Open source vs Microsoft vs public domain

[ImpalerCore]

There's always a tension in software between power and ease of use.

Scripts are very powerful, but if you go too far in the scripts
direction you end up producing a programming language rather than a
user application. If you add lots of buttons and menus, it's easy for
the casual user to get lost, or to put the software into a state he
doesn't understand. If you cut down the options, there's always
something conceptually trivial which the software won't do.

Microsoft have the advantage of huge resources to invest in usability
labs. So Microsoft software is typically quite easy for the casual
user to pick up and get core functionality out of the package. However
it also has lots of options hidden away for advanced users.
The problem is that the transition from novice to advanced user isn't
always easy. I had two days of training on "Word for long documents",
for instance. However by the time it came to write my thesis I'd
forgotten most of it. It's possible to set Word up to automatically
produce contents pages and link them to numbered paragraphs, keep
track of references, and so on, but really it's a job for a
professional secretary.

I remember when writing my thesis, someone in our lab had a Thesis
template for LaTeX and it was extremely simple to make text, image, or
formula changes without messing up the general formatting flow and was
miles easier than anything I could do in Word. Most of the people in
the lab used it, but the ones that used Word constantly had to
reformat their entire document after every little tweak from their
advisors (when their thesis was nearing finalization). The LaTeX
template looked like it required a degree in technical formatting to
be able to understand it much less make changes to it that didn't mess
something else up, almost akin to a programming language for
formatting.

Without the template, there's no way I could take the time to learn
LaTeX while the pressures of getting your real work done loomed in the
distance.

Best regards,
John D.

 

[Seebs]

Well I have used many WP's and Word is fine for me, In fact it's
nearest rival is Open Office not TeX so the system must be good.

Not necessarily.

I have not had any problems with word. At least no more than any other
office software and I used Windows, MAC and Unix. MS Word on the MAC is
very nice.

Your experience is very, very, far from my own. I have been using Word on
Macs since 1987 or so, and on Windows since maybe 1997, and I have never had
it not be a source of nightmarish problems. The thing is, they're problems
that users get habituated to, and stop noticing after a while, mostly. But
I've had to use it for producing the equivalent of a couple of books' worth
of material, and it was consistently awful in terms of both user interface
and reliability.

As a typical example, when Word 2008 for Mac came out, if you scrolled
rapidly, it would end up overprinting multiple pages of text in the same
space. You could "fix" this by scrolling down a full window height and
back, slowly. It would randomly transfer focus away from windows, requiring
you to, at the very least, swap around among windows until it figured out
which one you thought you were in.

And of course, it was randomly and subtly incompatible with Word 2007 for
Windows.

I have tried TeX several times but did not find it very
usable. IT may be better but it is not easier to use.

-s

 

[BartC]

There's always a tension in software between power and ease of use.

Scripts are very powerful, but if you go too far in the scripts
direction you end up producing a programming language rather than a
user application. If you add lots of buttons and menus, it's easy for
the casual user to get lost, or to put the software into a state he
doesn't understand. If you cut down the options, there's always
something conceptually trivial which the software won't do.

Microsoft have the advantage of huge resources to invest in usability
labs. So Microsoft software is typically quite easy for the casual
user to pick up and get core functionality out of the package. However
it also has lots of options hidden away for advanced users.

The most annoying things are options on hotkeys that you know nothing about.
A cat walking across a keyboard, or a child playing with it, and suddenly
the whole screen is rotated 90 degrees and you have no idea how to get it
back to normal.

And on most MS products, Ctrl-A followed by any printable key will delete
all your data without asking!

You'd think that for anything significant, it would ask for confirmation
first.

 

[Marcin Grzegorczyk]

And on most MS products, Ctrl-A followed by any printable key will
delete all your data without asking!

You'd think that for anything significant, it would ask for confirmation
first.

Considering that, on most MS products, hitting Ctrl-Z will immediately
restore that data (unless you've hit a bug), I'd say it's a minor
annoyance at most.

