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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: October 15th, 2023
  • brianary@startrek.websitetoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Microsoft is trying to convince Windows 10 users to upgrade with full-screen prompts
    1·
    7 months ago

    I work in finance, and the only time I use office is when my coworkers infrequently send me something locked in an Office document. Plenty of non-technical coworkers are addicted to it, but there’s no need, because it’s awful.

    The Office programs are an ancient, bloated mess with an impossibly convoluted UI that to one uses more than a small share of.

    The styles in Word and PowerPoint are never consistent: the bullets in lists never really match, fonts change randomly without reason, &c. These are intelligent people who have used this garbage for actual decades, and the WYSIWYG lie just results in a sloppy mess.

    Even Microsoft wants everyone to stop using the desktop versions, and rent it from the cloud, which can be done from any OS.

    For years, there was progress in moving governments away from implicitly endorsing Microsoft, and toward the simpler (but often still overcomplicated) OpenOffice/LibreOffice formats, and Microsoft engaged in some pretty shady behavior to stop it.

    Markdown is better for documents, or maybe HTML, or LaTeX via LyX or something. Databases and legitimate file formats are better for data, with scripts for formulas. There are many simple alternatives around, but the addiction is so automatic and insidious, I can’t tell you how often over twenty years I’ve gotten screenshots pasted into an empty Word document rather than just sending the image.