Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I was appalled at that post that Notjohn linked us to. I mean, talk about arrogant, condescending, patronizing TRIPE. I wanted to find that guy and slap him silly.
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I read the linked article. Haughty, you betcha...
But it just seemed like your typical promotion of vim/emacs-type programs compared to WYSIWYG word processors.
For example, earlier this year there was a fascinating post on the LaTeX subreddit,
"How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim".
He has GIFs+code examples showing customization that could blow the water out of any Word workflow:
- Text/Code Completion
- Word has AutoFill/AutoComplete
- Take a look at some of his examples:
- Taking into account context (Text/Maths)
- Course-specific substitutions (Physics/Maths)
- Automatically evaluating equations
- Overriding Space/Tab functionality
- Snippets
- Word has AutoText/Quick Parts/Building Blocks Organizer
- Displaying Equations Source+Images side-by-side
- Syntax Highlighting
- Can also take into account different languages mixed in the same document.
- Mass Spellchecking
- (At the very end of article, he shows an example of correcting spelling mistakes paragraphs at a time.)
- Is such a thing possible in Word? (Probably with macros?) Or do you have to replace one-by-one?
- And is there any way to get Word to remember which squigglies you've Ignored across sessions?
And as I've privately mentioned to Hitch in emails recently:
Flexibility of Plaintext+Version Control (Github) beats the pants off of entire blob comparisons (Word's Track Changes or Compare documents).
In any step along the toolchain, you're not forced into a one program, one way... you're free to use whatever programs you're most comfortable with.
But I do agree, whatever tools you use, best to spend a few hours to boost your productivity many-fold. Styles are one of those easy tools that everyone should learn. :P
(
And here's that Word Styles 101 video I always promote. <15 mins and anyone using Word would save themselves many hours of headaches.)
Complete Side Note: Early on document creation was only one-user, one-computer, but that's been changing for quite a while now.
With mobile becoming a lot bigger, and different OSes being intermingled, I think it's even a bigger problem to lock yourself into proprietary tools... or certain antiquated workflows (DOS... lol).
And it's only relatively recently that multi-user + multi-device document editing has been playing catchup (Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365, etc.). To see some of the technical backend issues, see
"Interoperable Office Collaboration" given at LibreOffice Conference 2019. Having real-time/online/offline collaboration + trying to bring Git-type functionality into these documents is... "fun".
Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Not sure why so many writers believe their craft should be the only one exempt from change/evolution/improvement. I suspect it's mostly dogma masquerading as art. "I can't write a sentence unless it's with Word Star on my Commodore 64 while wearing my favorite slippers."
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
After installing Word 2007 (first version with the Ribbon) I learnt more about Word in a year, than I had in decades of using previous versions. So, I'm a Ribbon devotee (hidden of course). Many non-MS Ribbons are pathetic, whilst others are downright diabolical.
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I was recently digging into the archives and stumbled across this Microsoft article+talk from 2008, "The Story of the Ribbon" by Jensen Harris:
https://vimeo.com/3305642
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jen...of-the-ribbon/ (Original article with all its dead links/images glory.)
He explains a lot of the reasoning behind it, shows user-generated usages (out of millions of users across a month, a few things were only clicked on... once), and even shows a lot of the failed prototypes. Interesting stuff.