 

[Marcin Grzegorczyk]

I remember when writing my thesis, someone in our lab had a Thesis
template for LaTeX and it was extremely simple to make text, image, or
formula changes without messing up the general formatting flow and was
miles easier than anything I could do in Word. Most of the people in
the lab used it, but the ones that used Word constantly had to
reformat their entire document after every little tweak from their
advisors (when their thesis was nearing finalization).

I did use MS Word for my Ph.D. thesis and I managed to avoid that kind
of problem, but at that time I had years of (occasionally painful)
experience with Word, and I knew how to set it up so that formatting
wasn't like a house of cards. As Malcolm said above, Word has many
advanced options, but finding them all (let alone understanding how they
interact with the document) is not easy. Back then, Microsoft's
documentation wasn't exactly helpful in that respect, and from what I've
seen, it hasn't improved much.

 

[Rui Maciel]

That is not true.

I really doubt you use Microsoft Windows, then.

That is not true either or TeX would have a far better take up than it
does.

Please do try to explain why Microsoft Windows is better or at least as
good as LaTeX.


Rui Maciel

 

[Rui Maciel]

Well I have used many WP's and Word is fine for me, In fact it's
nearest rival is Open Office not TeX so the system must be good.

If your idea of a document preparation system is limited to Microsoft Word
and OpenOffice then that explains why you believe Microsoft Word is any
good.

That is true.

Chris H dixit? That's your answer?

I have not had any problems with word.

You don't have any relevant experience with it, I see.

At least no more than any other
office software and I used Windows, MAC and Unix. MS Word on the MAC is
very nice. I have tried TeX several times but did not find it very
usable. IT may be better but it is not easier to use.

I've explicitly mentioned LaTeX and TeX but you keep omitting LaTeX in
your comparisons. Why is that?


Rui Maciel

 

[Keith Thompson]

Chris H wrote: [...]
Please do try to explain why Microsoft Windows is better or at least as
good as LaTeX.

Perhaps somewhere other than comp.lang.c?

 

[Rui Maciel]

ImpalerCore wrote:

Most of the people in
the lab used it, but the ones that used Word constantly had to
reformat their entire document after every little tweak from their
advisors (when their thesis was nearing finalization).

This is how you can tell if someone has ever used Microsoft Word. Anyone
who ever tried to use Microsoft Word to write any sort of document that
spans over a single page will quickly point out the gruesome challenge
which is the constant struggle with Microsoft Word to stop it from
completely screwing up your work. It doesn't matter if you do everything
by the book, correctly defining the semantics of every object in your
document, and you never stray away from the default style. Microsoft Word
will always force you to waste your time fixing the problem that it
introduces. These problems get to be much worse if the person writing the
document doesn't know how to use a word processor and therefore edits a
document as if it is an offspring of MS Paint.

And notice that no reference was made to the countless bugs and
limitations that plague Microsoft Word.

The LaTeX
template looked like it required a degree in technical formatting to
be able to understand it much less make changes to it that didn't mess
something else up, almost akin to a programming language for
formatting.

Not necessarily. It is quite easy to write a LaTeX document with nothing
more than a simple text editor. Nonetheless, there are plenty of
specialized editors which eliminate the need to know any of those arcane
commands. One which comes to mind is Scientific WorkPlace.



Rui Maciel

 

[Seebs]

Considering that, on most MS products, hitting Ctrl-Z will immediately
restore that data (unless you've hit a bug), I'd say it's a minor
annoyance at most.

You'd think, but it is not so in the real world, where people do not
always react calmly and rationally to an unexpected behavior, or may be
typing while looking at the keyboard.

There is a large population of users for which it's fairly risky, and the
number of circumstances under which applications have been known to declare
"can't undo" remains amazing.

-s

 

[BartC]

Considering that, on most MS products, hitting Ctrl-Z will immediately
restore that data (unless you've hit a bug), I'd say it's a minor
annoyance at most.

