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Google Docs vs. Microsoft Word: Which works better for business?:
Have you been thinking of reassessing which word processor your business should standardize on? The obvious choices are the two best known: Microsoft Word and Google Docs. But which is better?
Several years ago, the answer to that would have been easy: Microsoft Word for its better editing, formatting and markup tools; Google Docs for its better collaboration. But both applications have been radically updated since then. Word now has live collaboration tools, and Google has added more sophisticated formatting, editing and markup features to Docs.
TFA requires free registration, but the question is an interesting one: Have Google Docs arrived at parity with, or surpassed, Microsoft Word for business needs? How much work is required to transition existing documents, macros, and workflows?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bart9h on Tuesday June 02 2020, @04:53AM (14 children)
I don't know any WYSIWYG editor that didn't suck.
Is there any?
LaTeX is the only sane way.
I lets you focus 90% of your effort on the content, not the format.
With the WYSIWYG editors, it's pretty much the other way around.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by deimtee on Tuesday June 02 2020, @05:58AM (4 children)
Best wysiwyg I ever used was Wordperfect in 'reveal codes' mode. But that was 25 years ago, and usability has done nothing but drop since then across them all. Poettering probably has "add ribbon interface to Libre Office" on his todo list.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Common Joe on Tuesday June 02 2020, @08:18AM (1 child)
Reveal codes was one of the biggest losses I ever experienced when transitioning between word processes. I still miss it.
But we won't be getting it back anytime soon. Most of the information that was made by open/close commands in WordPerfect are now embedded in the paragraph mark at the end of the paragraph in LibreOffice and Microsoft Word. It's been that way for decades. To change it would probably be a major undertaking.
No, he won't get the chance. It's already an option [ghacks.net]. They added it experimentally in 2017 and it finished rooting in 2019, although it's still listed as an experimental feature and is called the "tabbed user interface". Instructions to turn it on are here [ghacks.net].
Before you get mad, there are a couple of things to be aware of: 1) I hate ribbons as much as you. 2) Not everyone shares our opinion. Some people prefer it. No, I can't imagine why either. I suspect it has something to do with being more visual people (icons) instead of readers (menus). 3) As a coder, I always believed there was room for both options for both types of people. I hated Microsoft for shoving ribbons down our throats. LibreOffice did it (mostly) right. Both options exists for both kinds of people.
(Score: 3, Informative) by meustrus on Tuesday June 02 2020, @01:35PM
I quite like the way MS Office works on OS X. Because OS X has a permanent application-defined menu, there's no reason to take File/Edit/View/etc away from the user. So the ribbon simply provides the superior visual language without taking away the menus that provide the superior text-based-discovery.
Though it's been a few years since I had any reason to author a printed document. These days I do basically all of my (non-code) writing in Markdown.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @01:20PM
Man I miss "reveal codes," best feature ever for figuring out why doing this thing causes this weird behavior.
Flip on reveal codes and you can see ever start/end italics, every space, everything. It was perfect (TM). Also, the equation editor was, for the time, pretty good.
(Score: 2) by dw861 on Thursday June 04 2020, @08:23PM
Yes, exactly. And this is why, in 2020, I'm still using WordPerfect for Linux.
http://xwp8users.com/ [xwp8users.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @06:04AM (1 child)
My experience with business users (on both sides of the document) is that they *need* pretty formatting that they are able to handle with minimum effort on their side. And they really absolutely *need* that formatting to hide the unconvenient / distressing actual content behind it.
So using LaTeX to focus them on the content that they want hidden, taking away the mostly-working formatting tool that they can handle without putting in any effort, is the same as taking away the prime purpose that they're using the tool for.
And that's why LaTeX will never fly in business.
It's never about the news, people watch the show only for the looks of the anchor. (I don't like it either, but you really should get it through your head)
(Score: 1) by CowMan on Tuesday June 02 2020, @08:29AM
Both sides ? Most business docs fly about as PDFs from my experience, like 99%.
Interestingly I have also seen a growing uptick of tex, particularly for data heavy reports as almost all inputs can be automated based on the output of technical programs, add a couple plain text files, and it's one click to generate a full report PDF using corporate standard templates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @06:09AM
What latex viewers do you use?
