Microsoft Outlook.
That right there spells it out in bold.
> Spreadsheet abuse
People do not care about the original purpose of a piece of technology. That makes a lot of sense to me. It does not matter for what purpose spreadsheets were originaly designed; what matters is for what kind of purposes people are finding them useful. In a sense, spreadsheet is a database, and a pretty easy one to build and use, too.