Yes, but there are a few problems:

o The application will have it's own ideas about what constitutes a single
undo 'event'

o You hit ^Z too many times, and undo work that you want. Now MS Word for
example has a Redo toolbar button, but where is it on Windows Mail? I can't
find it anywhere, and I've no idea what the shortcut-key might be, the Help
being entirely useless here. (Update: Redo is Ctrl-Y, after looking at a
different, non-MS application!)

o Or, you may not be aware of anything amiss until after you've added
substantial new content. Now Ctrl-Z would delete the new material, and would
anyway be preoccupied with the dozens of minor edit events you've done
since.

The whole concept of being able to delete a substantial body of material, by
pressing a key that is not Backspace, Delete, or another specific key, is
flawed.

(I see this all the time: you click on an edit box to extend or modify the
contents, but the entire line gets highlighted. Now the slightest wrong
move, and the whole thing disappears! Does Ctrl-Z work in this situation?
Maybe it does or maybe it doesn't, or maybe every application will be
different; I haven't even thought about using Ctrl-Z for that until today.
But that's not the point, it shouldn't be necessary.

Why are you required to press a key (eg. left or right to get to a 'safe'
state) to avoid deleting something, rather than the other way around?

 

[BartC]

ImpalerCore wrote:



This is how you can tell if someone has ever used Microsoft Word. Anyone
who ever tried to use Microsoft Word to write any sort of document that
spans over a single page will quickly point out the gruesome challenge
which is the constant struggle with Microsoft Word to stop it from
completely screwing up your work.

I still find that now; MS Word just has a mind of it's own sometimes
(sometimes? Make that most of the time. Try typing 8-1-2011 in Word2000; as
soon as Enter is pressed, you will see 8-1-2011-01-08 instead. And that's
one of the more minor matters.)

When I had to write a couple of manuals for a product of mine, in the 90s, I
quickly realised that using MS Word of the time, would be an utter waste of
time (and even more so now...)

Instead, I used the application itself (a CAD product intended for working
with a page at a time), with some program scripts to read simple marked-up
text, render a page at a time, and output it to Postscript. The result (for
the time) was superb, with embedded vector and bitmap images, full page
numbering, cross-references, the works. And it only took a few weeks
including writing the text!

(I think there was a 150-page user manual and a 300-page programming one,
with some syntax highlighting of the code examples; how on earth could I get
Word to recognise the keywords of the embedded program code, automatically?)

 

[ImpalerCore]

ImpalerCore wrote:


Not necessarily.  It is quite easy to write a LaTeX document with nothing
more than a simple text editor.  Nonetheless, there are plenty of
specialized editors which eliminate the need to know any of those arcane
commands.  One which comes to mind is Scientific WorkPlace.

Sure, writing the content was easy. Formatting it to the precise
specifications the university required for publication is not
trivial. And at the time, after trying to tweak the template I
realized that I would have to learn TeX or LaTeX to be able to modify
it for other purposes. I still use Word for basic documentation since
that is what is available and everyone knows it well enough, but if I
had to publish something, I'd definitely try to adequately learn TeX
or LaTeX.

Best regards,
John D.

 

[Chris H]

I really doubt you use Microsoft Windows, then.

Only on documents of a couple of hundred pages with diagrams, pictures,
indexes and bibliographies.

Please do try to explain why Microsoft Windows is better or at least as
good as LaTeX.

For me Word works... never managed to get LaTeX to work.... too much of
an uphill struggle.

 

[Marcin Grzegorczyk]

Yes, but there are a few problems:

o The application will have it's own ideas about what constitutes a single
undo 'event'

True, although I don't recall any MS application merging the above
mentioned action with any preceding edit action.

o You hit ^Z too many times, and undo work that you want. Now MS Word for
example has a Redo toolbar button, but where is it on Windows Mail? I can't
find it anywhere, and I've no idea what the shortcut-key might be, the
Help being entirely useless here. (Update: Redo is Ctrl-Y, after looking
at a different, non-MS application!)

Bad documentation and lack of GUI for common actions are different
categories of problems

o Or, you may not be aware of anything amiss until after you've added
substantial new content. Now Ctrl-Z would delete the new material, and
would
anyway be preoccupied with the dozens of minor edit events you've done
since.