Last time i fired up some old(4yrs only) .pdf they had lost math formula here and there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @09:42AM (4 children)
WYSIWYG editors suck. LaTeX sucks too. It ain't even markup, it's a fucking programming language. Literally.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 02 2020, @03:28PM (3 children)
I've long ago discovered that to be able to focus properly on writing I need a document compiler, not a word processor. And it needs to cooperate with distributed version control (which all "word processors" I've seen don't).
I still haven't found one I like.
Aside from some ancient ones running on mainframes in the 70's, and some homebrew that's a low-grade stopgap, I've looked at Scribble. Markdown, and, of course, Tex.
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TeX:
Even as a programming language, TeX wasn't designed with the knowledge that existed in the programming language community. No idea of scope rules. Everything is in one huge namespace, implemented by macro processing, and capable of redefining the syntax in obscure ways.
Once a few TeX "modules" have contributed their contents to the global namespace, you have no idea *what* your notations do.
Oh yes, these days TeX generates pdf files, and not much else.
At least TeX does do mathematics.
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Scribble:
Scribble *is* based on a decent programming language, Racket, which is a dialect of Scheme, which is a dialect of Lisp. But it does not have Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses. It is, simply, a different syntax for Lisp that looks like plain readable text with mark-up. The markup is where the Lisp is hidden. Each straightforward markup command is actually syntactic sugar for a Lisp expression. The bulk of the built-in textual layout semantics is written in Racket, and merely called from the Scribble document.
And Scribble can produce output in either TeX or HTML. This is a decided plus.
In theory, if you want to do something that's different from built-in, you just have to write some Racket functions to do it. So it's quite extensible. Except that the Racket code for Scribble is huge, and hard to understand unless you're willing to exert a major effort to get into it. And there are a few standard document formats and unless you're happy with one of those, you're involved in rewriting parts of Scribble. In practice, this makes your novel look like a manual.
And Scribble doesn't have a notation for mathematics.
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Pollen:
There's a variation of Scribble called Pollen. It's main distinction is that it's like Scribble with most of its guts ripped out so you're in a do-it-yourself situation. You can generate any output file format you want, as long as you do it al yourself.
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Markdown:
And the there's Markdown. Easy to use, also deficient. It is poorly defined. It has multiple implementations that differ in the corner cases. It has multiple incompatible notations for tables. It lacks an "include" feature to allow you to split a large document into multiple files.
And it doesn't do mathematics.
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If anyone can tell me where I'm wrong, or what tool might actually meet my needs, I'd like to hear it. At present I'm using homebrew code that has too few features, translates into HTML, has trouble producing decent TeX, and completely fails in producing any well-known word-processor file format such as .fodt, otd, or Word.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @05:20PM
Org mode https://orgmode.org/features.html [orgmode.org] works for me as a simple plain textish format that exports well. I mostly export to HTML but it lists ODT as included and mentions there are other exporters available.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @08:14PM
Have you tried lout?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2020, @03:59AM
This page compared a number of markup systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_document-markup_languages [wikipedia.org]
More history,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_language#Types_of_markup_language [wikipedia.org]
In the '80s and '90s I used various versions of Mark of the Unicorn products, first Mince (Mince is not complete emacs) and Scribble (CP/M 8080 version of Carnegie Mellon Scribe text formatter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language)#Related_software [wikipedia.org]
Later the two were combined into MotU FinalWordII (MS-Dos) which served well for a number of 100+ page structured user manuals, and also a 900 page book. This still runs in a DOS emulator and the pdf output is still perfect, the .ps files can be opened directly by SumatraPDF for viewing/printing.
FWII was also sold as Perfect Writer and later to Borland which became Sprint Wordprocessor. Amazingly enough there is still a Sprint mail list, I get a post every year or so these days...
Scribble/FWII formatter/Sprint all lacked multi-line formatting, thus no good equation editor (I faked it, but took a lot of manual spacing, not good enough for publication).
The full blown Scribe was expensive, but it did include an equation editor and much better image support than the Mark of the Unicorn microcomputer ports. I think the reason TeX won was that it was free (as in beer and as in freedom), the Scribe maintainers never offered a free version, so there was never a big user community like for TeX. But, for years major structured documents like Intel documentation were done in Scribe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2020, @12:10PM
I like LyX. Not really a WYSIWYG, maybe a mid option.
From there site:
LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).
LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface.
https://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]