Also true.

<rant>
Microsoft Office has a bigger undo-related annoyance, though. If you
start writing something, then hit Backspace several times, neither that
erase action nor the action of writing the text you've just erased is
undoable! I find this annoying to the extreme, because my style of
writing involves a lot of "nah, better put it a different way"
decisions, not infrequently followed by "hmm, the first approach was
good anyway".

To add insult to the injury, this behaviour seems to be totally unknown
outside MS Office; Visual Studio's editor, for example, has a pretty
standard undo behaviour (thank goodness). And as far as I know, there's
no way to turn it off in Office.

The whole concept of being able to delete a substantial body of
material, by
pressing a key that is not Backspace, Delete, or another specific key, is
flawed.

(I see this all the time: you click on an edit box to extend or modify the
contents, but the entire line gets highlighted. Now the slightest wrong
move, and the whole thing disappears! Does Ctrl-Z work in this situation?
Maybe it does or maybe it doesn't, or maybe every application will be
different; I haven't even thought about using Ctrl-Z for that until today.
But that's not the point, it shouldn't be necessary.

Why are you required to press a key (eg. left or right to get to a 'safe'
state) to avoid deleting something, rather than the other way around?

Beats me too, if you ask me.

 

[Nick Keighley]

And while Win32/GDI was a nightmare to work with, I understand that X11
wasn't that much better...

I quite liked Win32/GDI (still do in fact). The original MAC was even
better but that's long gone. X11 is a true nightmare.

 

[Nick Keighley]

ImpalerCore wrote:

Microsoft sold Microsoft Word for the Apple Macintosh since 1984, along
with another half dozen platforms.  Microsoft sold a Excel version for the
Apple Macintosh since 1985.  Adding to that, and contrary to popular
notion, Microsoft Word was never good.  A good proof of that was the
dominance of other word processors such as WordPerfect.

where is WordPerfect now? I agree MS Word is poor. I'm compelled to
use it a lot and I agree it has problems. But I'd rather slit my own
wrists than use use WordDefect! It *deserved* to die! DEC runoff was
less painful than WordPerfect.

<snip>

 

[Nick Keighley]

On Jan 6, 10:42 am, Chris H <[email protected]> wrote:

Microsoft have the advantage of huge resources to invest in usability
labs. So Microsoft software is typically quite easy for the casual
user to pick up and get core functionality out of the package. However
it also has lots of options hidden away for advanced users.
The problem is that the transition from novice to advanced user isn't
always easy. I had two days of training on "Word for long documents",
for instance. However by the time it came to write my thesis I'd
forgotten most of it. It's possible to set Word up to automatically
produce contents pages and link them to numbered paragraphs,

trivially easy. An index is more work but it too can be done.

keep
track of references,

also easy

and so on, but really it's a job for a
professional secretary.

no, not really.

 

[Nick Keighley]

I did use MS Word for my Ph.D. thesis and I managed to avoid that kind
of problem, but at that time I had years of (occasionally painful)
experience with Word, and I knew how to set it up so that formatting
wasn't like a house of cards.  As Malcolm said above, Word has many
advanced options, but finding them all (let alone understanding how they
interact with the document) is not easy.  Back then, Microsoft's
documentation wasn't exactly helpful in that respect, and from what I've
seen, it hasn't improved much.

if anything their documentaion is getting worse. The help seems to
feel you want a video with a perky young lady to explain how to change
the properties of a document (they moved it when they introduced the
<expetive> tool ribbon), when what I actually want is a plain text
explanation. Often you end up in the depths of MSDN after sevel layers
of menu they ask you what office program you are using. Well I started
from Word so take a guess...

 

[Rui Maciel]

Only on documents of a couple of hundred pages with diagrams, pictures,
indexes and bibliographies.

I seriously doubt you have created documents like those you described in
Microsoft Word. If you did, you would know first hand the countless
problems that Microsoft Word inflicts on any of it's users who are forced
to go through that adventure.


Rui Maciel